APS staff have their say on corruption

Public servants say they are concerned about cronyism and nepotism in their 2024 staff survey.

Transcript

00:00Corruption has been a huge focus for the public sector with the establishment of the National

00:05Anti-Corruption Commission in the last year and the Public Service Census results give

00:09us an idea of what public servants think about corruption in their agencies.

00:14So staff were asked if they had witnessed behaviour which they considered serious enough

00:17to count as corruption.

00:19It's not a perfect measure but it does give us some sense of what staff are thinking about

00:23this issue.

00:24In general it was fairly low so the range was from about 1% of staff to 4% of staff.

00:30On the lower end was treasury at 1% and the high end was home affairs and agriculture

00:35at 4%.

00:36These are agencies which do have a little bit more potential for corruption because

00:40of their functions.

00:41The really interesting stuff is what staff think could count as corrupt behaviour.

00:45In general they thought it was cronyism, so the preferential treatment of friends and

00:50behind that was nepotism, preferential treatment of family.

00:54Another really interesting trend was that people weren't really reporting this behaviour.

00:59They were asked about whether they had personally reported the behaviour in line with their

01:02agency's policies and this was all pretty low, around the 20% mark.

01:07On the really low end was finance at 3% and AGD at 13% so there's clearly some work to

01:13be done there.

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