Ethics of Cabinet ministers

The Korea Times

The Korea Times

Opinion

Michael Breen

Ethics of Cabinet ministers

Posted : 2010-08-26 17:07

Updated : 2010-08-26 17:07

By Michael Breen

In their grilling of Cabinet nominees this week, opposition lawmakers worked hard to convince voters that the President's men, and therefore the President, are unfit to rule.

For that, they cannot be blamed. Denting the ruler's image the main job of would-be rulers whose party is sitting out its five-year or 10-year period in the penalty box for its own reputation failure last time around. It's what we, the taxpayers who pay their salaries, expect them to do.

This process comes at a price, though. Democratic politics is so often more about PR than real leadership.

A look at the crimes for which candidates are being hung this week shows that the PR has now taken over to a point of absurdity.

Here's a round-up: Prime minister candidate, ten-fold increase in personal wealth in last three years as a provincial governor, taking bribes from a businessman; knowledge-economy minister, property speculation by wife; culture and tourism minister, registering false home addresses and buying property in his wife's name; health and welfare minister, daughter with foreign passport still on Korean health insurance (two crimes); labor minister, fake address and dodging military service; special affairs minister-nominee, using his influence to help a chaebol CEO get reappointed; education minister, evading tax and publishing the same scholastic paper in two journals.

This rap-sheet, the opposition charges, shows that most nominees have "ethical problems."

OK, opposition, job well done. Ethics is a sharper axe than competence. The actual achievement here, however, is different than the one intended. It is to reinforce for Koreans the widely believed misperception that their leaders, regardless of party, are morally corrupt.

From here, it is but one step to the assumption that we all, too, must cheat to succeed.

For older people, raised when political power here was truly corrupt, that message is so deeply ingrained that for them the distress is not in acting corruptly but in being caught. For the young, however, exposed to the virtues of democracy, the moment of choice, be it the first cheating in an exam or doctoring of a resume, sets them on a lifetime blunting of the moral edge that for most, because of the logic at play ― "everyone does it" ― leads to a justifying dislike of country. This gets reflected in the desire, unusual for a developed country, of so many to emigrate. It also explains why Koreans, especially in business, so often trust expatriates more than their fellow Koreans.

Given this deeply damaging consequence, politicians have an obligation to play the democratic game seriously. However, looking at those "crimes" again, it becomes apparent that this hearing process is itself morally flawed.

Take, for example, the issue of registering false addresses. This is indeed a crime and several hundred people are punished each year for it. So, anyone wanting to be a politician or a vicar shouldn't do it. But is it ethically wrong to break this law? Not in my book because the law itself is morally questionable law. Why, I wonder, are democratic politicians not debating whether the state should continue to have the right to force citizens to choose an official address and register at the local government office every time they move home? Only police states do this. We are accustomed to it because it was inherited from the colonial administration and the dictatorship, and it's one of those things that politicians, too distracted by frivolous opportunities to posture, have failed to deal with. Such rules have no place in a democracy that values individual freedoms. (If you disagree with me, consider that the motive was for children's education, which is a higher parental virtue in this country than obeying a stupid law.)

Second, what exactly is the crime when a nominee's wife buys a house in a country where everyone's wife is buying houses? Did she not pay tax on them? Whatever it is, as the owner, she and not the nominee is responsible before the law in a country that sees people as individuals first and members of a family second.

As for publishing the same paper twice, this is such an absurd charge that every journalist repeating it should be slapped over the head with a rolled up copy of his own newspaper.

The only serious thing here is the prime minister-designate's wealth and if there's no criminality there, it should be dropped.

To recover its moral equilibrium, the National Assembly should remove these non-crimes from its PR armory. But not before those guilty of the same charges leveled against the nominees apologize and resign.

Michael Breen is an author, former foreign correspondent and the chairman of Insight Communications, a public relations consulting company. He can be reached at mike.breen@insightcomms.com.