When Mission and Values Become Words: Asking Ethics and Pastoral Leaders to Listen - August 2022

20–21 August 2022

It’s devastating having to plead for humanity from an institution that publicly places human dignity, ethics, compassion and the common good at the centre of its identity.

By August 2022, I had been trying for more than three years to be heard.

I had first asked for support for a safe workplace on 2 July 2019. What followed, as documented throughout this series, wasn’t the restoration of safety I had asked for. I experienced an escalating cycle of aggressive adverse action, psychological injury, workers’ compensation failures, financial harm, ostracism and repeated attempts to find somebody — somewhere — who would listen.

By 20 August 2022, I wrote again to Professor Hayden Ramsay, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Ethics, whose portfolio encompassed the area in which I worked.

This was no longer simply a question for Human Resources.

It was a question for the ethical leadership of a Catholic university.

——

“If those that govern the university refuse to walk their talk…”

My email to Professor Ramsay on 20 August 2022 was headed:

“I am sharing my story publicly if the university leaders continue not to listen.”

I began by telling him that if the university continued to ignore its legal obligations, duty of care and serious compliance failures, I would tell my story publicly.

But underneath that warning was something much more fundamental.

I wanted somebody to listen.

I wrote:

“If those that govern the university refuse to walk their talk, it’s time for those not leading ethically, to step aside and let ethical leaders take over the governance of the university.”

And then:

“However, I don’t trust words. I trust action to align with words and missions and ethics and codes of conduct.”

This was the contradiction I could no longer reconcile.

I’ve spent approximately two decades working within the ACU community. My work sat within an institution that spoke of Catholic identity, mission, ethics, service, human dignity and the common good.

Yet when I was injured and desperately trying to preserve my employment, my dignity, my family and my capacity to recover, I experienced something profoundly different.

The question I was putting to the Deputy Vice-Chancellor responsible for Ethics was therefore very simple:

How was any of this compatible with the mission and values of the university?

——

This was personal in a way institutional correspondence cannot capture

There was another reason the events of August 2022 affected me so profoundly.

I had already lost my father to suicide.

That history was not an abstraction. It was part of my family’s lived experience and part of why public discussions about psychological safety, institutional cultures, mental health and suicide could be intensely triggering for me.

In my email to Professor Ramsay, I expressly connected what was happening around me with that history:

“I will be doing this in respectful memory of my dad who I lost to suicide…”

I wrote about people suppressing their struggles and pretending they were fine. I wrote that if institutions didn’t begin genuinely listening to lived experience, rather than simply repeating campaigns and slogans, the mental-health crisis would continue.

This wasn’t something I was observing from a comfortable distance.

I was writing while injured.

I was writing while frightened.

I was writing while trying to get somebody inside my own university community to understand what prolonged institutional abandonment was doing to me and to my family.

And I was telling them why it mattered.

——

I had already tried to reach Ethics

My email also recorded something that had caused me considerable distress: Professor Ramsay had blocked me on LinkedIn.

I told him directly:

“Your decision to block me on LinkedIn caused great distress and additional trauma.”

That needs to be understood in its context.

I was trying every avenue I could find to communicate.

I wasn’t writing to a random person outside the university. I was trying to reach a senior leader responsible for Ethics, within the organisational structure connected to my work.

I was explaining that something was terribly wrong.

Later in the email I asked the question that perhaps captures the entire period:

“I have a right to a voice in my own recovery. When is someone going to listen?”

That was the issue.

A voice.

My life, my employment, my health, my reputation, my professional capabilities, my finances and my family were being affected, while I was excluded and unable to participate meaningfully in decisions and narratives about me.

The serious inaccuracies and misrepresentations had become embedded in unethical and even undocumented processes affecting me, especially the misconduct coming from the national manager of employment relations and SAFETY, Rena Christmann, apparently doing so “on behalf of the university.” Did the current VC, Prof. Zlatko Skrbis, authorise this conduct? Whatever institutional account existed about me, I was demanding the opportunity to answer it with evidence.

