Assessing Integrity Systems: Introduction to the Symposium Australian Journal of Public Administration • 64(2):42-47, June 2005 © National Council of the Institute of Public Administration, Australia 2005 Published by Blackwell Publishing Limited INTEGRITY SYMPOSIUM The following Symposium on Australia’s national integrity systems, drawn from an Australian Research Council-funded project conducted in 2002-2004 by researchers from Griffith University, Charles Sturt University, University of Sydney, RMIT University, Monash University and the Australian National University, together with Transparency International Australia. The first three papers examine the public integrity regimes at federal, state (NSW) and local levels. The remaining four papers develop three themes as a framework for assessing strengths and weaknesses in Australia’s major integrity regimes: consequences, capacity and coherence. The papers were originally presented in sessions of the Australasian Political Studies Association (University of Adelaide, September 2004) and the 5 th National Investigation Symposium (NSW Ombudsman, Independent Commission Against Corruption and Institute of Public Administration Australia NSW, Sydney, November 2004). A. J. Brown Griffith Law School, Griffith University Brian Head Key Centre for Ethics Law Justice & Governance, Griffith University In concept, a ‘national integrity system’ is a relatively simple notion — this system consists of the broad range of institutions, processes, people and attitudes working to ensure integrity in the exercise of our society’s many different forms of official power. In practice, the ways in which these institutions interact and combine to form a ‘system’ is not so well understood, and methods for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of these systems — at least in any holistic fashion — have been largely absent. In the National Integrity System Assess- ment (NISA) project, the authors of the following series of papers broach these challenges by endeavouring to more accurately ‘map’ Austra- lia’s integrity systems, and to assess the state of those systems against themes that both make sense not only in Australian public policy but, perhaps, also offer new lessons for the expan- ding field of values-based governance evalua- tion worldwide. The term ‘national integrity system’ was coined by the foundation managing director of Transparency International, Jeremy Pope, in the mid-1990s to describe the different interrelated ‘pillars’ of anti-corruption reform used by an increasing range of countries, inspired partly by a prominent Australian example — Queensland’s post-Fitzgerald reforms. Prior to the 1990s, a common response to corruption had been the creation of a single, very powerful, anti-corruption agency along the lines of the Hong Kong Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC). However, it was increasingly recognised that the answer to corruption did not lie in a single institution, let alone a single law, but rather in the institutionalisation of integrity through a number of agencies, laws, practices and ethical codes. This was the approach taken in Queens- land, where anti-corruption commissioner Tony Fitzgerald QC had found there was ‘no purpose in piecemeal solutions, which only serve to conceal rather than cure the defects in the exist- ing system’ (Fitzgerald 1989; see Prasser et al 1990; Finn 1994; Preston et al 2002). Transparency International incorporated this example into its global anti-corruption efforts, developing the visual metaphor of an integrity system as an ancient Greek temple (Figure 1: see Pope 1996, 2000: 30; Langseth et al 1997; Stapenhurst & Kpundeh 1999). Many other international actors have also pu- rsued new frameworks for promoting and asses- sing what they consider, from experience, to be governance systems commensurate with high levels of public integrity (summarised in Table