Political Pressure and
the Archival Record Revisited
"The Role of the Archives in Protecting the
Record from Political Pressure"[1]
by
Chris Hurley[i]
ICA 2004 -
Archives, Memory & Knowledge, Vienna, 25 August 2004
(reprise of
paper delivered in Liverpool at LUCAS[2]
- July, 2003)
Judgement
is power. Power without responsibility
is a classic definition of tyranny.
Professional judgement that is not accountable is a tyranny by
professionals. Yesterday, some of you
will have heard Trudy Huskamp Peterson[3]
say that matters of professional judgement cannot be standardised. This is true only in the sense that
standards, benchmarks and criteria cannot control absolutely the exercise of a
discretion - else judgement would be eliminated. But judgement of any kind can be circumscribed, contained, and
limited by the application of standards.
In that sense, the professional judgement of recordkeepers not only can
be standardised, it must be. Otherwise,
we inflict on others the tyranny of our own professional power unchecked by any
restraint.
We
sometimes hear that recordkeeping is a bulwark of accountability. I would like to raise a different
question. In what way are we
accountable for recordkeeping - whether in the face of political pressure or
more generally?
This
involves lacerating old wounds. For it
is only through an examination of our own failings and shortcomings that we can
learn how to be accountable - how to behave better in the future. We have no dispensation from the obligation
to be accountable but we share the common human frailty of wanting to think
well of ourselves. We do not like
facing up to our own shortcomings. We
deny, we avoid, we hide from them. If
we are wise, however, we know that exposing them to honest scrutiny and
learning from them will make us better.
Accountability
requires certain things :
1. It must be clear what your role
is (who is accountable and to whom?)
2. It
must be clear what your function is
(what are you accountable for?)
3. Your
performance must be measured (against
standards, criteria, or bench-marks
set in advance)
4. Your
performance must be monitored (deviance
must be punished or corrected)
Recordkeeping,
in my submission, meets none of these criteria, in respect of our role as
agents of accountability. There is not
even agreement amongst ourselves, let alone in the society in which we
function, that we have such a role.
To
demonstrate this, and then to learn and grow based on the resulting insight,
involves lacerating old wounds. Some
such wounds are not even very old.
Earlier
this year, the Australian Society of Archivists (ASA) made a submission to an
Australian Parliamentary Committee investigating (yet again) the now notorious
Heiner Affair in Queensland. I regard
this submission as another accountability failure by the profession. On the aus-archivists listserv, I have
lacerated it as an outrageous exercise in professional evasion and whitewash -
an attempt to misrepresent our collective failures and shortcomings and
substitute a self-serving and dishonest account of our performance purporting
to demonstrate our reliability as agents of accountability.
The
paper I gave in Liverpool lasted a full forty minutes. This morning I have only half of that time
available. I tried to edit it down to
twenty minutes of delivery but I have decided against reading that shorter
version out to you[4]. The full version is available on Rick Barry's website[5]
and is even now being printed, I believe, as part of the Conference Proceedings
that are being published by the Society of American Archivists.
Instead
of simply reading out that cut-down version then, I will traverse the topic in
summary form and add a few words on a matter that has arisen since the LUCAS
Conference. I have two overheads - much
too busy to be put into PowerPoint, the only medium of projection available -
so I have prepared a handout that is being circulated.
My
LUCAS paper comprises two parables and two lessons. Both of my parables are drawn from otherwise unrelated events in
1990 - both involved political pressure and both involved (or came to involve)
me personally.
UNCODIFIED
BEHAVIOUR Conflicting
or Disputed Expectations |
WHISTLEBLOWING
Interfering;
Renegade; Troublesome;
Loose Cannon; Busybody;
Courageous; Heroic;
Unpredictable |
INDIVIDUAL BEHAVIOUR
|
UNCERTAIN
OR DISPUTED ROLE |
CODIFIED
BEHAVIOUR Agreed or
Shared Expectations |
ACCOUNTABLE BEHAVIOUR
Conformity; Reliability;
Credibility; Accountability; Trustworthy; Auditing; Monitoring
|
ASSIGNED OR
AGREED ROLE Understood,
|
|
|
COMMON RESPONSIBILITIES Universal
Application; Wide Impact |
INDIVIDUAL Particular
Application; Specific
Focus |
|
In
the State of Victoria, in that year, I was dismissed as State Archivist for
attempting to deal, against the wishes of my government, with a train of events
beginning with a case of alleged unlawful destruction of public records by a
senior official working on a matter involving the State Premier during an
election campaign.
