Like many Australian office workers, I was forced by my employer to complete a series of online training courses this year. There were 10 of them in all, including Grievance Management Guidelines, Security Awareness, Information and Cyber-Security and, of course, Work, Health and Safety Fundamentals. Not so long ago, such training would have been done in person, in a room, with lots of opportunities for entertaining role-play. Not any more. The compliance training industry, which is now worth some $5 billion worldwide, has long since migrated most of these courses online, often delivering them in multiple-choice formats sufficiently banal to induce a neuro-vegetative state in participants. One thing that did strike me, however, was the presence this year, for the time that I could remember, of a course titled Bullying and Harassment for Employees.
At an estimated completion time of 55 minutes, it took far longer than I had expected. There were modules on why people bully (“the thrill of exercising power”, “peer pressure”); what to do if you are bullied (“keep a record of events”, “make copies of any supporting documentation”); potential victims (everyone), and the monetary cost of bullying (estimated to be up to $35 billion each year, according to a 2010 report by the Productivity Commission).
There were case studies of prototypical bullying behaviour, where, for example, David keeps telling Nigel racist jokes in front of Juang, or where Penny consistently fails to acknowledge Graham in front of his colleagues. Accompanying each module was a stiffly pantomimed tableau – an office worker, maybe Graham, slumped face-first on his desk in despair; a scowling man with aggressive facial hair wagging a finger at a terrified-looking young woman, and two smug hipsters, heads back, smiling and laughing, presumably because they had successfully purged their office of bullying.
The course was well-intentioned and certainly comprehensive, but there was something about it that made me uneasy, starting with the fact that it was compulsory. Most concerning was the fact that I scored 98 per cent in the assessment tasks, which is the first time I had scored so high in any test in my entire life, and which could indicate that I am either an accomplished bully or that the barrier to passing was so low as to be virtually meaningless.
In truth, the best bullying awareness training is all around us, in the classroom and the boardroom, in our hospitals and houses of parliament. It’s in the daily news, in the very air we breathe, a near-constant drumbeat of tyrannical infractions, of ridicule and coercion and intimidation and gaslighting, of malignant, executive-level ego-tripping and habitual arseholery.
Virgin Australia CEO Jayne Hrdlicka is facing allegations of bullying from the company’s former chief pilot.CREDIT: DAN PELED
The allegations are everywhere. The former chief pilot at Virgin Australia recently claimed that its chief executive, Jayne Hrdlicka , bullied him so badly he was forced to take medical leave. (Virgin denies the allegations, and is pushing the Federal Court to dismiss the case.) Network Ten reporter Tegan George accused her colleague and star commentator Peter van Onselen of consistently working to sabotage her career. (The case is in mediation.) In April, cast members of The Phantom of the Opera , then running in Sydney, alleged that Opera Australia artistic director Lyndon Terracini made an “offensive remark” to the show’s lead, Callum Francis. (Terracini denied the allegation. Opera Australia has launched an independent review into bullying claims, including this one.)
While these cases are yet to be resolved, the more you read about bullying, the more it seems to be there, hiding in plain sight. It’s cancel culture and Twitter pile-ons. It’s China versus Australia. And what is Russia’s war on Ukraine if not an epic case of nation-scale bullying?
Bullying has always been with us, of course. The school playground is essentially Lord of the Flies , especially for kids who are different, and the hierarchical nature of our work structures, by definition, generates the kind of power imbalance that bullying thrives on. But a generational shift appears to be taking place, whereby such abuse of power is increasingly being called out. It’s a ripe cultural moment which, like many such moments, is messier than it seems, animated by notions like social justice, retribution, victimhood and resilience. It’s worth trying to figure out how we got here, and I’m going to need more than an online training module to help me.
When I was in primary school , I was bullied by two older kids. At least I think they were older. I can’t actually remember the details, what they did exactly or how long it went on. What I do remember is the feeling of powerlessness, of smallness, of being dominated by another animal. Bullying, I came to realise, is a type of predation. In the wild, away from the playground monitors, these kids would probably have toyed with me until they became bored, at which point they would have killed and eaten me. Or that’s how it felt.
