Chris Minns and the Broderick Review - August 2022

21 August 2022

In August 2022, the findings of the independent review into bullying, harassment and sexual misconduct in NSW parliamentary workplaces were released.

The review, led by former Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick AO, had been commissioned by the NSW Parliamentary Executive Group in July 2021. It examined workplace culture and harmful behaviours within Parliament and electorate offices, and made recommendations spanning leadership, prevention and early intervention, workplace culture, policies, reporting mechanisms, accountability and monitoring. 

It was called Leading for Change.

And when it was released, I was reading its messages about leadership, safety, speaking up and accountability while living through what was the failure of those very principles in another publicly funded institution - my university - and while trying to get the NSW systems responsible for workplace safety and workers compensation to listen to me.

That is the context in which I wrote to Chris Minns on 21 August 2022, then Leader of the NSW Opposition and my local member for Kogarah.

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The Broderick Review

There’s something important about going back to what NSW Parliament itself was saying at the time.

When Elizabeth Broderick was appointed in July 2021, the Parliament said that people working in or visiting Parliament were entitled to feel safe, free from harassment, and to have complaints heard and acted upon. Broderick herself emphasised the importance of public institutions responding to workplace issues quickly and effectively, and of listening to people so that their experiences could inform what needed to change. 

Then, on 12 August 2022, the Parliamentary Executive Group responded publicly to the completed review.

It acknowledged incidents of bullying, sexual harassment and sexual misconduct and the distress they had caused. It said people were entitled to workplaces where they felt respected and free from harassment.

More importantly for me, its response wasn’t simply about telling people experiencing harm to speak up.

It was about what institutions must do after somebody speaks up.

The Parliamentary Executive Group committed to effective complaint-handling mechanisms, prompt and effective responses to misconduct, appropriate responses to incidents, and support for individuals. It also recognised that workplace culture was a responsibility of leaders, office holders, managers and staff. 

Those words mattered because by August 2022, I had been trying to get precisely those things for years.

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I had already spoken up

I had first asked for support for a safe workplace on 2 July 2019.

By August 2022, speaking up hadn’t made me safer. It had exposed me to further harm.

I had spent years trying to get my workplace concerns heard. I had tried internal avenues. I had tried the workers compensation system. I had tried regulators. I had tried political representatives.

That now included trying to reach my own local state MP.

My email of 21 August began:

“As your constituent in the electorate of Kogarah, I can’t repeat myself after many months of repeatedly banging on the Kogarah electorate office door, trying to be heard.”

I was exhausted.

I wasn’t asking for another public statement telling people that bullying was unacceptable. I was asking someone with power to listen to what I was saying had happened when I had reported it.

I explicitly connected my experience with the issues exposed by the Broderick Review:

“The toxic culture in parliament doesn’t just affect staff there, it affects staff elsewhere like me who’s employed in a publicly funded university.”

The Broderick Review was about NSW parliamentary workplaces. It wasn’t an investigation into my university or my circumstances, and I don’t suggest otherwise.

What struck me was the principle.

A workplace culture becomes dangerous when power is allowed to operate without meaningful accountability; when people fear the consequences of reporting harmful behaviour; when complaints are mishandled; when those raising concerns are not adequately supported; and when leadership doesn’t intervene effectively.

Those issues don’t become irrelevant when you walk out of Parliament House.

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“Leaders must walk the talk”

I was also deeply troubled by what I perceived as a disconnect between public statements about workplace safety and what happened when an ordinary constituent came asking for help.

In my email I wrote:

“All leaders should not be tolerating or ignoring a toxic culture and allowing their executives to abuse their power to cause harm to staff.”

Later, I put it even more simply:

“Leaders must walk the talk.”

That’s what this email was really about.

The Broderick Review.

Because here was an independent review commissioned by NSW Parliament identifying serious problems within workplace culture and calling for structural change.

And here I was, at almost exactly the same moment, trying to explain that telling people to speak up is meaningless if the systems they approach don’t know how — or are unwilling — to respond safely when they do.

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I was trying to reach government from outside government

My email also documented how far I had already travelled through the NSW system.

