To the Whistleblowers: Thank You

by Rebecca Thomas

The story about OIAs is everywhere, all at once.

It feels a little like a scab many of us have been picking at for the past three years. We knew there was something underneath it. We could feel it. Occasionally we caught glimpses of it. But every time we tried to look more closely, the wound seemed to be covered over again.

Now, finally, part of that scab has come away and perhaps things can begin to heal. But healing takes time and care. Even when something looks healed from the outside, there can be evidence of scarring underneath that never entirely fades.

I have little doubt that this period in New Zealand education will be studied for decades to come. I hope future educators learn from it. I hope academics examine it. I hope our public servants learn from it. And I hope it becomes a warning about what can happen.

This piece is about the people who uncovered it.

Someone inside the Ministry of Education decided enough was enough. And then others began speaking. Since the stories began emerging, all I keep doing is thinking about them.

Somewhere behind the headlines, the interviews and the statements are human beings who had to make an incredibly difficult decision. Imagine if that had been you. Imagine what it must have been like being them. Imagine sitting in meeting after meeting hearing things that made you increasingly uncomfortable, while being surrounded by people with considerably more power and influence than you had.

I bet they wondered whether they were overreacting. They would have wrestled with those thoughts. Imagine looking around the virtual room at your colleagues and wondering whether anyone else was thinking what you were thinking. You can't exactly ask. Not at first. Because you don't know who is safe to ask. You don't know who agrees with you. You don't know whether the thing troubling you is troubling anyone else at all.

And power does something to those questions.

When the person you are questioning sits considerably higher in an organisation than you do, speaking up isn't simply about finding your voice. You have to calculate what using that voice might cost you. These are people who can influence careers, opportunities and reputations. Meanwhile, you are a person with a job you probably worked very hard to get, colleagues you care about, bills to pay, perhaps children to feed and a professional future you had imagined continuing quietly along its path.

That is the part of whistleblowing that is so easy to overlook from the outside.

We see the moment somebody spoke.

We don't see all the moments when they nearly did.

I imagine there were conversations at home. Perhaps quiet ones late at night with partners, friends or whānau. Conversations that began with, Something happened again today. Conversations where the same details were gone over and over because sometimes you need somebody outside a situation to tell you that, no, you aren't imagining it. That thing really did happen. It really did make you uncomfortable. You aren't being unreasonable for feeling the way you do.

Perhaps there were sleepless nights too. Because doing the right thing becomes considerably more complicated when doing the right thing might also hurt you.

Imagine watching decisions being made about something as important as the curriculum of Aotearoa New Zealand and slowly beginning to believe that the ordinary mechanisms of accountability were not going to reveal what was happening.

At what point do you decide to take out your phone? At what point does loyalty to an organisation become less important than your responsibility to the public that organisation serves?

I don't imagine that moment felt heroic.

I imagine it felt terrifying.

Because standing up to power isn't brave in the way we sometimes like to imagine bravery. There is no certainty that everyone will rally around you afterwards and tell you that you did the right thing. There is no guarantee that your version of events will be believed. There is no certainty that you won't be identified, criticised or blamed for the disruption that follows.

Sometimes courage is simply being frightened and deciding that you cannot live comfortably with your own silence anymore. 

We receive the revelation and they live with the consequences. 

We watch the clip while they know exactly who else was in that meeting. 

We share the article and move on with our day while they may be wondering who suspects them. 

We talk about what has been exposed, but they still have to wake up the next morning and somehow carry on with their ordinary lives.

For the whistleblowers, the story isn't over when the rest of us close the article.

There may be interviews, questions and evidence still to provide. There may be challenging conversations and relationships that will never quite feel the same again. There may be people they once trusted whom they now look at differently, and people who look differently at them. There may be moments when they wonder whether speaking was worth what followed.

I hope they also feel some release.

Because carrying something that troubles your conscience is exhausting. Knowing something and feeling unable to speak about it can be incredibly lonely. Perhaps, amongst all the fear and uncertainty, there is also some relief in no longer carrying it alone.

And there may be others inside the system right now who know more and are asking themselves the same question: Do I say something?

Whistleblowers are sometimes described as disloyal, but I think that misunderstands the complicated place from which many people speak. Sometimes speaking out comes precisely because somebody cares deeply about the organisation they work for and what it is supposed to represent. Sometimes the greater act of loyalty is refusing to stand quietly beside something you believe is damaging the institution you have spent years serving.

The Ministry of Education does not belong to a Minister. It does not belong to its senior leaders. It exists to serve the public and, ultimately, the tamariki and rangatahi of Aotearoa whose lives are shaped by the decisions it makes.

And whistleblowers, I am sorry.

We should never have needed the video.

We should never need a public servant holding up a phone to a computer screen to provide the transparency that democratic institutions are supposed to provide themselves.

I am sorry the burden landed on you.

Know this, somewhere before that phone came out, something else had already gone wrong. 

Thank you to the person who pressed record. 

Thank you to those who subsequently spoke. 

Thank you to the journalists who listened, investigated and understood the enormous responsibility that comes with protecting a source. And thank you to the partners, friends and whānau who may have been quietly holding these people up while the rest of us have been reading about them.

The silence has been broken.

We don't know your names, and perhaps we never will.

But I hope you know that somewhere beyond this week's headlines there are educators across Aotearoa thinking about you. We understand that something which took us only a few minutes to watch may have taken you weeks or months to find the courage to share. We understand that while the public gained something from your decision, you may personally have risked a great deal.

I hope you have good people around you.

I hope someone has checked that you are okay.

I hope, amongst the noise, you have had moments when you have been able to breathe out and realise that you don't have to carry this by yourself anymore.

Finally, I hope that when this period in our education history is eventually written about, somewhere amongst the politics, the OIAs, the investigations and the decisions, there is space left for the people whose names we may never know.

Thank you.