I Asked for Boundaries - The Code Calls That Courage

I was not trying to be brave.

I was burned out.

I asked for role clarity.

I asked for a realistic workload.

I asked for reasonable boundaries.

I asked for a safe and sustainable work environment.

That was all.

Under the Staff Code of Conduct, Courage is defined as “acting ethically and professionally in spite of known fears, risks and uncertainty.”  

What the Code does not say — but lived experience reveals — is that sometimes the act requiring courage is not whistleblowing or dramatic disclosure.

Sometimes it is simply saying:

“This workload is not safe.”

“This role is unclear.”

“This behaviour is harming me.”

I knew the culture. I feared retaliation, not because I was doing anything wrong — but because I had seen what happened to those who challenged dysfunction.

When a local Associate Director acted incompetently and without consultation, I was thrust into escalating instability. Decisions were made that affected my work, my reputation, and my wellbeing — without transparency or procedural fairness.

I did what any reasonable employee is told to do:

I followed the proper channels.

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Acting Despite Fear

The Courage section requires staff to act ethically and professionally despite fear and uncertainty.  

I did not disengage.

I did not behave unprofessionally.

I did not bypass process.

I documented concerns.

I sought clarification.

That is what facing challenges and difficult issues looks like in practice.  

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Raising Concerns Responsibly

Courage includes “having the strength to raise potential unethical behaviours” and to report concerns appropriately.  

Excessive workload.

Role ambiguity.

Instability created without consultation.

These are not personal weaknesses. They are recognised psychosocial hazards.

Asking for a realistic workload is not defiance.

Requesting boundaries is not misconduct.

Seeking clarity is not insubordination.

It is professional responsibility.

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The Obligation on Leadership

The Code makes clear that Courage also requires those in authority to:

• be open to receiving information

• take reasonable steps to respond appropriately

• make well-considered and justifiable decisions

• ensure fairness and dignity, especially where adverse effects may result  

These are obligations.

Instead of openness, there was defensiveness. Instead of proportionate response, there was obstruction. Instead of safeguarding health, there was escalation of harm.

When raising workload and safety concerns results in reputational framing or increased instability, the Courage obligations have not been met.

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WHS Context: Realistic Workload Is a Safety Issue

Under the Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (NSW), employers have a primary duty to ensure, so far as reasonably practicable, the health and safety of workers — including psychological health.

Psychosocial hazards include:

• excessive or unrealistic workload

• role ambiguity

• lack of consultation

• poor organisational justice

• misuse of positional power

A realistic workload is not a luxury. It is a safety control.

When an employee identifies workload as unsustainable, the appropriate response is risk assessment and mitigation — not silence, obstruction, or adverse treatment.

Fear of retaliation following safety concerns is itself a red flag in any WHS-compliant system.

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What More Could I Have Done?

The Code required me to:

• act ethically

• raise concerns appropriately

• face challenges professionally

• attempt resolution 

I did.

The Code required leadership to:

• respond openly

• exercise positional power properly

• treat staff with dignity

• make justifiable decisions where impacts were foreseeable  

That did not occur.

The question “What more could I have done?” is often what conscientious workers ask when systems fail them.

But the Code does not require silence in the face of harm.

WHS law does not require workers to absorb unsafe workload or psychological risk to protect hierarchy.

At some point, responsibility shifts:

Not to the exhausted employee asking for realistic workload and boundaries — but to those entrusted with authority.

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Courage, Properly Understood

My courage was not dramatic.

It was:

• asking for a realistic workload despite fear

• requesting boundaries in a toxic culture

• following process while under strain

• remaining professional while instability escalated

That conduct aligns with the Courage section of the Staff Code of Conduct.  

The response I received did not. 

And that is where the real divergence lies.

Video

NOTE: Incivility can be covert, not only overt. 

Why being respectful to your coworkers is good for business by Christine Porath

When Safety Is Denied at the Threshold - May 2021

"If evil people unite to do evil, then all the more should good people unite to do good. If the strength of bad people is that they are together, then good people must do the same to become a force." Leo Tolstoy.

I wanted to attend the Commemoration Service of the Rwandan Genocide on my own campus.

This was a weekend event, not a workday obligation.

It was a moment of remembrance, community, and moral witness.

For more than two decades, since 2001, this campus had been a place where I felt safe to work, to serve, to belong. The Rwandan community are my friends. The campus ministry was going to be present. Under ordinary circumstances, this would have been a place of pastoral care and collective dignity.