Meanwhile,
to the North, my Queensland colleague was asked to give her approval (as
required by statute) to the destruction by State Cabinet of the records of the
aborted Heiner Inquiry into malpractice at a State-run institution for
juveniles. The request, the appraisal,
and the approval of the request all took place within 24 hours. The records were then being sought in projected
legal proceedings by the manager of the facility and their destruction was
arguably an offence under the Queensland
Criminal Code.
Some years later, a Royal Commission uncovered systemic inmate abuse -
including sexual abuse - in facilities such as the one Heiner was
investigating. It has been alleged that
·
the
newly elected Labor Government was anxious to dispose of the records because
they knew that evidence of such abuse had been given to Heiner,
·
the
allegations that had first been raised by the then Labor Opposition and had
prompted the former Government to establish the Heiner investigation had by now
served their political purpose, and
·
Cabinet
was now acting to prevent the exposure of that instance of abuse because it
might have exposed the systemic abuse of which it was part - abuse that had not
yet been uncovered to the public gaze and which successive governments, the
unions, and the bureaucracy were all systematically covering up.
My
involvement comes from having taken a position that, whatever the truth of such
insinuations, the Heiner appraisal was unsatisfactory from a professional point
of view. This view, I think it is fair
to say, did not find favour with the Australian archival establishment. The public exchanges over many years were
protracted and poisonous.
Both
these cases have given rise to mixed opinions about the two archivists involved
- me and Lee McGregor. In my own case,
I have been portrayed by some as a hero, standing up (and suffering) for
professional standards. Others (usually
covertly and behind my back) portray my actions as naïve and counter-productive. Lee McGregor's actions have been defended by
her fellow government archivists. The
professional association (the Australian Society of Archivists) dithered for a
long time, made one false start, then eventually (and to its credit) condemned
her appraisal as professionally unworthy.
But, in a qualification that they continue to maintain to this day and
which can only come from a confusion of mind or purpose, they simultaneously
attempt to shift the blame onto the Queensland Government and bureaucracy. This is repeated in the ASA's latest
parliamentary submission (earlier in 2004): the archivist is guilty of
professional malpractice, but she is not accountable for it.
This
is an absurd position.
The
Queensland Government is, undoubtedly, blameworthy, but that is not ultimately
our concern as a profession. In a
perverse way, however, I agree with the ASA's continuing desire to exonerate
the Archivist - not perhaps in a way that they would welcome, but it is
agreement all the same. I would now say
that neither Lee McGregor nor I acted accountably because we had no opportunity to do so. We were literally unable to act in a professionally accountable
manner. Our profession let us both down
long before either of us was called upon to act in such a manner.
The
profession had not given us the standards and benchmarks necessary to guide our
respective judgements. It still has not
done so - with one exception. The ASA
has, in the teeth of opposition from the government archivists of Australia,
condemned ad hoc appraisal (the evil that lies at the heart of the malpractice
in Heiner). This occurred subsequently,
following heated dispute over what went wrong in Heiner. In 1990, however, each of us was left to
decide alone, on the basis of personal judgement rather than professional
expectations of us, what course of action to pursue.
We
were left, if you look at the top right hand quadrant of my Matrix of Accountable and Related Behaviours, in
the area of individual behaviour so far as our professional judgement was
concerned. Standards and benchmarks
setting out the behavioural expectations of our group, our profession, within
society (the lower right hand quadrant of the Matrix) were not available - they
still aren't.
Some
colleagues express puzzlement about what I mean by standards or
benchmarks. Quite simply, I mean rules
about how we conduct our work that would enable an informed outsider to
evaluate our actions in a particular case and to reach a conclusion about
whether or not we should have acted as we did.
As an example, I have suggested that the Heiner Affair teaches us that
appraisal should not be 'ad hoc'. That
means there should be rules or practice statements to ensure that similar
situations will produce similar outcomes, so that the exercise of professional
judgement in appraisal cases is not idiosyncratic or unfettered. If each appraisal should conform to or
establish a precedent, or else be readily exposed as a violation of professional
norms, then our actions in particular cases can be judged and we can be
condemned if we fail to meet this test.
