Wednesday, April 01, 2015

That Australian life - the ASADA mess

One of the reasons why we need to keep politicians and indeed law enforcement agencies out of public grandstanding on specific legal or quasi-legal proceedings is the mess they create. The ASADA (Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority) Essendon etc sport in drugs issue is a case in point. For the benefit of international readers not familiar with the Australian scene, this ABC piece by David Marks describes the case I am talking about.

In this case, I have no idea what was legal or illegal, what was un-ethical as compared to illegal. In grandstanding in the way they did at the start of the case, the politicians and ASADA blurred the line between legal and illegal and between ethics, regulation and public policy. It was a failure in due process.

This was not the first such case we have seen, nor will it be the last. It's just another example of the public policy and personal mess created by created by current approaches.

3 comments:

Evan said...

Complete agreement from me.

Winton Bates said...

Me too.

Jim Belshaw said...

Hi both. I wonder what we can do about it? It's quite difficult. When you comment on ASADA you get agreement. When you go behind and comment on the process failure, the initial grandstanding, the agreement drops away.