Bad Apple Bullies

Tips For Queensland teachers: How to deal with workplace bullies.

How has being bullied at work while teaching in an Education Queensland state school affected my life?

When I met John Ryan in Brisbane on October 13, 2004, he asked me if I wanted to make a "Victim Impact Statement".

At the time I told him that I was very reluctant to describe the impact of the bullying on my life, because Lynch-Mob State College acting principal Mrs GR had seemed to me to be enjoying bullying me.

I was concerned that Mrs GR would enjoy reading about the impact of her bullying on my life, and that her dysfunctional behaviour would be rewarded.

I did not expect, in October 2004, that I would still be waiting - in March 2010 - to be told what the real or imaginary allegations were that Mrs GR claimed to have found in the "notes to Leigh from Desley", and to know what the other "lots of allegations" were that Mrs GR claimed had been made against me, and to be given copies of Mrs GR's "lots of pieces of paper to prove how things may have happened" and still be waiting - in March 2010 - to have the opportunity to respond to Mrs GR's mystery allegations and to prove myself innocent.

So I have decided to describe some of the effects of the workplace abuse - and the systemic failure to deal with the abuse - on my life to this date, 8 March, 2010 -

 

The greatest effect of the workplace abuse - and the subsequent systemic abuse - has been to destroy my world.

The world that I believed in.

 

Before Mrs GR attacked me  -

I respected and trusted my usual school principal absolutely.

I believed in Education Queensland.

I believed in the Queensland Public Service.

I believed in the Queensland government.

 

I had always been an active member of the Queensland Teachers' Union ( QTU ).

 

For several years before Mrs GR attacked me, I had been an active member of the Labor Party.

 

I had spent many hours of my time supporting the two Local Members, organising groups of people to lobby in the local area on Sundays, conducting surveys, distributing election material, helping out on election day, attending fund-raisers, etc.

 

I now realise that the world that I believed in was a sham.

And that incompetence, malice and corruption rule.

 

I feel far less safe nowadays.

Because I know that incompetence, malice and corruption rule.

And that anything is possible.

 

When I met Ken Smith on Thursday 23 November, 2006, I understood him to say that I could walk into the Education Queensland District office at any time and apply for work.

 

I asked Ken Smith how he would like to go to work with a group of people who had comprehensively tricked him and lied about him.

 

I could never feel safe working for Education Queensland again.

I have lost all respect for Education Queensland.

 

Other than losing the world that I believed in -

 

1. For several years I have been stalked by a member of my old branch of the Labor party.

The Legal Aid website defines stalking behaviour as:

  • following a person or
  • repeatedly contacting a person or
  • intimidating or harassing them

http://www.legalaid.qld.gov.au/Legal+Information/The+justice+system/Offences/Stalking.htm

 

In about 1997 I became an active supporter of Labor party member Mrs C, who was campaigning to be Local Member.

For several months during 1997-1998, I organised groups of Labor Party supporters to go to local suburbs on Sundays and campaign on behalf of Mrs C.

During 1997-1998 I often rang Mrs GR and asked her to help with this campaigning.

She never agreed to help.

I first met Mrs GR at the Labor party celebrations after the election of Mrs C as Local Member in 1998.

The next year I was appointed to Lynch-Mob State College as Indonesian teacher.

And I found that Mrs GR had been appointed acting principal at the college.

By this time, Mrs GR was also chairperson of one of Local Member Mrs C's "Branches".

 

I had participated in many activities supporting Local Member Mrs C's 1998 campaign.

But I was not actually a member of one of her branches.

 

I had been a member of Local Member Mrs B's branch of the Labor party for several years.

I had attended several meetings of this branch over the years and had also participated in various activities with Local Member Mrs B's group.

During these meetings I had met Labor party member "Richard" briefly.

Richard would sometimes discuss Labor party issues with me when we met in local shops.

He seemed to speak with a foreign accent.

I had the impression that Richard was an intelligent man.

But that his ideas were often "quirky".

Probably reflecting his different cultral background.

 

When I was attacked at work by Mrs GR, I immediately "dropped out" of all activites with both of the local branches.

I did not hold Local Member Mrs C responsible for the behaviour of Lynch-Mob State College acting principal Mrs GR.

I knew that the branch members were a very 'mixed bag' and I understood that the Local Members had to 'do their best with what they had got'.

I did not want to involve the local groups in the situation and cause problems for either of the Local Members, both of whom I respected and trusted.

At this stage I saw the situation as a misunderstanding.

Mrs GR seemed to be inexperienced and very impulsive.

I presumed that Mrs GR had impulsively "beaten up" some trivial incident, and that it would all be easily explained.

