Cut the crap, get back to Collective Responsibility

The scandals swirling around Washington, or London and Canberra, like that of Canada’s former Liberal government, are complex and for the most part, obscure.
These messy affairs tend to drag for years, as political jockeying and point scoring render the process of gathering evidence increasingly difficult.
The focus of investigations is often sidetracked by the hunt for the elusive ‘smoking gun’. This mechanism, the ‘proof positive’ has become the holy grail of would be corruption busters.
The issue is driven by political and legal imperatives. The latter because the slimy toads who subvert the trust of public office will use every mean legal maneuver possible to escape the ignominy of convictions.
The first and most obvious step is to ensure there can’t even be any legal charges to fight. Let’s face it, very few politicians are actually punished for their crimes, the bar has been set far too high. The bar has been set to the ‘smoking gun’.
It is the political environment which allows clearly unscrupulous behaviour not merely to go unpunished, but for offenders to hold, grimly onto office, no doubt continuing dubious practices. Nothing short of ‘proof positive’ will dislodge them.

What all of this ignores are the fundamentals of democratic representation. Office holders hold something far more valuable, or perhaps that is should hold something more valuable: responsibility.
But political office is not about individuals, and the onus should never be a burden of proof against an individual. It is about the collective responsibilities of the various elements of government, beginning at the top.
A Prime Minister or President and their cabinet team are directly responsible collectively for any failings in that area of administration. To be sure, they cannot be privy to every activity around them, but they have the means and the duty to ensure vigilance.
I majority parties, the ones with the greatest level of temptation to subvert the proper processes of government have an equal and separate responsibility. It is facile to merely single out one of their number, as was the case with Randy Cunningham, but not face the reality of their responsibility to ensure safeguards and vigilance.
In a recent blog, Unspunblog, the writer quite rightly discusses the dearth of real leadership at the highest levels. The reality is, all facets of government are lacking in real leadership, the kind which takes their responsibility as a sacred trust.
It was the Australian oil for food scandal which started this thought process. In that unedifying episode we see ‘leaders’, government and corporate, busily denying the very responsibility which their roles embody.
It is simply not good enough to fulfill the letter of the law, or appear to do so. The collective responsibility does not require a smoking gun, it demands that its holders perform to proper standards or relinquish their office. For most of us, simply showing these crooks the door is preferable to long, drawn out, legalistic battles over who said what to whom.