This is merely an example. One
can envisage a whole book of rules designed to limit the operation of
professional judgement and to standardise outcomes.
A
slightly different version of this Matrix, together with a fuller
explanation of its meaning, is available on the Monash University's website[6]
in the form of a paper I gave earlier this year at a Lunch-Time Seminar for the
NSW Branch of the Records Management Association of Australasia on records
management and ethics.
So,
arguing from that position, I began developing and included in my LUCAS paper
(also my chapter on accountability in a forthcoming book edited by Sue
McKemmish, Michael Pigott, Frank Upward, and Barbara Reed) a table of possible[7]
roles and functions that the recordkeeper might undertake. This table can be found on the reverse of
the handout.
Since
LUCAS, Eric Ketelaar tells me he has had some success using it as a teaching
tool. Its purpose is simply to focus
debate on how we are accountable and for what.
Debate
about how to measure and monitor our performance comes later.
At another session of the Congress, I
heard Yvonne Bos-Rops recount the story of the development of the ICA Code of
Ethics. It was initiated by the ICA's
Section of Records Management and Archival Professional Associations
(ICS/SPA). Briefly, a draft ethical
code laying out specifics was drafted by the SPA. It was rejected by the ICA Executive Committee (EC) -
representing, effectively, the archival institutions. A compromise, the document you now see on the ICA web site, was
reached in order to "save" it by meeting the EC's demand for a new
draft comprising "short and universal principles". Its promulgation in this watered down form following
endorsement by the ICA General Assembly in 1996 is now regarded as a
victory. That, at least, is the
story I heard Yvonne Bos-Rops tell[8].
I think this story is instructive for
very different reasons. To me, it is a
tale of the subversion of true professional accountability by interests within
the profession opposed to it. It is, if
you like, a conspiracy story (or a theory only, depending on your point of
view).
My question is this: Why was the endorsement of the EC regarded as necessary? Why could SPA not have promulgated its own
first draft of the Code on its own
authority? It would not then have
been an ICA-endorsed document, it is true, but surely nothing prevented the SPA
from urging its constituent professional associations to adopt it at the
national level? If enough national
professional bodies endorsed it, the resulting embarrassment of the EC and
thence of the ICA itself would have been justification enough for this course
of action. It would also have put
pressure on the EC, lacking a code of its own, to cave in or develop an
alternative code that might then be compared alongside the other. I doubt the EC would have obtained much
comfort from the comparison.
Standardised and worthwhile national codes would be much better than the
international document that we now have.
There is no merit in being international if it means promulgating
generalised platitudes that are not worth having in the first place.
There was nothing in the paper I heard to suggest that in the post-1996
"implementation" phase the actions foreshadowed in the face-saving
formula of the time - "later rules, practices, and examples could be
added" - has led to anything.
Rather, Bos-Rops tells a tale of how the watered-down international code
has since been adopted and implemented by each national association in its own
different way as each country saw fit.
If that was to be the outcome anyway, what was the point of compromising
the original draft code to meet the EC desire to avoid specifics? This is not the story of the implementation
of a worthwhile international code of ethics.
Rather, it is the tale of a vanilla product being given flavour and
customisation at the national level - with the result that it is impossible to
say what the benchmarks are, under this code, internationally. This is like the United States saying that
it isn't torture under international law if George W Bush signs a determination saying it isn't.
We now have an international code of professional behaviour which it is impossible
to violate because it is so bland and which can be adapted by each national
entity to say anything it wants. Far
better to have had a robust international product, endorsed by the professional
associations section, from which national departures could have been
measured.
It would have been more difficult for
national bodies to vary to their own liking a hard-coded and specific document
issued by SPA but without EC endorsement than it has, presumably, been for them
to customise a document which consists only of "short and universal
principles". If the net result was
simply to provide a foundation for each nation to go its own way in any case by
giving its preferred colour to a bland base - without specific meaning and with
no attempt being made to achieve international standardisation - what harm
would there have been in basing the national implementations on the original
SPA draft and spitting in the EC's eye?
