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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am.

Australia has a body that’s supposed to look after all of our mental health, and recommend how the government can make the situation better. It’s called the National Mental Health Commission.

But inside the commission, some of the staff that are supposed to be coming up with solutions have faced layoffs, stress, anxiety, and worse.

So how did a commission set up with the best intentions, turn into such a struggle for staff?

Today, senior reporter with The Saturday Paper Rick Morton, on the tour around Australia the commission spent its money on and the cost for workers.

It’s Wednesday April 19.

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RUBY:

Rick, you've been looking at some concerning things that have been happening at the Mental Health Commission, which is this agency that is responsible for advising the government on mental health. Tell me, though, how you got started on this story.

RICK:

The best way possible. I got a little tip off in my email account where a few staff members, current and former, at the National Mental Health Commission had got together and decided that something finally needed to be done about some concerns that they had been trying to raise internally and through the right processes. But as usual, in the kind of reporting that I do, I'm always the last resort. It's like, well, let's try and get some outside eyes on this, which is kind of how I came across it. Having said that, I wasn't overly familiar with what the National Mental Health Commission did at the time. I knew it existed. I knew there were commissioners, and that's about it. And it's part of the problem, actually, as it turns out, because that commission was actually established by Mark Butler in 2012.

Archival tape – Mark Butler:

“I thought I'd just give you a bit of background about why we established the Commission, and why we established the report card.”

RICK:

When Labor was last in government and he was last Health minister.

Archival tape – Mark Butler:

“What we wanted was the capacity to track, year by year, in a meaningful way, how things were going. We wanted the capacity of an independent organisation, like the Mental Health Commission, to bring profile to the issue of mental health…”

RICK:

And its purpose at the time was really clear, which was to use evidence, research and analytics to advise governments on what policy interventions work and hold them accountable.

Archival tape – Mark Butler:

“So I think that this was a good idea that frankly has already, in its first year, made a difference.”

RICK:

Unfortunately, some of the concerns that were raised with me and what I subsequently found in a lot more interviews with a lot more staff, is that that has not been the reality, particularly over the last few years. And all up, I think I spoke to 15 current and former employees at all levels of the agency who painted this really troubling picture of what has been happening at the commission. And it became clear that there was a culture of dysfunction, alleged bullying and psychological harm at the commission.

RUBY:

Okay. So these concerns that these staff members wanted to raise with you, Rick, around bullying and dysfunction at the commission, where do they begin and what does this all go back to?

RICK:

So I mean, in some retellings of this, the commission never really did what it was meant to do. Because it started off small, it was always a small agency and it just attracted a lot of really smart and good people, but it just didn't have the cut through that it needed. But then in 2019, there’s new leadership. So, Christine Morgan is appointed, from the Butterfly Foundation where she was there for a decade, I think, doing work on eating disorders, as the CEO of the Butterfly Foundation. And Greg Hunt, the health minister, appointed her to the CEO position at the National Mental Health Commission. So there's a changing of the guard, and this is in March 2019.

Archival tape – Lisa Millar:

“Joining us now from Brisbane is the National Mental Health Commission CEO, Christine Morgan. Good morning Christine, welcome to breakfast.”

Archival tape – Christine Morgan:

“Good morning Lisa.”

RICK:

And, you know, by all accounts, Christine Morgan was a really good advocate.

Archival tape – Christine Morgan:

“I think the most important thing is to keep holding on to the fact that our mental health is just part of who we are as human beings and we actually have to take care of it.”

RICK:

But then Christine brings her people with her. So she brings, you know, people that she's worked with before, Jenny Muir, who was at Primary Communications at the time, which is a publicity firm. So Jenny comes across as her principal advisor, and then there's a few other people that she's worked with that she brings into the executive at this really small agency.

Not long after her appointment, Christine Morgan actually gave one of her first big interviews to the Bible Society Australia's publication, Eternity News. It's a Christian news outlet, quite avowedly so, and it revealed her thinking about mental health and wellbeing. So she was telling that organisation in terms of spirituality, it's really interesting as I travel the country and consult with communities, particularly our indigenous communities, I know that that's pretty problematic language, about mental health and wellbeing. She said there is a strong call for recognition that as human beings we have a visible component, we have a mental health component and we have a spiritual component, whatever that may mean for people.

And Christine Morgan mentioned travelling the country in that interview because that was actually the first time they did this nationwide tour called Connections, that was meant to introduce her to the mental health sector so that she could get her own feet on the ground and hear what people around the country are thinking. But then that national tour morphed into something completely different.

And it was actually this tour that became one of the emblems of dysfunction at the agency.

RUBY:

Okay, well, let's speak more about this nationwide tour then, Rick. Tell me a bit more about where it went and what it revealed about the way that the commission was operating.

