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RUBY:

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

Politicians write the laws that govern our behaviour in the workplace. But what happens when it’s their actions that are under scrutiny?

Recent scandals and allegations of workplace bullying have put the spotlight on the treatment of women in Parliament.

Today, chief political correspondent for The Saturday Paper, Karen Middleton, on the unique power dynamic between politicians and the people who work for them.

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Archival Tape -- Louise Milligan:

“Welcome to Four Corners. There’s a strong but unofficial tradition in federal politics, of what happens in Canberra, stays in Canberra…”

Archival Tape -- Louise Milligan:

“Rachelle Miller worked at Parliament house as an adviser to Liberal Party MPs and ministers for nine years. She believes it's time to blow the whistle.”

Archival Tape -- Rachelle Miller:

“What I’m trying to do by speaking to you is stand up for myself and say this isn’t okay, the behaviour wasn’t okay, and the culture’s not okay, and there should be something done about it.”

RUBY:

Karen, following those allegations that aired on Four Corners, former ministerial adviser Rachelle Miller lodged a complaint which alleged bullying and unfair treatment. So what do we know about that complaint?

KAREN:

We know that she lodged a complaint, well, she lodged two complaints really, last week that relate to two of her former employers: Alan Tudge, who's the minister with whom she had a consensual affair that she talked about on Four Corners and Michaelia Cash, who she worked for after she was moved out of Alan Tudge’s office. Now, she alleges that both ministers were engaging in bullying when she worked for them.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Reporter #1:

“She reported Mr Tudge was constantly very critical, would regularly lecture and intimidate her about her work. She alleges the minister one day told her to ‘stop being such a precious petal’...”

KAREN:

Tudge has not said anything directly about those allegations other than that he will examine what's being alleged. And Michaelia Cash is directly denied the allegations that were made about her.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Reporter #2:

“Senator Cash has strenuously rejected claims of any adverse treatment of Ms Miller by her or her office…”

KAREN:

And those allegations that we know of relate not only to bullying, but also to the process that saw Rachelle Miller actually leave that office in the end. The processes were what she calls a fake redundancy, which involved being given the choice of either a demotion or redundancy payout. And she took the latter.

RUBY:

OK, and so this complaint, it would be fair to say that it's not a one off. It seems like a much bigger discussion has been opened up about the way in which staff who work for politicians are treated.

KAREN:

I think that's right. And there are definitely others. One that I know about, then that I wrote about, involves the case of Kate Johnson, who was the chief of staff for Ken Wyatt, the indigenous affairs minister, back in 2018. And Kate Johnson has made a bullying complaint to the Department of Finance alleging that another of her colleagues was involved in bullying staff in the office. Kate Johnson worked in the office for five weeks as chief of staff in 2018, and she lodged this complaint after talking to the then prime minister's office. The prime minister's office staff then contacted Ken Wyatt to ask about these allegations, and he sacked Kate Johnson on the spot.

So she's lodged this claim and it's been investigated. But the problem is that she can't get access to the result of it. She's not allowed to have any knowledge of what actually happened as a result of her complaint and the investigation that followed. She's not allowed to be told the findings. She's not allowed to be given the report and she's applied for it under Freedom of information law. And she's had that application refused.

RUBY:

Right, so how is that possible, that the person who made the complaint, in this case Kate Johnson, can't get access to it or to the outcome of it?

KAREN:

Well, it's pretty strange, isn't it? Kate Johnson says she thinks it's disgraceful, and I think the problem here is in the nature of the way that the employment relationship is managed for parliamentary staff. This is not just staff of ministers, its staff of all members of parliament, all members and senators. And the arrangement is an unusual one. It's a bit blurry as to who is exactly the employer here, because the minister or the member of parliament has the hiring and firing job - they are the person that controls what happens in terms of direct employment - but the Department of Finance pays the salaries. And finance, when asked in an estimates committee hearing who the actual employer is, said it's the Commonwealth, which didn't really clear up the problem.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Woman #!:

“The Commonwealth is the employer. The Parliamentarian is the person who has the direct employment relationship with the employees in the office. The Department of Finance provides support to assist Parliamentarians to discharge their obligations as employer.”

KAREN:

But it means that if an employee of a member of parliament makes a bullying allegation that involves that person directly or the staff that work to them, the report ends up going back to them. And so it becomes this sort of circular and opaque situation where the complainant doesn't find out what the result of the investigation is and then isn't entitled, necessarily, to know what happens as a result of those findings. And so it doesn't, I think, provide natural justice - it suggests that once you've made the complaint, really you have no further role and you're not entitled to know that anything has actually been done to address it.

RUBY:

We’ll be back in a moment.

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RUBY:

Karen, what ended up happening with Kate Johnson's complaint, and what does her case more broadly reveal about the problems with this process?