That isn’t an unreasonable expectation.

It’s fundamental to DIGNITY.

——

Then I turned to Identity and Mission

The following day, 21 August 2022, I kept trying.

I emailed a staff member of Prof. Hayden Ramsay’s, after telephoning.

Again, my language shows how exhausted and distressed I had become:

“I have to protect my emotional safety from any more hypocrisy, lack of integrity, incivility and hostility, and everything that goes against ACU’s mission, community engagement, values, legal obligation for the safety and well-being of staff and community…”

I asked that Professor Ramsay start listening to my story.

I explained that I couldn’t simply keep repeating everything because doing so was itself traumatic:

“I can’t repeat my trauma again…”

Instead, I attached material.

I was trying to hand the evidence to someone who might finally look at it.

I also wrote about the damage to my family and asked the reader to contemplate the human reality:

“Imagine if it were you or your family, and you’d already lost a loved one to suicide.”

And at the end of that email I made the request again in the language of the institution itself:

“The university must stop the negligence this week and start supporting me respectfully and with dignity and compassion and integrity…”

——

Dignity. Compassion. Integrity.

I wasn’t borrowing those concepts for rhetorical effect.

They were precisely the principles a Catholic university should have been capable of recognising.

——

“Call me and support me as a friend”

Twenty-five minutes later on 21 August 2022, I forwarded the correspondence to a colleague and friend, someone I approached through the pastoral and Identity and Mission context.

This email is painful for me to read because it strips away almost everything except exhaustion and a request for human support.

I wrote:

“Call me and support me as a friend this week….”

And:

“I’m about to collapse from exhaustion because I haven’t stopped since I burnt out on 2 July 2019 and requested support for a safe work environment.”

Then came a sentence whose sarcasm reflected just how abandoned I felt:

“Thank you all so much for your concern and duty of care for my safety, health and well-being.”

I even pointed to the number of typographical errors in my correspondence as evidence of how exhausted I had become:

“And it’s obvious in the amount of typos below, how tired I am.”

I asked him, as someone with psychology, pastoral, academic and research experience, to read the material I had provided about workplace mobbing and its effects.

Again, I was trying to get somebody to understand.

Not somebody sitting outside ACU.

Someone within Identity and Mission.

Someone connected to the pastoral life of a Catholic university.

——

Where was the dignity of the human person?

That’s the question these emails leave me with.

What does an institutional commitment to the dignity of the human person mean when an employee is repeatedly telling the institution that she’s frightened, traumatised and exhausted?

What does the common good mean when somebody who has served an institution for approximately twenty years says that their unethical processes are causing profound harm to her and her family?

What does pastoral care mean if a person has to search through an institution for somebody willing simply to hear her?

What does ethics mean if the person asking ethical questions cannot obtain meaningful engagement?

And what does mission mean if it exists beautifully in institutional language but disappears at precisely the moment when living by it becomes difficult?

Those are not theological abstractions to me.

They became questions about survival, dignity, voice and accountability.

——

I live that mission too

There’s another part of this that has always hurt.

I align to ACU’s mission.

I believe in service.

I believe in community.

I believe in treating people with dignity.

I bring those principles into my work and into my life.

I spent years caring about colleagues, students, and the university community. Yet when I needed the institution to extend that same humanity towards me, I experienced myself as being treated increasingly as a problem to be managed rather than a human being to be heard. I was never the problem. 

See http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/01/quality-staff-and-university-leaders.html and http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/04/blocking-mobbing-and-truth-2020.html. 

And my family history made that abandonment even more serious.

The university did need to listen. It had an obligation to listen and act with integrity.

It needed to deal accurately and fairly with information.

It needed to take my reports about safety seriously.

It needed to ensure that processes affecting an injured worker (injury already caused by HR “on behalf of the university”), didn’t become an even greater source of harm.

And, at the absolute minimum, its treatment of a longstanding staff member should have been recognisable against the ethical principles it publicly professed.

——

“When is someone going to listen?”