I expected that the situation would be quietly resolved and then then I would be able to resume my activities with the local Labor party groups.

I did not expect that the abuse would continue for more than nine years.

 

For several years now, Labor party member "Richard" has been stalking me.

Richard is quite a big man, taller than me.

Richard seems to spend many hours wandering about the city.

At first he would walk up to me, raise his arm and fist in front of me and shout, "Up the workers!".

He repeated that several times.

Then he began to raise his arm above his head as he approached me.

More recently he has simply hovered around me, grinning.

 

Some time ago, perhaps in early 2007, when Labor party member Richard approached me at the entrance to a local shopping centre, I tried to explain to him that he did not understand the situation.

I explained to him that I had tried very hard to deal with the situation in a way that did as little harm to the Labor party as possible.

I made it plain to Richard that I wanted him to stop approaching me.

But he does not stop.

 

I do not hold Local Member Mrs B responsible for the behaviour of this member of her branch.

But I do wonder what Labor party member Richard has been told about me that would prompt him to stalk me.

 

Thursday 2 August, 2007

I emailed John Battams, General Secretary of the Queensland Teachers' Union-

 

"... I would appreciate some legal advice on Education Queensland's continuing refusal to allow me Natural Justice. ...

I used to be a member of (Local Member B's) branch of the Labor party.

Now one member of that group waves his fist in my face and shouts "up the workers!" whenever he meets me in town.

I feel very unsafe.

... This "Bad Apple Bully-Mob" do not mean me well. ..."

 

7 August 2007

Graham Maloney, Deputy General Secretary of the Queensland Teachers' Union ( QTU ), replied:

"... your request covers essentially the same ground that was rejected

  • by me by email on 19 December 2005 and 3 January 2006,
  • by Kevin Bates acting in my role by letter dated 18 August 2006
  • and by Jeff Backen acting in my role on 11 April 2007.

Accordingly, I do not intend to approve legal assistance requested by you."

So it seems to be the Deputy General Secretary of the QTU - or QTU officers acting in that role - who refuses QTU members legal assistance.

But do any of these officers have legal qualifications?

 

Wednesday 28 May, 2008

As I parked my car in the city, Labor party member Richard approached.

I was with two friends. 

Labor party member Richard B. walked up close to me and made a loud grunting noise.

 

Friday 4 July, 2008

As I left City Place, Labor party member Richard saw me.

He raised his arm above his head.

Then he stood in front of me, blocking my path, so that I had to walk around him.

 

Friday 2 January, 2009

I was shopping at Rusty's, the local fruit and vegetable market.

Labor party member Richard appeared in front of me in one of the narrow passageways between the local market stalls.

At first he seemed to be friendly.

He was smiling and he had his right hand held out wide, as if he was going to hug me.

I said "Oh, hello!", in a friendly manner.

Then Labor party member Richard doubled up his fist and held his fist very, very close to my face.

And said "Up the workers!" in my ear.

 

Monday 1 March 2010

A television news program about the working conditions of teachers was broadcast in Cairns.

I appeared in the program.

Tuesday 2 March, 2010

The next day at about 12.30pm I went shopping in Woolworths, Abbott Street, Cairns.

I was looking at some items on the shelves.

I turned around and saw Labor Party member Richard standing nearby, watching me.

I recognised that I knew him and I automatically said "Oh, hello, how are you?"

Richard looked down and shuffled his feet.

I then realised who he was, and I immediately began to move towards the checkout.

Woolworths is being renovated and I had to walk down a long passageway for half the length of the store.

Labor Party member Richard followed very close behind me - he seemed to be less than one metre behind me - for the whole way to the checkout.

Then, when I reached the checkout,  Richard moved in front of me and walked through the checkout.

 

Richard had bought nothing in Woolworths.

Richard's sole purpose for being in Woolworths seemed to be to make me aware that he was watching me and following me.

 

2.

The workplace bullying, the mobbing and the continuing harassment has affected my health.

12 October 2000

This was the day of my meeting with Lynch-Mob State College acting principal Mrs GR to discuss her behaviour towards me during and after the meeting with Mother D.A.

Acting deputy principal Miss AL later came into the meeting.

During this meeting acting principal Mrs GR seemed to lie.

She seemed to say that she had not asked me to stay behind in her office after Mother DA had left the room.

This was not true.

During the meeting with Mother DA, I had said very little.

Mrs GR had sat with her back slightly towards me.

While Mother DA abused me, Mrs GR kept saying to Mother DA, "I will speak to (my name) about that later."

