More people than you may believe will interpret my column in the Herald today and this blog as an argument that accessing pornography on work laptops is acceptable. They are wrong. I do, however, see accessing pornography in private as acceptable. The difference is the use of the workplace laptop.
Does that difference justify the sacking of Ports Minister Paul McLeay and, for that matter, a great many men before him? Anyone who uses work equipment to access porn is an idiot, and, frankly, on that score I'd question their suitability for a responsible position, but that is not the usual justification for the sackings and breach of the fellow's privacy. Yes, accessing pornography is, presumably, a private activity, and why should that privacy be denied simply because the laptop was provided by an employer?
The usual justification is that the use of the laptop was inappropriate, long a favourite word of the PC world, and what that means is that it is the accessing of the pornography that was inappropriate. But there was no more harm done than accessing a fishing site. There's no suggestion that the pornography was illegal, and there were no victims, there was no affront to anyone. In fact, in the case of Mr McLeay and many others no one would ever have known if IT specialists had not gone hunting through the machine's hard drive and history.
Premier Keneally's justification for the dismissal of McLeay is that the community expects better behaviour of ministers, and by that she does not mean better behaviour than using a government-provided laptop privately. She means accessing pornography. I don't believe that the community does, or should, expect any more of male ministers in this regard than it does of men in general, and men have been leering over pornographic images, legally, for as long as there have been men and pornographic images.
The sacking of Minister McLeay and so many other men is hugely disproportionate to the breach of a rule, to the point that I see it as a new male vulnerability and even as a weapon of a rising force in management, women.
Frankly, I wouldn't accept a work laptop as a take-home machine, not because I'd access porn on it - I wouldn't. I'd provide my own laptop simply because I'd rather grant work the use of my laptop than accept limitations on the use of its.
Does even a government minister's private accessing of porn justify public shaming and dismissal?
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