But by late May 2021, nothing about my circumstances was ordinary.

By then, I was too traumatised and too unsafe to step foot on public university grounds alone.

When Support Becomes a Barrier

Because I feared further interception, obstruction, or misuse of my communications, I could not safely contact campus ministry myself. My emails had already been blocked. My attempts to seek pastoral care—care that exists precisely for moments like this—had been treated as threats rather than cries for help.

So I asked a trusted friend to act on my behalf.

This was about immediate emotional safety.

My friend had already encountered hostility when she contacted the WHS manager to raise concerns about their legal obligations. Despite this, she agreed to call again—this time to the Dean of the Strathfield campus, someone I had respectfully served, supported, and worked alongside for many years. I had supported her academic work, her teaching, her research, her professional aspirations. This was not a stranger.

A Dean of Campus holds WHS responsibilities.

That duty does not disappear when a worker becomes inconvenient.

On 27 May 2021, my friend called. She introduced herself. She explained she was calling about me—because I needed reassurance that I would be supported if I attended the commemoration.

The response was silence.

When my friend said, “you do know her,” the reply came slowly: “yes.”

When she said, “I just need to talk about Vicki,” she was cut off.

“No, thank you. Goodbye.”

She tried again.

“This is very important.”

“No, thank you. Goodbye.”

The call was placed on hold and then terminated.

No conversation.

No inquiry.

No duty of care.

Immediately after the call was terminated, my friend received a call back from a private number.

There were three separate attempts to call her.

She did not answer.

No voicemail was left.

This detail matters, because it did not occur in isolation.

By this point, my communications had already been blocked. Third parties attempting to raise WHS concerns on my behalf had already been met with hostility. The sudden appearance of a concealed number, immediately following a refusal to engage, formed part of what would become a repeated pattern of behaviour.

We both suspected who it was likely to be.

At the time, the national manager of employment relations and safety knew—or ought reasonably to have known—that what was occurring was reckless, unlawful, and placing me at serious risk of harm. The use of a hidden number, rather than transparent and documented communication, only intensified the sense of coercive control and intimidation already surrounding my attempts to seek safety and support.

The Immediate Physical Consequence

When my friend told me what had happened, my body reacted before my mind could catch up.

The shock triggered a sudden and severe spike in blood pressure.

I suffered a nosebleed.

I began hyperventilating.

Blood pooled in my throat and I started choking.

I am medicated for hypertension because of prolonged stress caused by workplace harm. This was not an abstract reaction. It was acute physiological collapse.

My friend stayed on the phone, trying to keep me conscious and calm. She very nearly called an ambulance.

Had she done so, she would have been forced to expose herself to serious health risks at the height of COVID—despite living with a white blood cell disorder and other conditions that made such exposure dangerous.

This is how far the harm had spread.

The university’s failure to meet its WHS obligations did not only endanger me.

It began endangering those trying to keep me alive.

“I’m Dying”

The next morning, I wrote an email to a friend and colleague I did not want to write.

Everything that follows was written in real time—not as reflection or rhetoric, but as documentation of what my body and mind were enduring after the shock of the night before.

“I got a severe nose bleed from the shock and nearly choked on blood last night… Everyone’s silence and incivility is killing me.”

But that was only part of what I documented at the time. In the same period, I described the broader psychological reality of what was being inflicted:

“This psychological thriller has been more surreal than my dad’s sudden shock of suicide. As we say, ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’ And I add that university staff have become experts at doing nothing.

Worse than government departments.

What did I ever do to become such a threat to this individual? I suspect the answer is I didn’t die or go away destroyed. But the staff bystanders are now succeeding. I assume it’s because if someone agrees to have a cuppa and I tell them what I’ve been put through, it might cause compassion and empathy and support for weeding out the toxic behaviour, and making it a university with integrity again.

So the goal is that I (Vicki) must die. Well everyone ignoring my plea for support will do that. But no one can disagree that I haven’t fought, on my own, to the very end. But everyone doing nothing—no duty of care and support—it’s the staff, who could’ve been in my shoes, that will succeed in the executive goal of negligence and serious offences to destroy me.”

These were contemporaneous descriptions of lived reality under coercive control, mobbing, and institutional abandonment.