 

I now realise that this was the start of a pattern of "refusing to listen"  abuse -

  • Mother DA abused me, shouting down my explanations.
  • Mrs GR told me that she was too busy to listen to me.
  • Usual principal Mr EL was on leave and made his 29 November 2000 agreement with Mrs GR that "the ( DWP ) process is warranted". He had not discussed the situation with me before making this agreement.
  • The Cairns District Office "lost" all but the first page of my Stage 2 Grievance, so they "did not understand" what I was complaining about.
  • John Ryan instructed all Education Queensland staff not to read my letters.
  • Peter Beattie refused to read my letters.
  • Rachael Hunter refused to read my letters.
  • The CMC refuse to read my letters.
  • etc.

 

When Mrs GR seemed to claim that she had not asked me to stay in her office after the meeting with Mother DA, I was deeply shocked. 

This was not the way that school principals normally behave.

No school principal had ever lied about me, right "to my face".

 

I was also shocked by Mrs GR's manner.

She did not seem to be affected in any way by her behaviour.

 

I began to realise that, if a person is a liar , they have no problems at all.

They had nothing to worry or stess about.

Because if there was any problem, they could simply "change their story".

And the next day they could change it again.

 

Now I realise that this is the sort of behaviour pattern that psychopaths exhibit.

But at that time I knew nothing about psychopaths.

 

From that day I felt very unsafe in dealing with Mrs GR.

I felt that anything was possible.

That nothing that Mrs GR said could be relied upon from one day to the next.

 

At the end of the meeting, I told acting principal Mrs GR and acting deputy principal Miss AL that I had tried to contact Mrs GR at the weekend to discuss some health problems privately.

I told them that I had not intended to discuss these problems with acting principal Miss AL (who was usually a reading teacher, sitting next to me in our shared office).

I asked them both several times not to gossip about my health because it had caused problems for me at another local school when I had told the principal my health problems.

(I had told a principal that I was deaf and he seemed to have told either the parents or the children because, being children, they began following me around, shouting at me and then saying, "She can't hear anything. She's deaf!")

I told Mrs GR and Miss AL about the problems that I had with my heart banging and thumping.

I had been told that I was at very high risk of a heart attack because my cholesterol levels were very high.

I was advised that stress might be a factor and that I should try to reduce stress.

On Monday 9 October 2000 I had taken a day of sick leave to recover from the stress of the abuse by student D.A., Mother D.A. and acting principal Mrs GR.

I was worried that acting principal Mrs GR would "beat up" this day of sick leave against me.

I told Mrs GR and Miss AL that I sometimes took a day of sick leave after stressful situations to try to give myself time to recover.

I hoped that they would understand that I was not "slacking", I was just looking after my health.

 

I said, "I expect that you have noticed that I ..." and then I stopped, because I did not feel safe telling Mrs GR that I was hard of hearing.

I was apprehensive that she would maliciously tell students B.O.J. and B.O. S. to "be kind to (my name) because, you know, she's DEAF!"

And that this would, of course, undermine me greatly with these naughty children, and create more problems for me.

 

17 October 2000

After that meeting I was very worried.

I felt that my relationship with acting principal Mrs GR had been destroyed because she had seemed to lie about me and we were both very aware of this situation.

Or I certainly was.

Mrs GR also seemed to be very worryingly impulsive, repeatedly jumping to conclusions and "beating things up" into a drama, rather than asking questions and finding out the facts.

 

I felt about as unsafe at work as you could possibly be.

I felt that there were no boundaries.

That anything could happen.

 

12 November 2008

This was the day after I had spoken to the staff about the unsupervised groups of children who were missing from the Grade 7 classrooms when I arrived to take them for Indonesian.

My friend warned me that Mrs GR was "out to get you".

My friend warned me that I was "the person" that Mrs GR had been talking to the staff about at the staff meeting.

"The person" who had been "humilitating children".

She told me that Mrs GR had told her that I had told student BOS to "put her nose against the wall".

I rang Mrs GR and she confirmed that this was correct.

I was very, very shocked by Mrs GR's aggression towards me.

And her seemingly irrational and deeply unprofessional behaviour.

I became very ill.

I was continually crying.

On the morning of the next Monday, 13 November 2000, I felt "jittery" and unable to think clearly.

I was afraid that I might really do something wrong if I went to work, because I could not think properly.

 

My heart was thumping and banging in lots of different ways.

I had pains on both sides of my heart.

I had a loud roaring sound in my right ear (tinnitus).

I was on sick leave for the next week.

 

I had had roaring in my ears before.

I had it for the first time while I was working at The North State School in about 1992.

The behaviour of the children in Queensland was much, much worse than the behaviour of the children in New South Wales, and there was very little support for classroom teachers.