I referred to SafeWork NSW, SIRA, IRO, the HCCC and NSW Police. I described having previously provided records to the Kogarah electorate office. I described my efforts to raise serious concerns about my university and about the handling of my workers compensation and workplace-safety matters.

This was what I was telling my elected representative in real time.

I wasn’t silently deteriorating while nobody knew there was a problem.

I was communicating.

Repeatedly.

I was identifying what the hazards were. I was identifying the people and institutions that had failed me. I was describing the psychological and financial consequences. I was asking for somebody to look at the records.

The email shows just how distressed I had become. I wrote that I could no longer comfortably approach the electorate office and that the experience of repeatedly trying to be heard had itself become another source of trauma.

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The cruel contradiction of “speak up”

There’s a phrase that appears constantly in discussions about workplace culture:

Speak up.

But the Broderick Review points us towards a much harder question.

What happens next?

What happens when somebody does speak?

What happens when their complaint is complicated?

What happens when it implicates people with institutional power?

What happens when they’re distressed after years of trying to navigate systems that were supposed to protect them?

What happens when their communication is no longer polished because they’re exhausted, frightened and overwhelmed?

Do we listen less because the person has become distressed?

Or do we ask what happened to make them that distressed?

By August 2022, I was no longer communicating like the calm, confident professional I was prior to the secondary trauma and systemic harm.

My emails were raw. Sometimes angry. Sometimes pleading. Sometimes confronting.

But underneath all of that emotion was an extraordinarily consistent request:

Please listen. Please look at the evidence. Please make the unsafe conduct stop.

——

And there was another layer of irony

The email to Chris Minns forwarded an email I had sent the previous evening, 20 August 2022, to Professor Hayden Ramsay, then Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Ethics at my university.

I had deliberately invoked the Broderick Review there too.

That matters because I wasn’t merely complaining about individual behaviour.

I was asking a question about institutional ethics.

• What does an organisation’s commitment to dignity, safety, ethics and human worth actually mean when one of its own staff members says she is being harmed?

• What does leadership mean when the complaint is difficult?

• What does duty of care look like when somebody has already become psychologically injured caused by the employer’s retaliation, not the initial WHS grievance?

• And what does accountability mean when the systems designed to resolve the problem become part of the person’s experience of harm?

Those questions were consuming me.

——

Parliament eventually acknowledged the harm of not getting this right

On 15 November 2022, NSW Parliament delivered its formal Statement of Acknowledgement following the Broderick Review.

It apologised to people who had experienced bullying, sexual harassment or sexual misconduct within parliamentary workplaces. It acknowledged the pain, mental stress and anguish caused by harmful workplace behaviour, as well as its lasting impact.

And it acknowledged something else:

how hard it is to speak up. 

Because speaking up isn’t the end of an institution’s responsibility.

It’s the beginning of it.

The responsibility then shifts towards the people who receive the disclosure, complaint or request for help.

• Will they listen?

• Will they investigate appropriately?

• Will they protect the person from further harm?

• Will they ensure there is no retribution?

• Will they respond promptly?

• Will leadership take responsibility?

• Will anybody actually act?

I was already living those questions when the Broderick Review was released.

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This email is part of the contemporaneous record

I look back at my email of 21 August 2022 and see somebody who was utterly exhausted.

But I also see evidence.

Evidence that I was trying to communicate.

Evidence that I was asking political representatives to understand what was happening.

Evidence that I was connecting my experience to a much larger conversation NSW Parliament itself was having about workplace culture, leadership, power, reporting and accountability.

And evidence that I understood something then that I believe even more strongly now:

A safe workplace cannot be measured by the quality of its policies or the strength of its public statements. It has to be measured by what happens to a human being when they actually need those policies to protect them.

The Broderick Review was called Leading for Change.

For me, that title still carries a challenge far beyond the walls of NSW Parliament.

Leadership is not saying that people should speak up.

Leadership is what you do when they do.

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Document 448.