Reading these emails, I can see somebody becoming increasingly desperate to find a functioning doorway into her own institution.

First Ethics.

Then another staff member.

Then Identity and Mission.

Then pastoral ministry.

Call someone.

Email someone.

Forward the evidence.

Explain it again.

Ask someone to read.

Ask someone to listen.

Ask someone to recognise the contradiction.

And underneath all of it was the same request I had been making since 2 July 2019:

I wanted to be safe in my workplace.

By August 2022, that simple request had become something almost unrecognisable.

The emails of 20 and 21 August 2022 are part of the documentary record of what I was telling ACU’s senior ethical and pastoral structures at the time. They record my distress, my warnings, my exhaustion and my repeated requests for intervention.

They also leave a question that extends far beyond my individual circumstances.

An institution’s values are easiest to proclaim when they cost nothing.

Their real meaning is revealed when somebody, rendered vulnerable by unwritten processes, requires the institution to live by those values.

In August 2022, I was asking senior leaders of ACU to do exactly that.

Not merely to speak about dignity.

To afford me mine.

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 447, 449-450.

Still Looking for Someone to Listen - August 2022

By late August 2022, I was still looking for someone to listen.

That sentence sounds simple. But by then, I had been trying for more than three years.

I had raised concerns internally. I had approached my union. I had approached workplace safety and workers’ compensation regulators. I had approached government representatives. I had provided records and evidence. I had continued writing, explaining and asking questions.

I was still trying to find someone prepared to stop, look at what had happened as a whole, and take it seriously.

And I was frightened.

——

Another Question I Needed Answered

In August 2022, another issue came to my attention concerning a staff appointment within the university library.

I questioned whether a person appointed to a senior librarian position held the university qualification ordinarily associated with professional librarian roles.

I didn’t know the answer.

That was why I was asking.

Had the person subsequently completed the necessary university studies? What qualifications were required for the position at the time of appointment? If those requirements hadn’t been met, who had authorised the appointment and on what basis?

These were valid questions.

But after everything that had happened since July 2019, I no longer had confidence that simply raising a concern internally would result in transparent scrutiny.

I wanted a legitimate and ethical external (NOT “independent”) examination.

Not assumptions. Not another closed loop of “internal” decision-making.

Someone genuinely “independent” and external to look.

——

I Was Still Trying to Find an Avenue

What stands out to me now is how hard I was still trying to use legitimate avenues.

I hadn’t walked away.

I hadn’t stopped asking questions.

I hadn’t stopped believing that somewhere within all these systems there must be somebody willing to examine the records.

But my confidence in those systems was disappearing.

I wrote that if university leaders didn’t begin taking their obligations seriously, I was considering speaking publicly about what had happened to me.

Even then, I was only making enquiries about how I might do that.

I was nervous about it.

This was my workplace. My career. My private life. My family. My grief. My finances.

Speaking about any of it outside the systems I had been relying upon wasn’t something I approached lightly. But I also had to speak up (actually, it felt more like screaming for help, to attract attention), to save my life from this relentless abuse of power targeting me. 

This was a serious WHS issue. And no one, with authority, had lifted a finger to keep me safe at work. What does that tell us?

What I wanted was simple:

I wanted someone with the responsibility and authority to listen.

——

This Had Become So Much Bigger than a WHS issue

By then, what I was trying to communicate could no longer be contained within the language of an ordinary workplace WHS issue.

I wrote about what had happened following my father’s suicide.

I wrote about stigma, grief and trauma.

I wrote about harassment and privacy.

I wrote about my leave entitlements and wellbeing.

I wrote about discrimination and bullying.

I wrote about the workers’ compensation process and statutory “failures” and the financial consequences that were accumulating around me.

I wrote about the impact on my family.

Everything was becoming connected.

The workplace situation had followed me out of the workplace and into my home, my finances, my relationships, my health and my sense of safety.

And still, nobody was looking at the whole picture.

