My Constitution, Section 17

Section 17 - Offences by Officers

No Officer or employee shall:

(i) fail to reasonably execute duties of Office or employment without good reason;
(ii) appoint to or employ in the public service of that jurisdiction any citizen who that Officer or employee knows or reasonably ought suspect is not reasonable;
(iii) make any recommendation to superiors that is inconsistent with this Constitution;
(iv) provide false information to any Officer;
(v) provide information to any other Officer of any Australian jurisdiction from which the inferences that would be drawn by the Reasonable Person are inconsistent with what that first Officer knows actually to be the case; or
(vi) accept any tangible or intangible consideration held as valuable by market calculation or by cultural reckoning or by that Officer or employee personally as the Reasonable Person would believe is likely to or intended to influence that Officer or employee away from reasonable execution of duties.

Officers have one job to do: exercise retaliatory force on behalf of people who have the right to exercise it in the first instance. Everything they do in the capacity as Officers has to be consistent with that, including their interaction with other Officers and how the content of one Officer’s action affects the content of another Officer’s action.

The key word of the first item is the reason at the end. The meaning of reasonable had been established long ago, where the invocation of reason at the end there is to provide allowance for genuine personal distress or attendance at other tasks, and also allowance for differences in opinion on relative priorities of one task over another so long as reason is used to formulate those priorities.

The second item is necessary so as to make Officers accountable for making sure that reason is predominant in the action of government by way of providing the foundations for how to judge who they put into positions of government.

The third item is a reminder of the primacy of the Constitution and that it must be kept in mind. It is also the upwards-directed counterpart to 16(5) regarding communication to subordinates, and also ties in with effects arising from their own actions on the contents of other Officers’ actions.

The fourth item is a general prohibition, whose basis is also a matter of content of other Officers’ actions. The fifth has the same basis, but is more focussed on misrepresentation than outright falsehoods.

The six and last item is straight-forward, other than that it better deals with gifts that have no or indeterminate market value by putting the locus of evaluation right where it should be: on the parties involved in the transaction.

JJM