——

Reference

Parliament of New South Wales. Independent Review into bullying, harassment and sexual misconduct at the Parliament of NSW (the ‘Broderick report’). Reviews and Reports. The page provides access to the full Leading for Change report, the Parliamentary Executive Group’s response and the subsequent Statement of Acknowledgement. 

NSW Parliament — Reviews and Reports: Broderick Review⁠

https://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/about-parliament/corporate/reviews-and-reports

When Mission and Identity Will Not Answer the Question - August 2022

23–30 August 2022

By August 2022, I was no longer asking an abstract question about ACU’s mission and identity.

I was asking how that mission applied to me.

I’ve worked at ACU for approximately twenty years, living the values the university publicly professes: dignity of the human person, service, compassion, community, respect for others and the common good.

My family’s relationship with the university reaches back even further, to the late 1990s.

That history matters to me.

And yet, after everything that had happened since I first spoke up locally on 2 July 2019, I was still trying to find somebody — anybody — within the university who would answer a very basic question:

How does what has happened to me reconcile with ACU’s Catholic identity and mission?

That question became particularly confronting in August 2022.

——

I went directly to Mission

I found the university’s Communications Officer (Mission).

The ACU webpage preserved in my records described the Communications Officer (Mission) as the person to contact for comment about the university’s “Catholic identity and mission”, or for comment from areas including ACU Campus Ministry, EthicsFinder and ACU Community Engagement.

That seemed to be precisely where my questions belonged.

So I contacted her.

On 23 August 2022, I left a voice message on her phone. It was a voice message I recorded and sent, due to the creepy nature of all this conduct, and for self-preservation from further harm, like this incident: http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/02/when-safety-is-denied-at-threshold-may.html

I have that recorded message and I have retained the transcript of exactly what I said.

I also sent written communications. The records include the lengthy text message I sent to the Mission communications number. The screenshot preserved in my records shows that message marked “Read.”

I also know that my emails were being received and read.

I wasn’t throwing questions into the ether. I was trying to communicate directly with my university through a position specifically identified by ACU as a contact point for comment about its Catholic identity and mission.

And I was asking for answers.

——

Listen to what I was actually saying

The voice recording is difficult for me to revisit because even through the written transcript, the level of distress is unmistakable.

I spoke about my twenty years at ACU. I spoke about trying to live its mission and values through my work and through the way I supported other people.

I spoke about what had happened after I asked for discrimination, harassment, bullying and privacy violations to stop.

I spoke about my father’s suicide and the impact upon my family.

I spoke about the loss of my financial security.

I spoke about isolation and ostracism.

I spoke about my attempts to get back to my work.

I spoke about workers compensation and the Injury Management Plan.

I spoke about being frightened.

And I kept coming back to the same question:

“So you tell me how all this relates to the mission and to the identity, and ethics and everything that is being promoted, because I lived that.”

That wasn’t a rhetorical flourish.

I wanted an answer, because this had begun with something so much smaller than everything it eventually became.

I had asked for a few agreed boundaries so that I could have a psychosocially safe working environment.

That was it.

I hadn’t asked for my life to become consumed by an institutional battle.

I hadn’t asked to become isolated from my workplace, my colleagues and the support network that should have been part of my recovery.

I hadn’t asked for my family to become caught up in my workplace matter.

I hadn’t asked for their privacy to be implicated, or for members of my family to receive communications that I experienced as attempts to intimidate them into silence.

I hadn’t asked to spend years documenting what was happening because documentation had become one of the few protections I felt I had left.

I had asked for safety.

And this is where the question of dignity becomes impossible for me to separate from everything that followed.

——

The dignity of the human person

My own relationship with ACU extends across approximately twenty years of service, and my family’s relationship with the university reaches back even further, to the late 1990s.

That history matters to me.

It makes what followed - including the involvement of my family in a workplace matter that was mine - all the more difficult to comprehend through the lens of the dignity of the human person.

This isn’t an abstract phrase to me.

It’s not something that belongs only in a mission statement.

It has to mean something in the treatment of an actual human being.

It has to mean something when that human being becomes vulnerable.

It has to mean something when an employee says: I am frightened.

It has to mean something when she says: I need this conduct to stop.

It has to mean something when she asks for a safe work environment.

