Sunday 19 April, 2009
Some recent reviews have prompted me to think about the similarity between the behaviour of people in Nazi Germany - who refused to "know" about the Nazi concentration camps - and the behaviour of Queensland public servants - who refuse to "know" about the workplace abuse in Queensland schools.
"Good is a British film set in Nazi Germany in the 1930's.
It raises old questions about the so-called good German, the essentially decent, reasonable and conscientious citizen who despised Nazism (we must suppose) but managed to survive, perhaps even prosper, through a tacit accommodation with the regime.
Were such men good Germans or cowards and hypocrites?
How much did they know of what was happening?
And if they knew, were they justified, as loyal citizens, in putting their own interests ahead of a duty to resist?"
I was bullied by the acting principal.
It was radiantly obvious from the first moment that I was being bullied.
Seven classroom teachers who had seen me teach had a formal meeting with the acting principal and told her clearly that she was bullying.
But the local mob - the acting deputy principal, the usual principal and at least one member of the District office staff - joined in with the acting principal's bullying.
Then tens, perhaps hundreds of Queensland public servants simply passed my protesting emails and letters back to the local mob who were doing the bullying.
What kind of people do this every day?
What kind of human beings passively facilitate the abuse of fellow human beings?
"... For many Germans there was a life of comfort, duty and reward that dulled even the most sensitive spirits.
Much of Good unfolds at elegant receptions, in well-furnished offices and apartments ...
Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Eichmann and other recognisable monsters behave with affable civility."
My usual principal charmed me into remaining at his school.
I had applied to leave because I was so worried about the problems at the school.
My usual principal charmed me and assured me that he would deal with the problems at the school.
I respected this man and trusted him absolutely.
Then, while he was on leave, this man whom I respected and trusted absolutely made an agreement with the acting principal that I would be on a punishment program the next year.
And, when he returned to the school, my usual principal continued to smile at me and to charm me.
Each day since then this smiling man has returned to his luxurious house high on a hill.
To his wife and children who love him.
Knowing that he has earned these rewards by lying about a teacher and bullying her out of work
I often wonder how my usual principal can live with himself.
And I suspect that he lives with himself very easily.
And that he smiles.
- Good, Evan Williams, Film, p.20, Review, The Weekend Australian.
And last weekend Stephen Matchett asked :
"What would any of us do in a society governed by bullies with no respect for the rights or lives of others ...?
A society where people are imprisoned for not deferring to moral cripples ...?
A society where everybody understands what happens to individuals who do not keep their heads down and mouths shut?"
Mr Matchett, it is obvious you do not live in Queensland.
This is the way that Queensland teachers are living today.
"It's not the sort of question Australians ask of ourselves because this sort of threat is so alien to our experience."
Not here, not in Queensland, Mr Matchett, not alien at all.
" But ... there is no reason we couldn't become such a society if enough people stayed silent."
They are silent in Queensland Mr Matchett.
They are silent in Queensland hospitals, Queensland schools, Queensland public service offices, the Queensland Ombudsman's offices, the Queensland CMC offices ... all silent.
Silence is their "Code of Conduct".
"While some civil servants argued against the abuse of power long before the outbreak of war, the Nazis had completely corrupted the rule of law, and almost everybody looked the other way."
Silence, a passive silence, is the rule of law for Queensland public servants.
- Unnerving questions of character, Stephen Matchett, Forum, p. 36 Review, The Weekend Australian, April 11-12.
Monday 13 April, 2009
24 managers at middle to senior levels who had been accused of workplace bullying talked to Adelaide University psychologist Moira Jenkins.
The research was part of her PhD on workplace conflict management.
"Bullying is not a black-and-white issue," says Jenkins. "Some of the people I interviewed had experienced unfairness in the way the allegations were investigated; some were bullies and had got away with it lightly. Most were crushed by what happened. ... Being labelled a bully can have long-term consequences," she says.
In her study, Jenkins found performance or behavioural issues with subordinates were often the precursor to a bullying complaint against managers.
"Performance issues" can also be fabricated by abusive managers to pay people back for doing their job properly or for complaining about workplace abuse.
My concern about this study would be - how would a psychopath respond to these questions?
