Kevin Lewis discusses how personal grievances are not a legitimate part of whistleblowing, but tend to flourish under its guise.
I was lecturing in Australia about 10 years ago just as a new national law came into force. The law was introducing the requirement of ‘mandatory notifications’ covering all registered healthcare professionals.
This created a formal framework for what we would call whistleblowing in this country.
So there I was, merrily explaining whistleblowing and how the new law would operate, when I spotted a lady in the front row listening intently. She was concentrating hard and taking copious notes.
At the end of the lecture she approached me and asked if I could help her with a couple of points she didn’t understand.
‘Of course,’ I replied, ‘what points were those?’
To my dismay she referred to her copious notes, looked me right in the eye, and said ‘Vistle’ and ‘Blowink’.
English was not her first language, to be fair to her. But Australian clearly wasn’t mine because the Australians have, as ever, come up with a far better, richer and more descriptive terminology – ‘dobbing in’, as in… ‘you dobbed me in to the teacher (or to mum and dad etc)’.
Had I used that term she wouldn’t have needed all those notes.
But I later learned that ‘dobbing’ and ‘being a dobber’ is a particular genre of whistleblowing anyway.
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