It has to mean something when her family is drawn into something that began as her workplace matter.

And it has to mean something when the person asking the question has given approximately twenty years of her working life to the institution.

That’s why I keep returning to Mission and Identity.

How is any of this reconciled with the dignity of the human person?

Not as an abstract Catholic principle.

Not as words on a university website.

As something that must mean something in the treatment of an actual human being.

——

The contradiction 

This wasn’t just any employer.

ACU is a nationally registered, publicly funded Australian university. It operates across Australia and has a presence in Rome.

It publicly identifies itself through an explicitly Catholic mission and identity.

That makes the question of institutional conduct more important.

• What does dignity of the human person require when an employee says she’s being harmed?

• What does the common good mean when a staff member repeatedly asks for a psychosocially safe workplace?

• What does community engagement mean when an employee and members of her family experience the institution very differently, under current leadership, from the values being publicly communicated?

• What does compassion mean when somebody is telling you that she’s frightened?

• What does ethics mean if policies and values exist beautifully on websites and in public communications, but the person asking how those principles apply to her, cannot obtain an answer?

• And what does Catholic Identity mean if the difficult questions about institutional conduct are the questions nobody wants to answer?

They require answers.

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“Polished words on paper mean nothing to people”

A week later, on 30 August 2022, I wrote again.

My email again asked how what I was experiencing, could be reconciled with the university’s:

“mission, values, ethos, community engagement, code of conduct and compliance of Australian laws”

By then, I was explicitly connecting what had happened to me with the broader public conversation about mental health and mentally healthy workplaces.

I wrote:

“Polished words on paper mean nothing to people.”

This captures the problem for me.

An institution can have excellent policies.

It can publish beautiful statements about dignity.

It can speak about compassion, wellbeing, inclusion, ethics, social justice and the common good.

It can employ people specifically to communicate its mission.

But eventually those principles have to encounter an actual human being.

They have to mean something when that human being is distressed, injured, frightened, persistent or asking questions the institution would rather not answer.

Otherwise, what do they mean?

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I can only speak for myself

There were broader concerns in my communications. I was beginning to ask questions about regulators, governments, workplace mental health and what appeared to me to be much larger systemic problems.

Those questions remain important.

But here I want to be careful.

I can speak for myself.

I can speak about what happened to me.

I can speak about the records I kept.

I can speak about the communications I sent.

I can speak about the voice message I left and recorded.

I can speak about the text messages.

I can speak about the emails.

I can speak about asking for help.

I can speak about asking for safety.

And I can speak about repeatedly asking how the conduct I was experiencing could possibly be reconciled with the values my employer professed.

The text message preserved in my records ends with words that are painful for me to read now:

“I’ve begged and begged and begged. No more indignity and exploitation of the human person.”

That was August 2022.

More than three years after I first asked for a safe work environment. 

——

So what’s the answer?

That is the question I am left with.

• What was the answer from Mission and Identity?

• How was what was happening to me consistent with the dignity of the human person?

• How was ignoring repeated requests for a safe work environment consistent with the common good?

• How was involving my family in something that began as my workplace matter consistent with respect for human dignity?

• How was my prolonged isolation from my workplace consistent with an institution professing community?

• How was the level of fear and distress I was communicating consistent with a commitment to wellbeing?

How could I be telling the university, repeatedly and in increasingly vulnerable language:

I am frightened.

I need support.

I want to get back to my work.

Please listen to me.

- while the public language of mission, compassion, dignity and mental health continued around me?

I wasn’t asking the Communications Officer (Mission) personally to resolve everything that had happened.

I was asking a question that the very purpose of that position made particularly important:

What does ACU’s mission require the institution to do when its own employee is telling it that the institution’s conduct towards her is causing profound harm?

And if what I documented was consistent with ACU’s mission and identity, then explain to me how.

If it was not consistent with that mission and identity, another question follows.

Why did nobody intervene?

I had asked for a few agreed boundaries for a psychosocially safe work environment.

Look at where it went from there.

That’s the question I was asking in August 2022.

And it is the question these records still leave unanswered.

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Document 460-462.