My bully was such an amazingly convincing "spinner" - even I believed her at first.
And she certainly seemed to believe what she was saying at each given moment, even if it directly contradicted what she had said the moment before.
She even managed to persuaded the Director-General of Education that she deserved his sympathy and support.
How does this research deal with the evidence of a psychopath?
Are they classified as innocent victims?
Or as psychopathic liars?
And if somebody is a psychopath - are they really lying?
Or do they honestly believe the stories that they are continually changing?
If you have been accused of workplace bullying and would like to take part in Moira Jenkins' research, go to aboto.com.au or email moira.jenkins@adelaide.edu.au.
Source: Sticks And Stones Will Break My Bones But Names, a thematic analysis of what it means to be accused of workplace bullying, by Moira Jenkins, Helen Winefield and Aspa Sarris, University of Adelaide.
Saturday 11 April, 2009
Can you tell facts from gibberish?
Queensland teachers urgently need you to apply today for a job as a Senior Investigator with the Office of the Queensland Ombudsman.
Salary $80,862.60 - $86,707.40 p.a.
Inquiries : Louise Rosemann (07) 3005 7000
"A large part of our role is to work with ordinary Australians who come to us with complaints about conditions in their workplace," Workplace Ombudsman Nicholas Wilson says.
"That might relate to being ... maltreated or some other issue."
According to the International Ombudsman Institute, ombudsman-type roles evolved to protect people against -
- violation of rights
- abuse of powers
- error
- negligence
- unfair decisions
- and maladministration.
They also serve to make government actions more open and the government and its servants more accountable to the public.
In the case of Education Queensland, the Queensland Ombudsmen are failing dismally to deal with abuse in all of these identified areas.
Queensland teachers need Ombudsmen who will deal with the workpace abuse in Queensland schools.
"Though formal qualifications can help potential employees demonstrate their interest in workplace relations, people who work in this field tend to have a broad and hard-to-define range of skills."
Primarily the capacity to refuse to accept the gibberish that they are told by senior officers of the Queensland Department of Education.
For instance, among those who have found satisfying positions within the Workplace Ombudsman's office are people who have previously been lawyers, police officers, teachers and nurses, says Wilson.
Wilson says more and more ordinary Australians have become aware there is someone they can turn to if they believe they are being unfairly treated.
This "awareness that there is someone they can turn to" is, however, an illusion.
There is no-one there.
I, for example, turned to the Queensland Ombudsman in January 2003.
And Education Queensland simply fobbed the Ombudsman off with gibberish.
The Ombudsman copied out the Education Queensland gibberish and declared my case "closed".
Leaving me howling, "But this is all gibberish!" into the Great Queensland Public Service Void.
And the Ombudsman has been busily copying out the Education Queensland gibberish and declaring my case "closed" ever since.
And I - well, I am now called a "vexacious applicant" because I keep telling the Ombudsman that he is being fobbed off with gibberish.
"Good" applicants give up hope and accept the gibberish.
"As far as possible we seek voluntary compliance," Wilson says.
You are not getting compliance, Mr Wilson.
You are getting gibberish.
"Litigation is considered only where ... one party is unwilling to recognise and fix the problem."
Education Queensland are not willing, Mr Wilson.
They are not fixing the problem.
They are fixing you more gibberish right now.
- People skills needed here, Denise Cullen, Behind the job ad, p.2, Weekend Professional Public Sector, The Weekend Australian
Now here's a curious development.
On page 4 of The Weekend Australian, the Queensland Government are advertising for a new Director-General for the Department of Education and Training.
Wasn't Julie Grantham going to be the new Director-General for Not Knowing and Not Understanding and Being Too Busy And Important To Deal With Education?
Please ring Kathy McLean of Fish & Nankivell 0414 376 698 if you are willing to "know about" and to deal effectively with the high levels of workplace abuse in Queensland schools.
Thursday 9 April 2009
Each day in New York 700 teachers do not go to work in schools.
They go to sit together in "rubber rooms", a sort of prison for teachers.
Imagine being trapped in a room day after day for months and perhaps years with a group of very disturbed and depressed people.