RICK:

Yeah. So the 2019 Connections tour, it is the first one, it introduces Christine to the sector. You can make an argument about why that's necessary. She just got the job. She wants to meet people on the ground here for herself. They wanted to make it something that happens every two years. But of course, then Covid got in the way. So there was a 2022 tour, which is the next big national tour, the Connections 2022 tour. Now, as part of that tour, which is much bigger, by the way, it's on Broadway this time. It's not off Broadway like 2019. It's bigger, it's bolder. It goes to more places like 40 different communities around the country, in every state and territory. And it's run, essentially, by her principal adviser, Jenny Muir, and a bunch of communications companies. And Jenny and Christine Morgan flew business class and stayed at top tier hotels, all the way around the country. And it generated $535,000 contract, more than half a million dollars, in fees for Primary Communication, which is a private company where Jenny Muir served as chief counsel and worked for a very long time, just before joining the National Mental Health Commission in 2020. I'm not suggesting anything improper in the awarding of this contract, but it did show that there was a lot of comms work being done, and because they weren't the only one to get a contract, there was also a $700,000 events management contract to Social Deck, which is another private company, to run the Connections 2022 tour, which reached just 1500 people. 1500 people, through these, you know, roundtables and community conversations that took place. And they were often, you know, each individual roundtables, frequently really poorly attended. And in some cases the number of staff outnumbered, the number of people from the community who actually attended those events,

So, you know, there was this one well, there's a few of these, actually, but there's one in particular. One example of a roundtable that they hosted in August last year in Palm Island. And there were just two people at it from the community. And in the notes prepared later, this is their official kind of record of who they reached on their connections tour. Their notes of these two attendees, they wrote that it was predominantly First Nations. Which is, I would suggest, a mathematical impossibility. It’s either half or fully, of just two people. So, it kind of gives a really good example, I think, of what a lot of people were telling me, which was that this tour was so badly run that policy people at the commission were essentially sidelined and had nothing to do with it until after the fact. And some people just said to me, you know, it was a photo opportunity and they didn't even have the courtesy to check, you know, cultural protocols. And then after the fact, they spent another $136,000 to Orima Research, as one staff member put it to me, to try and retrospectively justify what they'd heard, but to turn it into something usable in terms of data. But they were using junk data from these really poorly attended sessions to justify when, as a staff member told me, they should have just dropped it, you know, cut their losses and moved on.

RUBY:

So it sounds like there are serious problems with the effectiveness of this tour, Rick. But I just want to come back to the contract. The contract that's worth around half a million dollars that the commission awarded to a company that had connections to a senior staff member. How unusual is a decision like that? And have there been any concerns raised about the decision to award that contract?

RICK:

So, I mean, yes, there have been concerns raised internally. Multiple times, actually. In particular, I know that there has been a public interest disclosure made about the awarding of that contract. Now, a public interest disclosure is a very specific mechanism for public officials to report serious wrongdoing that could result in harm either to taxpayer funding or to people themselves as a result. So it's a very specific mechanism and it's very serious. And I know that that is still being investigated separately. Now, there were other allegations. In fact, Christine Morgan, the CEO of the National Mental Health Commission, told staff in December last year that the secretary of the Department of Health, Brendan Murphy, had received an anonymous tip. Allegations of fraud and corruption at the National Mental Health Commission, which included governance issues around procurement of contracts, around financial irregularities with spending and expenses, but also generally, you know, strategic issues as well.

But Morgan told staff at the time that Brennan had already ordered an investigation into this stuff and had been finalised and they couldn't find any evidence of any wrongdoing.

But in a statement to me when I raised those allegations and more, I must say, about workplace bullying and incidents, not to put too fine a point on it, the Health Minister, Mark Butler, his office, said they were taking it very seriously. They take all allegations like this, in any part of health, very seriously and that he had launched an investigation In the wake of my reporting.

RUBY:

We'll be back in a moment.

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RUBY:

Rick, can we speak a bit more about your reporting, because you've been speaking to many current and former employees of the Mental Health Commission. And it's pretty extraordinary that they're choosing to speak out at this point in time. It really indicates that, you know, they've reached kind of the end of the line, perhaps in trying to sort things out internally. Can you tell me a bit more about any further allegations that they've made and the impact that all of this is having on them?

RICK:

Yeah, I mean, this is really the tough stuff because, you know, I've written about other organisations in the past where they, it's hard to put into words, but the employees feel like, you know, they've been witnessing things happening and they've been told that they're just making too much of it or that it's not really happening or that their concerns are invalid. And we're talking about seriously, you know, concerns about strategic directions. But beyond that, there were the issues that they thought they were saying, which was in terms of those contracts being awarded, the financial irregularities, really expensive lavish dinners being hosted by the executive and the advisory board, which was not just a lot of money, but more than would be normal elsewhere in the public service, according to some staff reports.

