The Maryanne Thompson saga is finally drawing to a close with her guilty plea over falsifying qualifications.  The oddest thing about the court case yesterday was the State Services Commissioner presenting a Victim Impact Statement.  Who’s the victim here?  Apparently the State services as a whole and all State servants.  I don’t think  so.

I don’t see State servants being or acting as victims.  They haven’t and don’t need to take on board the responsibility for one individual’s wrong-doing.  In any walk of life, there will always be individuals who flout the rules, take advantage of trust, or are plain bad.  When someone in the business world breaks the law (not an infrequent occurrence), no one suggests the whole system of private enterprise has been victimised by this.

Iain Rennie was right to say that there is an impact on the general perception of trustworthiness of State services.  But Len Cook, the new head of the Institute of Public Administration, hit the nail right on the head when he said the real issue was how the system deals with individual cases of wrongdoing or corruption.

Trust and trustworthiness are vital ingredients of our system of government and public administration.  One falsified cv doesn’t undermine that, stupid (and unnecessary) as the action was.  But please, Iain Rennie, let’s not go down the path of claiming collective victimhood.