The First Duty.

Every institution exists for a purpose. Before it acquires policies, procedures and mission statements, it enters into a covenant with those who serve within it.

The covenant is seldom written because it appears too obvious to require words. Carry out your duties honestly, and the institution will stand between you and arbitrary power. A hospital owes that to its doctors and nurses. A court owes it to judges and witnesses. A government department owes it to every public servant who walks through its doors expecting to perform the ordinary business of government without wondering whether they are personally at risk.

The Commission of Inquiry into the CFMEU has heard evidence that unsettles that expectation. Former public servants have described aggressive confrontations. Staff have spoken of distress after demonstrators allegedly entered government offices searching for a senior official. Former Master Builders Queensland chief executive Grant Galvin gave deeply personal evidence of years of intimidation that culminated in a profound mental health crisis. Neil Scales told the Commission that demonstrators went "room to room" searching for him while chanting his name. These matters remain before the Commission, whose findings are yet to be made.

Industrial disputes are nothing new. Nor should they be. Democracies depend upon the freedom to protest, to organise and to argue vigorously. Those rights are part of a healthy society. Yet there comes a point where the argument changes. When people arrive at work wondering whether the institution around them is willing, or able, to protect them from intimidation, the question is no longer one of industrial relations. It becomes a question of duty.

One passage of evidence deserves closer attention. Mr Scales recalled that after raising the incident with the responsible minister, he was told it was simply, "unions being unions". Whether the Commission ultimately accepts that account is a matter for it to determine. The phrase itself, however, deserves reflection. It does not examine the conduct. It classifies it.

Once behaviour is placed into a category where it is regarded as ordinary, the instinct to ask whether it should be tolerated begins quietly to disappear. That may be how institutions begin to lose their bearings.

There are many forms of corruption. Some involve money. Some involve favour. The quietest kind asks only that decent people alter their expectations by degrees. Yesterday's exception becomes today's inconvenience. Tomorrow it is simply how things are done.

Institutions rarely abandon their principles by announcing new ones. They simply begin using familiar words in unfamiliar ways.

Buildings possess no conscience. Institutions possess no courage. Those qualities belong only to the people within them. If enough decent people conclude that silence is the safer course, the institution gradually learns to speak in silence too.

That need not arise from malice. It may grow from fatigue, caution, political calculation or simple self-preservation. Whatever its cause, the consequence is much the same. The institution slowly adapts itself to the presence of intimidation instead of insisting upon the standards from which its authority is derived.

Every institution eventually reveals what it truly serves. Not by its mission statement, nor by its annual report, but by the conduct it is prepared to excuse.

The broader question belongs to all of us. The health of an institution is measured less by how confidently it exercises power than by how confidently ordinary people believe it will protect them. That confidence is not maintained by policies or carefully chosen language. It survives because people trust that when intimidation enters through the front door, the institution will not quietly leave through the back.

Commissions of Inquiry are established to discover facts. They occasionally uncover something more unsettling.

Human beings have always been capable of intimidation.

The more difficult question is whether institutions built to restrain arbitrary power can slowly become accustomed to it.

If they can, the greatest danger is not that an institution ceases to function.

It is that it continues to function while quietly forgetting what it was built to protect.