——

“I Need Support, Kindness and Compassion From Somewhere”

There’s one sentence I wrote at the time that cuts through all of the institutional language:

“I need support, kindness and compassion from somewhere because I’m alone and frightened.”

That was where I was.

Not powerful.

Not strategic.

Not trying to create a public campaign.

Frightened.

I had been battling what was happening since July 2019, and I couldn’t understand how I could have approached so many organisations and still feel so completely alone.

I had approached my union - NTEU.

I had approached SIRA.

I had approached SafeWork NSW.

I had approached NSW Police.

I had approached my local state MP - Chris Minns.

I had continued trying to explain what had happened and why intervention was necessary.

Yet the lived outcome for me remained the same:

I didn’t feel safe.

I didn’t feel protected.

And I didn’t feel heard.

——

Policies vs. Safety

One of the things that had become increasingly difficult for me to comprehend was the difference between an organisation having policies and a worker actually being safe.

I had encountered:

• Policies.
• Procedures.
• Processes.
• Departments.
• Regulators.
• Correspondence.
• Administrative responses.

What I needed was for somebody to examine what was actually happening to me.

A policy cannot listen.

A procedure cannot notice when a human being is becoming overwhelmed by what’s happening around them.

A beautifully written commitment to workplace wellbeing means very little to the person asking for help if nobody’s prepared to examine whether that commitment is being honoured in practice.

For me, psychosocial safety wasn’t an abstract policy concept.

It was whether I could feel safe in the workplace where I had built my career.

It was whether I could raise concerns without fearing what would happen next.

It was whether someone would listen when I said something was wrong.

——

A Real-Life Psychological Thriller

I’ve described what I’m living through as:

“a real life psychological thriller”

That’s how disorienting it’s become.

The ordinary expectations I once had about institutions no longer seemed to apply.

Raise a workplace safety concern — expect it to be examined.

Provide records — expect somebody to read them.

Approach a regulator — expect regulation.

Approach a union — expect representation.

Say that you’re frightened and need help — expect somebody, somewhere, to respond with humanity.

Instead, I felt as though I kept moving from one institution to another without ever reaching the place where somebody would stop and look at the entirety of what had happened.

The more systems I entered, the more complicated everything became.

And somewhere inside all of those processes was a human being who simply needed to be heard.

——

What Happens When Someone Does Speak Up?

We hear constantly that people should speak up.

Ask for help.

Tell somebody.

Reach out.

But by August 2022, my experience had forced me to confront another side of that message.

What happens after somebody speaks?

What happens when they speak repeatedly?

What happens when they provide documents?

What happens when they approach the bodies they’ve been told exist to protect them?

What happens when they keep explaining that they’re frightened?

Speaking up only works if somebody is prepared to listen.

Where institutions have legal, professional or ethical responsibilities towards people, listening can’t simply mean acknowledging correspondence and moving it somewhere else.

At some point, somebody has to look.

——

The Fair Work Ombudsman Had My Evidence

By this stage, I had also provided extensive material to the Fair Work Ombudsman.

It was another attempt to find a legitimate avenue.

I wasn’t asking anyone simply to accept everything I said without scrutiny.

Quite the opposite.

I wanted scrutiny.

I wanted somebody independent to examine the records.

I wanted the chronology looked at.

I wanted decisions tested against obligations.

I wanted the questions I had been asking for years to receive answers based on evidence.

That’s what accountability meant to me.

——

Still Looking

By late August 2022, I was beginning to contemplate whether I might eventually have to tell my story beyond the institutions I had been approaching.

But that wasn’t where I had wanted to end up.

And it wasn’t the most important thing about this moment.

The important thing was how many places I had already tried.

I was still searching for a legitimate pathway.

Still providing evidence.

Still asking questions.

Still trying to preserve some belief that the systems around me could work if only the right person stopped long enough to look.

Underneath all the allegations, correspondence, regulators, policies and processes was something painfully ordinary.

I needed help.

I needed kindness.

I needed compassion.

And after more than three years of trying to speak, I was still looking for someone to listen.

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Document 446.