Corporate culture has changed, now it’s Canberra’s turn

Everyone should understand that corporate Australia is not driven by left ideology. The business community has not gone ‘woke.’

If the Prime Minister and his team want to win the election, they must undertake the task of genuine cultural change. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Dean Martin

Happy Easter to you all, and what a good time it is to rest, recuperate, pause and reflect. Citizens are in need of some respite from the politicians, but those in the federal ­Coalition mustn’t skive off over the break — they have urgent work to undertake.

Scott Morrison and his team might begin by casting their minds back to before the 2019 election. Members were convinced they were going to lose and most were deep in the doldrums. People were openly looking for jobs and planning life after politics.

Notable exceptions were the Prime Minister himself, who continued to believe, and the indefatigable Tim Wilson, who beavered away with his campaign against Labor’s foolish policies attacking self-funded retirees — a campaign that ultimately proved highly successful.

Come the night of the election, the win was deemed a “miracle”. The victors — already prone to the mindset that it is the leader’s job to win elections — fell back with relief into their comfort zone.

In the celebratory euphoria that followed the win, sober insight was not undertaken. This group of people had experienced what in occupational health and safety terms is called “a near miss”, and a fatal one at that.

Yet there was no investigation afterwards, no examination and identification of the contributing factors, and no strategies put in place to avoid future accidents, ­injuries and fatalities. Instead, ­hubris, even delusion, took hold.

Then about six weeks ago, a tsunami of scandal hit, and our government found itself drowning under wave after wave. No one should be in any shock. It was only a matter of time before we found ourselves here. This situation has been many years in the making.

Outside Canberra, organisations in the private and public sector have had to lift their compliance and governance standards, inch by inch, for decades. In the past five years particularly, industry regulators have focused their sights on “culture”.

Back in 2016, the Australian Securities & Investments Commission defined culture as “the underlying mindset of an organisation”. Common law decisions, royal commissions and regulators have since made it clear that boards would be held accountable for cultural failings.

The Australian Institute of Company Directors defines culture as “the collective behaviours driven by a set of norms and values that directly impact decision making”. Culture is “inextricably linked to questions of right and wrong” and “refers to an organisation’s reality” — in essence, “the way we do things around here”.

A sick organisational culture can continue on, undiscovered, for only so long. Any organisation with a cultural problem is an organisation whose time of reckoning will come.

With regards to the Liberal Party, the signs have been there for many years, and they have all been ignored. Now it is the time of reckoning. Just imagine for a minute if the Prime Minister were, say, the chairman of the board of a large company, a charity, or a sporting team. Would he have had to stand down by now? What would happen if, say, there were two alleged rapes, one occurring in the middle of the night in the boardroom, reports of rampant sexual activity at their head office, including sex workers visiting service managers, videos circulating of male staff masturbating on the desk of a female executive, multiple sexual harassment allegations and claims that senior staff had been allegedly harassing customers on social media?

Heads would roll. There would then be a comprehensive inquiry into the culture that had led to the situation, and an implementation taskforce would be charged with delivering meaningful reform.

Everyone should understand that corporate Australia is not driven by left ideology. The business community has not gone “woke” and the people who lead companies are not a bunch of pearl-clutching puritans.

Instead, the laws of the land, put in place by parliament, and the regulators they instruct have made the corporate cultural environment we have now. There is an ever-expanding labyrinth of rules that we all must follow, risks we must avoid, and litigation and prosecutions we do not want to expose ourselves to.

For example, decades ago, companies stopped allowing drunk staff members to come into the ­office in the middle of the night and just hang about. The risks of what was likely to occur, and the cost to the business, made it so prohibitive that rules were put in place to avoid it.

In times past, corporate leaders could use the excuse they didn’t know what was going on. Those days are gone. Leaders are held ­responsible for the culture of their organisations — because when ­people do the wrong thing, it is ­because the culture has allowed it.

If the Prime Minister and his team want to win the election, they must undertake the task of genuine cultural change. Pretence at change will not work because people can see through the spin.