Page 5870 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 7 December 2011
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problem means these workplace problems continue. Without this data it can be difficult to create prevention strategies.
I am strongly of the belief that these issues—workplace violence and bullying—need to be brought out into the open and actively addressed. A significant amount of progress can be made with corresponding progress in health and productivity in employment. The requests made in Mr Rattenbury’s motion will play an important part in achieving this. Bringing these issues into the open could result in more claims being made in the area of occupational violence and bullying, but this should be characterised as a success. Firstly, we will be providing restitution to people who have experienced bullying, and, secondly, the broader economic benefits of addressing these issues far outweigh the costs incurred every year through health impacts and lost productivity.
Lastly, I want to reiterate the point made by Mr Rattenbury that preventative strategies are crucial in addressing workplace hazards. Whether it is workplace assaults or workplace bullying, preventative strategies are the best approach rather than waiting to react after the event. I commend Mr Rattenbury’s motion to the Assembly.
MR HANSON (Molonglo) (5.42): I commend Mr Rattenbury for bringing this motion forward. I think we can all agree that bullying is both unacceptable and insidious. I share the Chief Minister’s concern about the bullying, and in some cases brutality, faced by front-line working staff, in particular people like our nurses at the hospital and our teachers, who sadly sometimes face these sort of incidents.
But I do want to point out the difference between the rhetoric that we are hearing today and our agreement with the principles. The reality is the failure of Katy Gallagher and the government, and also the Greens, when it came to the incidents of bullying that occurred in ACT Health throughout 2010. You will recall that 11 registrars resigned and there were complaints made. But at that point Katy Gallagher denied any complaints, publicly, before confirming one way or the other. She went publicly and said that all she had seen was a lot of mud being slung and that this was all politics. The chief executive said no complaints had been made—when they had been made, and we have seen that from the clinical review that was conducted.
Katy Gallagher and the then Chief Minister, Jon Stanhope, then threatened doctors by saying that they were going to conduct a review of all the medical board investigations over the previous 10 years. That was a disgraceful act that was clearly threatening, was clearly bullying, and was described by the doctors as such; it was described by the AMA as a thinly veiled threat, and that is what it was.
Katy Gallagher stood up here today and talked about how much she feels about bullying and how this is an insidious thing. Yet she was conducting this threatening behaviour against doctors and was essentially trying to cover up and obscure any complaints that were made. Had we not driven and fought hard on these issues, as did the ABC in this case, the review or the reviews would never have occurred. The clinical review found that the complaints that had been made to the management about bullying at the Canberra Hospital had been ignored. That was shameful, and the
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