It is hard to believe that American teachers are being treated this way in 2009.
http://www.mobbingportal.com/rubberroom.html
Monday 6 April, 2009
Leonie Wood writes in The Age about the problems facing whistleblowers:
Persons contemplating whistleblowing need to realise that the disclosure of their identity may cause them harm in ways they never find out — employment or promotions not offered, friendships undermined.
Last week, the name of a whistleblower was named publicly during an intriguing court case in which ASIC was trying to protect his identity.
The whistleblower does not want public attention.
But Federal Court judge Alan Goldberg heard that in April 2008 during a phone conversation with Dianne Schulman, a private investigator hired by lawyers representing Multiplex shareholders in a class action, the whistleblower indicated that he had endured a difficult, stressful and expensive few years after sounding the alarm.
He said he was "just an ordinary person trying to do the right thing".
The whole experience, he told Ms Schulman, had been "quite an ordeal".
Maurice Blackburn principle Andrew Watson told the judge that the whistleblower seemed "disillusioned" about being a whistleblower: he gave the impression he felt "hung out to dry … by ASIC".
He was very aggrieved by the fact that he had spent … $100,000 of his own money on lawyers."
Australian regulators face a dilema as private litigants demand access to sensitive transcripts of confidential interviews and other material obtained during investigations.
When informers have requested confidentiality, a conflict emerges between the regulators' public duties of delivering material to third parties and the promise to preserve confidential sources.
Saturday 4 April, 2009
Allan Kessing was accused of leaking two highly-confidential Australian Customs Service reports to The Australian newspaper in 2005, sparking the biggest overhaul of airport security in the country's history.
Kessing was found guilty by a NSW District Court jury in March 2007 and given a suspended sentence.
Kessing said the Rudd government's proposed laws would limit protection to whistleblowers who pass issues to their superiors and not those who go public, unless there was an imminent threat to public health or safety.
"First of all you take it to your immediate superior, they then pass it up to their superior, but what if it is your superior who is under threat? He's not going to pass it on," he told the Sunday Profile program on ABC Radio.
"Why would the person who has suppressed it be inclined to investigate it?
"It is laughable."
Exactly.
The CMC and Education Queensland repeatedly allowed the people that I had complained about to investigate themselves and "find no evidence" of their own misconduct.
The problem is systemic.
There is a systemic indifference to corruption.
And the workplace abuse of Queensland teachers continues to this day.
"From what my ex-colleagues in Customs tell me, no, in fact just recently there have been problems at the airport and all my ex-colleagues have been told, "say nothing to anybody otherwise the same thing will happen to you as Alan Kessing'."
"I've done my best, I've fought the government and they've broken me.
"Personally, no. But financially, yes," Kessing said.
Monday 30 March, 2009
Will the eight new ministers will be in any way different from the plodders who preceded them?
We are assured that this new, energised government will be different.
Does that mean distorting the truth until it has become unrecognisable will no longer be standard practice?
Does it mean that the Government will cease spending millions of dollars on self-congratulatory publicity campaigns and millions more employing hundreds upon hundreds of journalists, their sole purpose being to tell us what a fantastic job Premier Anna Bligh is doing?
Will there be a genuine attempt to reform Freedom of Information laws, as promised?
Sunday 29 March, 2009
How a 58-year old American teacher was driven out of work: http://www.endteacherabuse.org/Schwartz.html
Some of the strategies used to drive her out of work are similar to strategies used by Bad Apple Bully principals in Queensland.
Saturday 28 March, 2009
On April 28, 2006, Shellharbour Hospital boss, Michael Brodnik, distributed an email.
A decision had been made, he wrote, to set up a new unit within the emergency department.
"The unit will be … four beds, ... using the concept of 'virtual beds'."
Patients who arrived at emergency and needed admission would be assigned a virtual bed if no official in-patient bed was available, remaining physically in emergency.
The rationale was to get patients off the emergency department's books within eight hours of arrival - a watershed imposed by government as a so-called "key performance indicator" or KPI, amid political pressure over backed-up hospitals and ambulances unable to offload patients.
For a while Dr Simon Leslie, the head of the hospital's emergency department, continued a vocal opposition to the imaginary beds.
The directive to reclassify patients "according to any objective look at it was fraudulent", he told the Herald last week.
