My Story - My Voice

Monday, September 14, 2026

I Took My Questions to the University’s Governing Body - August 2022

23 August 2022

By August 2022, I was no longer asking only what had happened to me.

I was asking a much bigger question:

How could what had happened to me be reconciled with the policies, mission and values of the university itself?

On 23 August 2022, I wrote directly to the university’s governance email address. The subject line was simple:

“Questions I would like to ask my employer.”

My message was equally simple:

“Dear governing body,

Please find my questions I would like to ask in the attached document.”

What I attached was anything but simple.

It was a lengthy set of questions drawn from the university’s own Mission and Values and its own policies and procedures concerning workplace bullying, discrimination and harassment, work health and safety, staff complaints and dispute resolution.

I was no longer only describing how I felt. I was putting the university’s own words alongside what I had experienced and asking those responsible for governance to explain the difference.

——

How did this align with the mission?

I began with ACU’s Mission and Values.

My first question was:

“How do you, as an individual, live out the mission of ACU in your work?”

Then I asked the question at the heart of what I had been struggling to understand:

“How did the handling of this grievance align to the university’s mission on acting in truth and love, commitment to the dignity of the human person and the common good?”

I asked how my equity and wellbeing as a staff member had been demonstrated. I asked how the actions taken towards me represented the university community and its stated values.

ACU publicly spoke about the dignity of the human person, including physical, mental, social and spiritual wellbeing. Yet I had experienced isolation and exclusion at the very time when connection, pastoral care and human support mattered profoundly.

I specifically asked why I had been denied the opportunity to attend a staff spiritual retreat in mid-November 2019:

“Why was I isolated?”

That question was only four words.

But by August 2022, it carried years of experience behind it.

See http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2024/10/ostracism-as-adverse-action-2019.html

——

I had raised a bullying grievance. Why hadn’t the bullying procedures been followed?

I then worked through ACU’s Workplace Bullying Policy and Procedures.

I asked why those procedures hadn’t been followed when I first raised my serious grievance against my manager.

The university’s own policy defined bullying as repeated and unreasonable behaviour creating a risk to health, safety and wellbeing, including behaviour that intimidates, offends, degrades or humiliates.

I identified conduct I subsequently experienced from HR senior executives themselves at a whole new frightening level: intimidation, exclusion and isolation, undermining of responsibility, withholding information and threats or comments concerning job security.

Instead of experiencing the organisation’s policies as protection after speaking up, I experienced many of the very behaviours those policies were supposed to prevent.

I asked why my requests for an advocate or staff representative had been ignored.

And I quoted another provision that had become particularly significant to me:

“A person must not victimise or otherwise subject another person to detrimental action as a consequence of that person raising, providing information about, or otherwise being involved in the resolution of a complaint under this policy and procedure.”

That was precisely the issue I was trying to put before governance.

What happens when a staff member raises a complaint about bullying — and the institutional response itself is against policies and regulations, and becomes another source of harm?

See also http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2024/07/bullying-discrimination-and-harassment.html and http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2024/10/zero-complaints-management-process.html among many other posts as I tell my story, based on the contemporaneous records, that no regulator had ever cared to review, investigate, intervene and stop. I’m writing it from a human perspective so that I don’t have to repeat myself and continue reliving it. Readers can select any of the plethora of posts and read for themselves.

——

The policies said grievances should be handled differently

I also turned to ACU’s Supervisor’s Guide for Dealing with Discrimination, Harassment and Bullying.

The words in that document mattered.

It described discrimination, harassment and bullying as unlawful and not tolerated at ACU. It connected a safe, harmonious, respectful and inclusive workplace directly to the university’s Mission.

It spoke about duty of care.

It spoke about early intervention.

It spoke about managers addressing potential problems at the earliest opportunity.

And it set out principles for dealing with grievances: sensitivity, promptness, natural justice, support people, confidentiality, fairness, impartiality and protection from victimisation or reprisal.

I asked:

“Again, why was this not applied? These are HR’s policies, procedures and frameworks. Clearly written to guide all parties.”

There was another particularly important instruction in the university’s own guidance:

“Arrange to meet with the complainant at the earliest opportunity to clarify the grievance.”

That was painfully significant.

I had wanted to meet.

I had wanted to talk.

I had wanted the substance of my grievance heard - without the feeling of dishonesty, human degradation, lack of safety, privacy violations and intimidation in undocumented meetings with HR senior executives.

I referred to the meeting of 2 October 2019, writing that it had achieved nothing and that no notes had been taken. I had subsequently asked for another meeting and specifically asked that it be documented.

My question in August 2022 was therefore straightforward:

Why hadn’t that happened?

Sunday, September 13, 2026

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.