 |
| Public ethics. Private abandonment. |
At the same time as public messages about wellbeing, ethical leadership, and responsibility were being shared under the authority of a Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Ethics, I was privately sending him evidence of harm, describing fear, and asking for help. Those two realities existed side by side — the public voice of values, and the private experience of being ignored, shut out, and ultimately blocked when I was in crisis.
By February 2022, I was trying to survive what was happening to me.
I had already raised concerns through internal channels. I had reported what I believed were serious breaches of work health and safety obligations. I had tried to follow process, to be reasonable, to trust that an institution I had served for over twenty years would respond when one of its own said, clearly, that something was wrong.
Instead, everything escalated.
The pressure. The silence. The refusal to act.
By that point, my income had been disrupted, my health was deteriorating, and I was facing the very real possibility of losing my home. I was frightened in a way that is difficult to explain unless you have lived through it. This was not just stress, but the kind of fear that sits in your body because every system that is supposed to protect you is failing at once.
That is when I reached out directly to the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Ethics.
My job in the Library Directorate also comes under his portfolio, leadership and responsibility.
I wrote to him because he held a role that, by definition, carried responsibility for ethical leadership. The Library Directorate sat under his portfolio. My job sat under his portfolio. And what I was experiencing was not just poor management or workplace conflict — it was a collapse of integrity at multiple levels.
I sent him a private message on LinkedIn. I attached evidence. I explained what had been happening to me.
I told him I was frightened.
I told him I could lose my home.
I told him I was dealing with ongoing harassment, intimidation and what I described, at the time, as mobbing.
“Please stop the stalking, blocking, mobbing, harassing & intimidating… even toward my grief-stricken family.”
I described the cumulative harm.
“I finally burnt out from severe privacy violation, negligence, harassment, discrimination… and psychological violence that’s still happening.”
I made it clear that this was not abstract. This was not theoretical.
“Psychosocial hazards do kill.”
And I asked him, directly, to act.
“What is your choice in action as an ethics professor and DVC?”
That question came from a place of belief. At that point, despite everything, I still believed that someone in a position of authority — someone responsible for ethics — would step in when faced with evidence of harm.
What happened next is something I will never forget.
He viewed my LinkedIn profile.
And then I was blocked.
The DVC of ETHICS blocked a victim of workplace mobbing!
At the exact moment I was most distressed, most vulnerable, and most in need of intervention, a senior executive — a Professor of Ethics — chose not just silence, but exclusion.
To me, it communicated:
No acknowledgement or validation.
No attempt to understand.
No indication that the information I had provided had even been considered.
That decision came after months of escalation where:
- I had raised psychosocial hazards that were not managed
- I had sought support that was not provided
- I had experienced conduct that I believed breached both ethical standards and legal obligations
- and I had continued, despite all of that, to try to engage constructively
Blocking me was not just a personal slight. It was not just unkind.
It was a failure of responsibility at the highest level.
When a worker presents evidence of harm, articulates fear, and identifies risk to their health and safety, the response is not optional. It is not a matter of preference.
It is a matter of duty.
And that duty was not met.
What compounded the harm was the contrast.
While I was being shut out, excluded, and left to deal with escalating fear on my own, the same senior executive continued to present publicly as a leader in ethics — speaking about wellbeing, values, and responsibility.
But I had seen what happened behind that language.
I had experienced what those words meant in practice when someone actually needed them to translate into action.
They didn’t.
That is where something shifted in me.
Up until that point, I had been trying to hold onto the idea that systems fail, but people within them can still choose to do the right thing.
That belief began to break.
This was not a junior staff member who didn’t understand the implications of inaction.
This was a senior executive.
A professor.
Someone whose role was to understand, teach, and embody ethics.
And in the moment where ethics required action — not theory, not language, not positioning — but action, the choice was to turn away.
The harm from that decision intensified everything I was already experiencing.
It deepened the sense of isolation.
It reinforced the message that there was no safe pathway left within the institution.
It escalated the psychological impact of what I was already enduring.
And it contributed to a level of fear that no worker should ever be placed in for simply exercising a lawful right — the right to a safe work environment.
Integrity was not just compromised. It was absent.
Because integrity is not what is said in public.
Integrity is what is done when someone is at risk and you have the power to intervene.
This is also where the legal dimension cannot be ignored.
What I reported was not just “concerns.”
It involved:
- psychosocial hazards recognised under WHS law
- alleged breaches of duty of care
- ongoing harm with foreseeable consequences
- and a worker actively seeking protection and intervention
In that context, doing nothing is not neutral.
Shutting down communication is not neutral.
Blocking access is not neutral.
Those are decisions.
And decisions at that level carry consequences.
What makes this even more difficult to reconcile is that I did not go outside the system first. I did not bypass process.
I followed it.
I escalated internally.
I reached leadership.
I gave the institution every opportunity to act.
And when I reached the point of contacting the person responsible for ethics, it was because I still believed that integrity, at some level, existed within that structure.
That belief did not survive that interaction.
What followed was not just ongoing harm — it was the realisation that the safeguards I thought existed were not going to be activated, even when the risk was clear, even when the evidence was provided, and even when the consequences were foreseeable.
That is what people need to understand about institutional harm at this level.
It is not just what is done to you.
It is what is not done when it could have been stopped and how quickly everything unravels when those with responsibility choose not to act.
⸻
Legal Accountability — Integrity vs Obligation
This was not simply an ethical “failure”. It raises serious questions about compliance with:
- Work Health and Safety obligations to ensure psychological health and safety
- Duties to manage psychosocial hazards, including bullying, harassment and organisational risk factors
- Executive responsibilities to act on credible reports of harm and risk
- General protections under the Fair Work Act, where adverse treatment follows the exercise of a workplace right
The gap between what was required and what occurred is fundamental.
⸻
Closing
I did not lose faith because of one moment.
I lost it through a series of decisions, silences, and failures — this being one of the clearest.
When someone entrusted with ethics chooses not to act in the face of harm, it forces a question that is far bigger than one workplace:
What do those words actually mean, if they disappear when they are needed most?
And the institutionalised wage theft continued…
Source: contemporaneous record of events - Document 253.