I was dealing with a difficult class and I had tinitus for a couple of days.

After that I would get it about once a year, always when I was under stress.

 

2469 File F The District Office documents 40-43

I now realise that the tinnitus had become much worse during Term 3 2000.

This is the LOTE (Indonesian) update that I wrote and gave to acting principal Mrs GR and acting deputy principal Miss AL after the meeting on 12 October 2000.

The date on the first page of this document - document 43 - is falsified.

Mrs GR seems to have written “19/11”, which was the Sunday before I returned from sick leave after the shock of Mrs GR’s announcement to the staff concerning me.

The true date of this document would have been about one month earlier, 16 October, 2000.

I felt quite ashamed of the way that LOTE had been limited during Term 3 2000.

I explained that there was no carpet in the LOTE (Indonesian) classroom and the chairs in the LOTE classroom had made a lot of noise.

The teacher in the class next door complained to me that every half-hour she was being disturbed by the noise of twenty-five chairs being moved as twenty-five children got up, then twenty-five chairs being moved again as twenty-five children sat down.

I had classes coming and going every thirty minutes all day long, and I got very stressed worrying about the noise.

I did not explain this in the document, but actually I had spoken to usual principal Mr EL about the noise.

He told me that he would ask the caretaker to put squares of carpet on the bottom of the chairs.

I waited for this to happen for a few weeks, but nothing was done.

So then I discussed the noise of the chairs with Mrs GR.

She just said that the school could not afford to buy me a carpet.

"By 11:00am my ears were buzzing with the noise of the chairs and I had a bad headache from the stress of trying to minimise the noise"

(I did not realise it at the time, but this was tinnitus, which was being triggered by the stress.)

When you are teaching a language, you want the children to speak in the language.

You often ask the children to ask each other questions in the second language.

Unfortunately the noise of the children all speaking to each other also disturbed the teacher next door.

The plays that the children loved doing were also too noisy.

I tried doing the plays outside but that was also too noisy.

 

I had to think of a way of teaching Indonesian that did not involve using the chairs and tables and minimised speaking.

So the children sat on the floor and played team games in Indonesian while we waited for the chairs to be fixed.

We waited for the rest of the term.

Nothing was done.

The children were bored and I was increasingly stressed.

After a few more weeks I spoke again to Mr EL.

I had the impression that he had simply forgotten all about the chairs and the carpet.

 

 

When Mrs GR gave me the letter dated 29 November 2000, to advise me that she and usual principal Mr EL had agreed that "the (DWP) process is warranted" and that I would be on DWP in 2001, the letter seemed to be full of Mrs GR's usual mysterious hints, warnings and threats.

At this stage I had no idea at all why I was being attacked.

I felt under great stress for the rest of Term 4 because I knew that any trivial incident could be "beaten up" as an excuse to launch an even more serious attack on me.

The tinnitus continued for several weeks.

I had never had it for such a long period of time.

I understand that tinnitus is directly related to stress.

I went to Bali for the holidays.

After enduring several weeks of my heart thumping and banging in lots of different ways, pains from both sides of my heart and continual roaring in my ears, I fell over in the road while I was walking into town.

 

 

 

 

The thumping and banging of my heart, and the pains on both sides on my heart continued till I went to see my GP in January 2001 and she gave me a sick-leave form for one month.

At the time I had presumed that I had these continual pains, thumping and banging because I was getting old.

My father had died at 53 and so I presumed that I was going to die of some sort of heart attack.

But when I was given sick leave the pains from both sides of my heart and the thumping and banging of my heart stopped absolutely.

And it has never returned.

It was only then that I realised that the stress of the bullying was causing the pains and the thumping of my heart.

So I was very grateful to be allowed to retire because of a hearing loss.

Because I believe that, if I had had to return to work, the stress of the bullying and the abuse of the DWP process would have killed me.

 

And, I now believe, that may be the real purpose of the DWP process.

During the "mediated" meeting on 27 November 2000, the QTU organiser had told me that there was no hope of justice, and that the DWP process usually affects people's mental and physical health.

Older teachers seem to be being deliberately attacked and driven into ill health retirement.

So they can be replaced by cheaper, less experienced, more easily manipulated teachers.

Who can be sent out to work in the remote areas.

 

 

 

To be continued

"What does anyone do with their life? My thinking on this is that you have to experiment to see what you can put up with, what satisfies you, and after some experimentation you get an idea of what your personality demands."

Julian Assange, "the brains behind the whistleblowers' website WikiLeaks", quoted in Searching for Assange, Richard Guilliatt, pp15-19, The Weekend Australian Magazine, May 30-31, 2009.