I thought this story, which I interpreted
as the tale of well-meaning but naïve people genuinely trying to establish some
ethical standards within the recordkeeping community and being way-laid by the
unscrupulous manipulators amongst us who want no such thing, a fitting
counter-point to and verification of my own thesis. This sounds harsh. It is
meant to be. I will countenance no
defence of the EC that it was being "practical" and simply
recognising the impossibility of getting international endorsement from the
national bodies to a genuine statement of international benchmarks. That defence amounts to no more than an
admission of ICA's own weakness and venality.
The logical end of that line of defence is, ultimately, a justification
of death camps. You can't make a
defence out of that. It certainly
doesn't excuse the "capture" of the SPA effort by an EC bent of
weakening its effectiveness.
This account of the ICA Code of Ethics is
not just an exercise in aimless vitriol.
At the LUCAS Conference, there was
discussion of things that could be done to crystallise and publicise (if not
actually act on) cases of political pressure affecting the archival
record. The conference had certainly
highlighted many such instances involving many different aspects of the common
problem. I spoke out against any action
involving the ICA. The ICA, I argued,
was itself unsound because it overly represented the institutions. These institutions had a vested interest in
opposing genuine standards because often (as many of the papers at the LUCAS
Conference illustrated) the archival institutions were themselves at fault in
these cases. This made the ICA (a
creature of the institutions) unsuitable as a vehicle for doing anything about
it.
In response, it was argued that the ICA
was an edifice of many rooms and that the SPA may provide a suitable
professional avenue beyond the power of the institutions to influence the
outcome. Until I heard the story of the
ICA Code of Ethics here in Vienna, I half believed it.
Table: Roles and responsibilities in recordkeeping |
|
Role |
Key Ideas |
Ordainer |
Quasi-Legislative:
Issue edicts or binding instructions.
Compliance. Non-compliance is
punishable. Power to allow or forbid
(e.g. appraisal). |
Preceptor |
Standard-Setter: Not
intervention to change things, but saying what must be done for things to
change. Articulation of wisdom and
experience. |
Mentor |
Source of Advice, Education, or Recommendations: The recipient can take it or leave it. Does not specify a standard or benchmark. |
Facilitator |
Assistance:
Participation in whatever course of action is decided upon. Carry out the decision and provide expert
assistance on how to do it. |
Provider |
Service Provider:
Supply services and assurance that these services meet obligations. May or may not be a provider of choice. |
Enabler |
Provider of Tools/Infrastructure: For example, providers of whole-of-enterprise metadata
frameworks, portals, and interfaces. |
Monitor |
Reporting System:
Collect information on the conduct of recordkeeping. Similar to financial reporting
underpinning effective audit (see below). |
Watch-Dog |
Intervention: when
wrong-doing or a departure from standards/procedures is detected. Prosecution, publicity, warning. Routine, not discretionary. |
Enforcer |
Watch-Dog with Teeth
: Involves compulsion or inflicting
penalties – directing others, detecting transgressions, altering behaviour by
punishment/sanction. |
Auditor |
Evaluation: of
performance against pre-determined standards or benchmarks. Reporting the results. |
[i] Chris Hurley is an internationally known practitioner, theorist and author in the field of archives and records management in the public and private sectors in Australia and New Zealand. He is currently employed at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia.
[1] Political
Pressure and the Archival Record: Liverpool Conference Revisited (Wien, ICA 2004
- Archives, Memory & Knowledge, Wednesday, August 25, 11:45 to 13:00). It is
published here with the kind consent of the author.
[2] Liverpool University Centre
for Archives Studies.
[3] Trudy Huskamp Peterson, "ISO, ICA, and Archives Standards" (Wien, ICA 2004 - Archives, Memory & Knowledge, Tuesday, August 24, 11:45 to 13:00).
[4] The abbreviated version
prepared for delivery in Vienna should be available at - http://www.wien2004.ica.org/fo/speakers.php?ctNv1=48&ctNv2=&IdSpk=391&AlphSpk=&p=&SpkV=2 on the Congress website at but I have never
been able to open it.
[6] Chris Hurley, "Ethical Dilemmas in Records Management", 6 April 2004.
[7] In some cases, mutually
exclusive and contradictory.
[8] Yvonne Bos-Rops "The ICA
Code of Ethics : A Challenge for Professional Organisations" in Margaret
Turner, Karen Benedict, Yvonne Bos-Rops, Dianne Carlisle "Implementing the
ICA Code of Ethics : Experiences and Challenges."