Shaun Drummond quits over ruckus about whistleblower penalties

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Queensland’s top health bureaucrat has fallen on his sword amidst a blaze of local media coverage over a somewhat stunning public submission from his own department to a review of the state’s Public Interest Disclosures laws that called for consideration of penalties for inappropriate disclosures to journalists.

Shaun Drummond, a seasoned senior executive and leader across the public hospital and health sector both in Queensland and interstate, was confirmed by premier Annastacia Palaszczuk to have handed in his notice on the same day that Queensland minister for health Shannon Fentiman had expressed her confidence in Drummond as Queensland health director general.

Drummond finishes at the end of July.

The submission by Queensland Health is rather a doozy of a legal and public relations own-goal in that it openly advocated for consideration of penalties against those within it who may be found to have inappropriately blown the whistle to the media.

While the submission is cautious enough to use the broader term ‘penalties’ rather than specifying criminal penalties, neither Queensland’s health minister nor the premier now appears to be contesting that this is what was intended. It appears possible the submission was not as closely scrutinized as it may have been by a number of people.

The offending paragraphs in the submission are in response to the review’s question of: “Are the provisions for disclosures to the media and other third parties appropriate and effective? Are there additions or alternatives that should be considered?”

Queensland Health’s response is: “While s20 provides for when an officer may make a disclosure to a journalist it does not consider penalties for inappropriate disclosure of relevant information to journalists. Consideration could be given to expanding this provision to include penalties for inappropriately disclosing relevant information to journalists where a department is dealing with the matter.”

It is a courageous approach to legal reform by the agency given the clear intent of PID is to foster transparency and weed-out misconduct rather than seeking new sanctions for the unauthorised disclosure of information to the media.

Drummond reportedly tried to distance himself from the report — many senior executives do put their trust in delegated authority not to shoot them or their agency in the foot — but this became problematic given the submission was a formal public document bearing his signature as the departmental chief.

Relations between Queensland Health and the local media, which is dominated by Newscorp’s Courier Mail, have always been robust, with the newspaper declaring in its editorial headed “Buck stops with health department boss” that “The botched surgery of Jayant Patel, Gladstone maternity ward troubles and the DNA testing bungles are the kinds of stories that would not have been able to be told if Queensland Health had its way.”

The Courier Mail’s editorial also states that Drummond wrote to the paper to clarify the submission and quotes Drummond.

“He said the submission did not say that “whistleblowers inappropriately disclosing relevant information to journalists when the department is dealing with a matter should be penalised”,” the Courier Mail editorial said.

Technically, this is correct. To be exact, the submission stated consideration “could” be given to creating penalties for whistleblowers, an approach known in the corporate and government relations trade as the “Bonsai fig leaf” defence.

Perhaps Drummond’s biggest mistake was not questioning or testing the advice of those beneath him, namely the approach of trying to bat away the submission’s clear suggestion that there ought to be sanctions for false or malicious alarms, which, to use a boxing term, is leading with your chin.

It’s also not clear why Queensland Health chose to use a PID legislative review process to float a balloon for new penalties (essentially already covered by leaking laws) when the spirit of the laws fairly clearly leans in the other direction.

The whistleblower provisions evidently do have effect, although they can take time and can extract a toll on whistleblowers.

In March, the former mayor of Logan, Luke Smith, pleaded guilty to having accepted a “secret commission from an agent” over a powerboat.

The plea came after Logan’s chief executive, Sharon Kelsey, was sacked for reporting corruption to the Queensland Crime and Corruption Commission (CCC), resulting in seven Logan councillors in addition to Smith later being charged with fraud over the sacking — only for the CCC to then drop the charges in 2021.

The dropping of the fraud charges sparked a review of the CCC by none other than Tony Fitzgerald, the judge who ran the royal commission into corruption in the Queensland police following the 1987 airing of ABC Four Corners’ Moonlight State investigation by Chris Masters.