So these things start to get to staff and they've tried to raise matters internally. You know, this year alone, four staff, including very senior people, have taken stress leave. And this is an agency with just 42 staff members, by the way. And this month the commission sacked a quarter of its workforce. Ten people were just terminated because they ran out of money, which is highly unusual. You know, I was told that they were operating a budget deficit because they just spent everything on the Connections tour.

And another senior employee told me that the commission is currently operating in breach of these new workplace laws, which essentially require people in positions of power to have a positive legal obligation to do something if their organisation is operating in a way that makes staff psychologically unsafe. So a positive legal obligation means you can't just look after the fact and say we should have done something. It means you have to act. If you know something is harming someone, you have to do something about it. So this person took that very seriously because they thought that that was the case.

I was also told by many people that I spoke to that at least two employees had developed suicidal ideation linked directly to the demands placed on them by this fractured workplace, which was a term used by the executive in a correspondence with them. And if you just look at the data for the 2021 Australian Public Service employee census, which is an official report within government, used to measure how agencies and departments are doing their work and in treating their staff. The National Mental Health Commission ranked 99 out of 101 agencies on staff wellbeing. It came in just ahead of the Department of Home Affairs, which actually sort of makes sense. But the National Mental Health Commission, faring so poorly does not make any sense at all. In fact, it's darkly ironic for a lot of the people who spoke to me about it.

RUBY:

Yeah, because this kind of thing, I mean, it would be distressing no matter what workplace it happened in. But it is particularly distressing to think about it happening at the place that's supposed to be expert in mental health, the place that advises the federal government on good mental health. And yet it has employees with some of the worst mental health in the entire public service.

RICK:

It's a really bad look, and it goes beyond that. They've been funded by the Commonwealth Government to lead the National Mentally Healthy Workplace Alliance. That's a $12 million piece of work, with a whole team internally, which is meant to guide other workplaces and employers around the country on how to be best practice in treating your staff well to make sure they've got the mentally healthy. And this agency can't even be its own light bearer when it comes to that stuff, how the hell are they meant to advise anyone else without being accused of hypocrisy? For a start, and there's an open question about whether they even understand what a mentally healthy workplace looks like, because certainly in practice that's not the case.

RUBY:

And Rick, you said that Mark Butler, who is the Health Minister and the person who actually set this commission up in the first place more than a decade ago, he is now investigating what's going on at the Commission and the conduct that you've uncovered. Can you tell me more about that, about what's likely to happen next and what you think the future is for the commission and for the CEO?

RICK:

Yeah, it's interesting you ask that question, actually, because literally just a few minutes before I came in to have a chat to you guys, the staff at the National Mental Health Commission were being told that Christine Morgan has stepped aside as the commission's CEO while this investigation, commissioned by Mark Butler, the health minister, is underway. It's expected to take around three months.

So I must admit I'm pretty unfamiliar, in the last decade of writing about these kinds of issues, in having such a swift response. Usually not much changes and certainly not much changes quickly. So it's going to be very interesting to see what actually comes out of this, because it seems like staff are being taken seriously, their concerns are being taken seriously. It doesn't look like it's a whitewash, like some of the investigations, or at least how staff feel some of the investigations, in the past have been handled.

So, what I'm intrigued by now is the fact that in the staff briefing this morning, I haven't had a chance to make any of my own phone calls directly about this yet, so my understanding may change. But it feels like it's now being referred to as a review as well as an investigation, which might seem like semantics, right? Except that there are really critical questions around the broad function of the National Mental Health Commission and whether it can even survive this, which is where a review might indicate that the Health Minister is interested in whether it's actually serving its functions, no matter who's in charge, and whether it needs to be redesigned, rebuilt or completely burnt to the ground with something new to take its place.

RUBY:

Rick, thank you so much for your time.

RICK:

Thanks for having me, as always.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today…

Jacinta Price has been appointed Shadow minister for Indigenous Australians, in just one of several cabinet reshuffles announced by Opposition leader Peter Dutton.

Senator Kerrynne Liddle will be the new assistant minister for child protection and family violence, while Michaelia Cash will be Shadow Attorney-General.

In a surprise announcement, former Home Affairs Minister, Karen Andrews, also resigned from the Coalition frontbench.

And,

NDIS Minister, Bill Shorten, says the system he presides over is ‘stressful, debilitating’ and ‘nonsensical’.

In an address to the National Press Club, Shorten unveiled a reboot to the NDIS, including a crackdown on unethical practices from service providers.

Shorten revealed that the NDIS taskforce is currently investigating three hundred million dollars worth of fraud.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See you tomorrow.

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