responsibility for developing a tourism website

3B Ruby

Ruby is a public servant. She is a web developer within a department of a state government. Ruby has been given responsibility for developing a tourism website by the IT Manager Rye. Ruby adds various links to news services to enliven this government webpage. These links include global news channels. It is later found that those sites sometimes provide news on court cases that are currently under suppression order here in Australia as they are in process. When noticed this causes huge embarrassment to the government department. Rye, the IT manager of the department had not seen the website before it went live but even if he had it is unlikely that he would have noticed and tested every link. In any case, the links were not problematic until a local court case gave rise to a publication suppression order. Jai now needs to determine who should take responsibility and what actions should be taken about the event. He needs to prevent recurrence of this type of problem.

What professional ethical dilemmas are Ruby and Rye dealing with here? (e.g. Should we allow or sanction Ruby’s behaviour? Is there a public interest question raised by this scenario? What actions do everyone involved need to take to ensure that this kind of situation does not occur again?)