At the time, the national manager responsible for employment relations and safety was actively engaged in conduct that escalated harm rather than preventing it. The Vice-Chancellor, as the senior officer with ultimate WHS accountability, authorised a system that allowed this to continue unchecked.

This was not an isolated failure.

It was a culture.

What This Says About Governance

A public university has non-delegable WHS obligations.

Pastoral care does not require permission.

Human dignity is not conditional on compliance.

Yet in this moment—when I was trying to attend a genocide commemoration with support—I was treated as a problem to be shut down, silenced, and ignored.

The result was medical crisis.

The result was terror.

The result was the near-involvement of emergency services.

This is what reckless endangerment looks like in practice.

Not dramatic language.

Not hindsight embellishment.

But documented harm, contemporaneously recorded, witnessed, and survived.

Why I Am Writing This Now

I am sharing this because formal processes did not stop the harm.

I am sharing this because silence nearly killed me.

I am sharing this because WHS failures do not stay contained—they radiate outward, endangering families, friends, and communities.

And I am sharing this because remembrance events are meant to affirm our shared humanity—not become the setting where institutional cruelty is most starkly revealed.

No one should have to choose between dignity and survival.

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If this brings up anything heavy for you, please pause, breathe, and take care of yourself—dignity includes care for your own nervous system.

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Document 172.

No Duty of Care

Further reading 

Brown, M.E. and Mitchell, M.S. (2010). ‘Ethical and Unethical Leadership: Exploring New Avenues for Future Research.’ Business Ethics Quarterly. 20(4):583-616. DOI:10.5840/beq201020439 

[Online approved OA version]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/298852866_Ethical_and_Unethical_Leadership_Exploring_New_Avenues_for_Future_Research

Duffy, C. (2025, 19 September). ‘Senate inquiry calls for cap to vice chancellor pay as chair lashes 'rotten culture' hurting university staff and students.’ ABC News. [Online]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-19/senate-inquiry-interim-report-university-governance/105795694

What the NTEU decided to do vs what it ethically should have done - May 2021

“Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.” Thomas Jefferson. 

I had joined the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) in good faith.

I did so while navigating workplace bullying, harassment, and an active workers’ compensation claim. I joined because unions exist to protect workers when power is misused—especially when someone is already injured, frightened, and financially exposed.

What followed instead was silence, obstruction, and conduct that compounded harm.

The Moment I Was Shut Out

In March 2021, while I was still a financial member of the NTEU, my attempt to email my union representative via their official @nteu.org.au address was blocked.

Not ignored.

Not delayed.

Technically blocked.

I received an automated server rejection stating “Access denied.”

At the time, I was already experiencing serious distress and fear. I had credible concerns about workplace surveillance and retaliation. Being blocked from contacting my own union—without warning, explanation, or due process—was terrifying.

It signalled something far worse than neglect: active exclusion.

What the Union Failed to Do

Under workers’ compensation law, an injured employee is entitled to protection from further harm, wage theft, and harassment.

Yet during my membership:

• Wage payments and leave entitlements continued to be withheld

• Harassment persisted under the cover of “process”

• I was left to navigate workers’ compensation law alone

• No clear advice or advocacy was provided

• No explanation was given about what the union would or would not do

This failure was not neutral.

It enabled harm.

While this was happening, the NTEU continued to deduct my membership fees—adding insult to serious injury—at a time when I was in acute financial hardship and struggling to keep a roof over my head.

What the NTEU Says It Provides — and What I Experienced

What follows is a direct comparison between the NTEU’s own published policies and my lived experience as a financial member.

Industrial Assistance to Members

The NTEU states in its policy manual:

“NTEU provides industrial assistance to individual members with workplace issues via the provision of advice and support through the Elected Officers and staff of the Union. Industrial assistance will generally be in the form of verbal and written advice, support and representation at workplace meetings…”

As a member dealing with workplace bullying, harassment, and an active workers’ compensation claim, I repeatedly sought this advice and support.

Instead, I was blocked from contacting my union representative, received no meaningful advice—verbal or written—and was left to navigate complex industrial and compensation processes entirely on my own.

This was not a limitation of assistance.

It was no assistance at all.

Union Support and Protection

The NTEU publicly assures members:

“Should you ever get into trouble at work, union membership means that there is someone there to help and provide you with knowledgeable and professional advice… Being part of a union helps to protect your rights at work and to access advice and support from experts and workplace delegates.”