KAREN:

The finance department notified her, I think it was in January last year, that the complaint had been dealt with and it's been investigated. But they told her that she wasn't entitled to receive either the report or even a summary of the findings, and that the argument put was a privacy based argument that under the Australian privacy principles and the workplace harassment and bullying policy that the government has, that she wasn't entitled to know any of that, which she disagrees with and thinks is unreasonable. And I spoke to the head of employment law at Maurice Blackburn, Josh Bornstein, who has a lot of experience in these kinds of issues, and he doesn't think that that's a sustainable argument either.

Archival Tape -- Josh Bornstein:

“I think that reasoning is bogus. I don't think there is a good basis to invoke privacy. It's often done, basically, to cloak the whole process and the outcome in secrecy…”

KAREN:

He used a very colourful descriptor in response to the suggestion that privacy should prevent the complainant from knowing the result of an investigation

Archival Tape -- Josh Bornstein:

“...quite frankly, to use a technical legal expression, the notion of privacy attached to a disciplinary investigation is bullshit.”

KAREN:

Josh Bornstein made a very interesting and I think important point, which is that getting closure on a complaint, whether the findings were that it was upheld or not, is very important to the person who makes it.

Archival Tape -- Josh Bornstein:

“It leaves them, I think, more damaged often than they would be otherwise. And often the damage they sustained to their mental health is made much, much worse by a completely unsatisfactory process.”

KAREN:

And it can be very detrimental to their mental health to not receive that resolution. And he says that people who complain of bullying and harassment usually have already suffered some kind of trauma or mental health effect anyway, but that is exacerbated quite considerably by the lack of resolution.

RUBY:

And Karen, for political staff in particular, this process is made worse because ultimately these people, they're responsible to their direct boss who is the politician. Can you tell me about that?

KAREN:

Yes. Well, if the allegation is made about the politician themselves - and in the case of Kate Johnson, it was made about another staff member who was very close to the politician, worked very closely with with the politician in the case of Ken Wyatt - but if it's an allegation direct to the politician, well, it's the politician that ends up being the arbiter in terms of what happens as a result, which is pretty unsatisfactory, I would have thought, because they get to adjudicate on themselves ultimately.

Obviously, in the case of a minister, the prime minister would have a role to play in directing a minister to act and take action if a complaint was upheld, if the prime minister thought that that was in the government's political interest to do that. And this is where it gets pretty complicated, because if we don't have transparency, if there's not obvious accountability, then you can't know whether there are political considerations coming into play, and it's a very political atmosphere in the building at Parliament House. It's a pretty unusual workplace arrangement.

And Josh Bornstein made that point as well.

Archival Tape -- Josh Bornstein:

“Well, obviously, the staffers who work for politicians and ministers are in a very vulnerable position. Their boss who can hire them and fire them is the minister and there's a complete asymmetry of power between them. They work in a murky realm, if I can put it that way. The minister often requires them to engage in dirty work, unethical work, sometimes illegal work so that the minister won't be caught and punished for that. And so in most cases, they don't take on the minister because the cost of doing so is too great.”

RUBY:

And Karen, you have worked in Canberra for many years, and I'm wondering if you can tell me a bit about your thoughts as you've watched this unfold over the past week since that Four Corners episode went to air. How surprised were you and what is your opinion on the culture in Canberra towards women?

KAREN:

I wasn't surprised. It all goes to the culture in Parliament House, which has been quite a permissive culture. It's a hothouse. It's a tense and fraught atmosphere. It's full of people who are passionate, who are defending their various causes or seeking to interrogate them. So it's an unusual atmosphere. It has been a problem in terms of relationships and how they managed the intensity of the work environment and and the risk of bullying, harassment, sexual harassment in particular.

I've written in the past about some of the experiences I had, particularly as a younger journalist working in that building. And it was certainly, I think, a different experience for young women as journalists and as staff than it was for young men. I had hoped things had improved a bit. And while we're not talking about sexual harassment allegations in the Four Corners thing, it does all go to the same issue of culture behaviour and what's allowed and what people get up to and are not disciplined or pulled into line for.

And there are people who are being put at risk by unequal relationships, power relationships, which can manifest in lots of different ways. And I do think we need to think about the systems we have in place to not only discourage the abuse of power when people have it and other people don't, but also the various ways that these relationships can play out that can disadvantage particularly young women and leave them quite traumatised.

And I certainly know you hear anecdotally and I know as a result of some of the stories we've heard in the last few days that the people get very damaged from feeling like they are being manipulated or exploited or that they don't have any agency in a professional relationship in a workplace. So we should confront these things. They've been around for a long time. I'd hoped the situation might have improved a bit, but it does feel like with the discussion of bullying and harassment, that's started to emerge in the last few days, that maybe things haven't improved as much as we'd hoped.

RUBY:

Karen, thank you so much for talking to me about this today.

KAREN:

Thanks, Ruby.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today…

The South Australian government has announced a series of new restrictions after a growing cluster of coronavirus cases emerged in Adelaide.

Residents are being advised to work from home if possible, and gyms and other recreational facilities have been shut. A number of states and territories are also now requiring those travelling from Adelaide to quarantine.

And the federal government has agreed to a settlement worth $1.2 billion over its Robodebt program, which unlawfully raised automated debts against welfare recipients.

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

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