"It required staff in my emergency department to write down records that were incorrect."
That could have been the end of it, but then Peter Garling, SC, came to town.
On April 14 last year, at one of the inquiry's 34 public hearings, "Dr Leslie told me the 'virtual ward' was a fiction to compensate for the fact that Shellharbour Hospital does not have a short stay unit," Garling recounted in his report.
Leslie's evidence resulted - finally - in the virtual ward's abrupt termination.
Though this, as he had previously observed to Browbank, was, "easy because it doesn't actually exist".
Three weeks later, Sue Browbank, Michael Brodnik's boss, informed Dr Leslie of the abolition of his position.
When Dr Leslie updated the inquiry on the personal fallout from his testimony, Garling in late September 2008 ordered four days of extra hearings, devoted to the doctor's treatment.
Dr Leslie's treatment was "unreasonable, repeated, unwelcome, unsolicited, offensive, intimidating, humiliating and threatening," Garling wrote.
"I find it amounted to bullying and harassment in accordance with NSW Health's own guidelines."
"The workplace culture in NSW public hospitals is characterised by lack of respect and trust, absence of empathy and compassion, inability to celebrate the success of others, failure to communicate, and a lack of collaboration," was Garling's damning verdict after his journey to the heart of the health system.
Its anti-bullying policy had failed, dissent was quashed and persecution was rife.
Garling said Leslie's situation went unresolved because Shellharbour managers "did not demonstrate … the slightest knowledge of what constituted bullying and unacceptable behaviour".
Leslie will now take his case to the NSW Industrial Relations Commission.
Peter Garling, SC, is a man of courage and integrity.
It would only takes one man like Peter Garling to break the grip of the Bad Apple workplace bully-mob on Queensland schools and hospitals.
One man - or woman - with the courage and integrity to "know" about the workplace abuse.
Julie Grantham, will you have the courage to "know"?
Or will you collect your generous salary while carefully "not knowing" and "not understanding" about the workplace abuse in Queensland schools?
Friday 27 March, 2009
The ALP's Fiona Simpson described the "culture of fear" that existed in Queensland's public service.
Whistleblowing, by definition, is first and foremost about dedicated and conscientious public servants whose primary motive is to ensure the departments and the agencies in which they work fulfil their duty to the public.
Last month, Mark Dreyfus tabled a report of the legal and constitutional affairs committee in the House of Representatives that recommended a comprehensive whistleblowing scheme for the commonwealth public service.
This report, currently being considered by the Government, will lead to "the strongest whistleblower protection regime in any Australian jurisdiction".
The report recommends a model for disclosure first to the relevant agency, then to an external agency such as the Commonwealth Ombudsman.
The committee recommends that protections for whistleblowers should include immunity from criminal liability, from liability for civil penalties, from civil actions such as defamation and breach of confidence, and from administrative sanction.
The right to make a disclosure should also be defined as a workplace right, with recourse to the Commonwealth Workplace Ombudsman.
As well, the report recommends protection for disclosure to members of parliament, legal advisers, professional associations and unions for certain purposes, and the media in limited circumstances.
Requiring internal disclosure as a first step guards against interference with investigations and ensures natural justice for those against whom complaints are made.
And it allows for all documentary evidence to be "lost" or destroyed.
And it allows for investigations to be delayed for years so that corrupt public servants can claim to have "forgotten" what they did and why they did it.
The CPSU is the union that covers "the dedicated public servants who sort out wrongdoing".
Sort of like the CMC in Queensland, who write you letters full of gibberish and then refuse to allow you to tell them that they have had the wool pulled over their eyes?
To suggest that a complaint to the Commonwealth Ombudsman is "likely to be a bureaucratic nightmare, befouled by politics" misunderstands the independent stature of one of the most highly respected public agencies in the country.
Mr Dreyfus ... you are so innocent.
You clearly have no experience of whistleblowing.
The committee recommended that the onus is on each agency head to delegate staff within the agency to receive and act on disclosures.
By "losing" all but the first page of your disclosure, "misunderstanding" your complaint, rubber-stamping your disclosure "No Response Required. File away" etc. etc. as per usual.
Thursday 26 March, 20009