I was “in trouble at work” in the most literal sense: injured, under workers’ compensation, experiencing ongoing harm, and in serious financial distress.

There was no protection.

There was no expert advice.

There was no one “there to help”.

Access to Representatives and Communication

The NTEU instructs members to contact their local branch and workplace representatives when issues arise:

“Being a member of NTEU means that you can seek advice on industrial or legal issues that relate to your employment… contact your local NTEU branch and get in touch with your workplace representatives.”

This language assumes that communication channels are open and available to members.

In my case, they were not.

In March 2021, while still a financial member, my attempt to email a union representative via an official @nteu.org.au address was rejected with an “Access denied” server response. No explanation was provided. No alternative pathway was offered. No policy basis was cited.

I was not just unheard.

I was locked out.

Code of Conduct and Respectful Engagement

The NTEU’s Code of Conduct states:

“NTEU expects our workplaces and activities to be respectful safe places where staff, officers and members are not subjected to inappropriate behaviour… The Code of Conduct is binding on members and staff.”

As a member raising serious concerns about harm, safety, and rights, I expected respectful engagement and a clear complaint pathway.

What I experienced instead were unanswered questions, dismissive responses, and procedural silence—at a time when I was already vulnerable and distressed.

Respectful engagement did not occur, not from 2020, when I needed critical information about my workers’ compensation statutory entitlements, including my weekly payments, the employer’s legal obligation to provide a return to work plan aligned to its injury management policy and the legally binding injury management plan agreement and protection measures to stop the continual stalking and harassment from the primary cause of my claim, the national manager of employment relations and SAFETY. 

A safe process did not exist in practice.

The Questions I Asked — That Went Unanswered

When it became clear I was receiving no service, I demanded answers. Among the questions I formally put to the NTEU were:

• Why was I never properly oriented about what support the union provides and how it works, despite repeatedly asking for a meeting?

• Does the NTEU provide advice and advocacy regarding workers’ compensation rights? If so, why was none provided to me?

• Why was no action taken for months after I supplied extensive evidence of bullying, harassment, and discrimination continuing under workers’ compensation regulations? 

• Why was I blocked from contacting a union representative through an official NTEU email address while still a member?

• Who authorised or enabled that block?

• Why were my concerns about harassment, privacy breaches, and ongoing harm met with silence?

• Why did the union continue to take my money while providing no service and allowing harm to continue?

I received no substantive reply to these questions.

Asking for a Refund — to Survive

Eventually, I asked for my membership to be cancelled and for my fees to be refunded—not as a gesture, but because I was in genuine financial hardship caused in part by the union’s inaction.

The response I received stated:

“Under our policy, you are not entitled to a refund. However, in acknowledgement of your current financial hardship your request has been reviewed and an out-of-policy refund has been authorised.”

The tone was unmistakable: arrogant, conditional, and self-congratulatory.

My response was simple and true:

“They had no issue breaching their own policies in my direction when it came to neglect, obstruction, and allowing harm to continue.

Why, then, was policy suddenly invoked as a shield?”

This was not a favour. It was the bare minimum—after the damage was done.

Nowhere Else to Go

I attempted to raise concerns externally with the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU).

I was directed straight back to the NTEU—the very organisation that had engaged in the conduct I was complaining about.

Another closed loop.

Another institutional shrug.

The Weight of Collective Betrayal

The sheer number of individuals and entities willing to unconscionably inflict harm on an innocent person—while invoking policy, process, or silence to justify it—is profoundly shameful.

Employers.

Insurers.

Regulators.

And yes—a union.

How Did I Survive This?

I survived because I had no choice.

Because I documented everything.

Because I refused to accept gaslighting as reality.

Because even when systems closed ranks, I held on to truth.

But survival is not the same as justice.

Why I Am Telling This Story

My story must be told—because accountability must follow.

Unions do not get a free pass simply because they speak the language of solidarity.

Protection must be real, not rhetorical.

And injured workers must never be abandoned, blocked, or quietly erased.

Silence is not neutral, and neither is policy when it is weaponised.

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This account is based on contemporaneous records, correspondence, and documented events during my NTEU membership.  Document 171.

Further reading 

Baker, A. (2024, 24 April). ‘5 Ways Toxic Leaders Retaliate via "Proper Channels".’ Psychology Today. [Online]: https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/beyond-cultural-competence/202311/5-ways-toxic-leaders-retaliate-via-proper-channels