After a time, I went to my parents and told them. My dad wasn’t concerned: he said he had been bullied at school by boys who rubbed shoe polish on his testicles, which apparently burned very badly. (Who knew?) He told me that the best way for me to deal with the boys at school was to punch them in the face. But I had to really clock them. Deck ’em. Put them on their arse. This was easy for him to say. He was six foot something and had played rugby for Australia. I was four foot nothing and played marbles. I decided that when I saw my bullies in the playground, I would follow the time-honoured protocol of weedy kids everywhere and run away.
But some people can’t run away. Or rather, their abuse is so bad that the most effective way of running away is to kill themselves. This was the preferred option for Choi Suk-hyeon , an elite triathlete in South Korea, who was found dead at her team dormitory in June 2020, at the age of 22. A child swimming prodigy, Choi had been competing with the national team since 2015. Shortly after her death, it emerged that she’d been subject to years of horrific abuse by her coach, Kim Gyu-bong, and team captain, Jang Yun-jung.
Choi was constantly punished for putting on weight. In 2016, at a training camp in New Zealand, she and a teammate were forced to eat about $230 worth of bread, eating and vomiting and eating again, as punishment for having had a Coke at lunch. In March 2019, she was beaten by the team doctor for sneaking a peach. In a series of secret recordings made by Choi on her mobile phone and released by her parents after her death, Kim tells Choi to “stop whining, or I will beat you dead myself!” Other recordings captured the sounds of Choi being hit by Kim, who calls her “psychotic” and bans her from eating for three days. (In 2021, Kim was jailed for seven years for the abuse; Jang Yun-jung received a four-year sentence.) Choi’s death rocked South Korea, a supremely patriarchal society where sports coaches have immense sway over their charges.
Australia experienced a similarly high-profile reckoning earlier this year, with the death, by suspected heart attack, of Labor senator Kimberley Kitching . Kitching, who was 52, had been under immense strain, with allegations emerging after her death that she had been bullied by three senior Labor women. Her friends said that these women had ostracised and isolated her, removed her from an ALP tactics committee and from important group emails, accused her of not understanding climate change because she didn’t have children, and attacked her for disloyalty to the party. (The women
After Labor senator Kimberley Kitching died this year, allegations emerged of her being bullied by three senior women from her party.CREDIT: KRISTOFFER PAULSEN
The story made news for several reasons, including that it involved allegations of women bullying women (research suggests that most bullying is done by men) and because it invoked the term “mean girls”, which made federal politics sound like a year 9 sleepover gone wrong. It also underscored the fiddly, opaque nature of the term “bullying”. Is leaving someone off an email trail bullying? What about a dig about not having kids? And is it really possible to bully a politician? They spend the whole time shouting at one another anyway, right?
The fact that people are still second-guessing what bullying actually involves is instructive, given that it is very clearly defined. According to the Fair Work Commission, bullying happens when a person or group of people repeatedly behave unreasonably towards another worker or group of workers, and the behaviour creates a risk to health and safety. It can involve mocking or humiliating someone, holding initiation ceremonies, being aggressive or intimidating and using offensive language.
Depending on the situation, it can also include teasing or playing jokes, leaving some workers out of work-related events, giving someone too much or too little work or work above or below their skill level, or not giving someone information that they need to do their job.
When it comes down to it, though, bullying is “only limited by our imagination”, as workplace lawyer Josh Bornstein puts it. “It’s all about, ‘How can I make this person’s life miserable?’ ” As the head employment lawyer at Maurice Blackburn, Bornstein has acted for some of the most grievously bullied people in Australia, including parliamentary staffers and junior lawyers. (He is also currently handling Tegan George’s action against Network 10.)
One of his strangest cases involved a woman at a large aviation company who repeatedly tormented a male colleague, a decade her junior, by, for example, turning up the airconditioning in his office to impossible levels, and covertly contacting his customers and asking them to make a complaint. The woman kept a diary of her bullying on the company’s intranet, bragging to her co-workers and encouraging them to join in. The victim became severely depressed; when he discovered the diary he contacted Bornstein, who brokered a settlement. (The settlement is subject to a non-disclosure agreement, which is why Good Weekend can’t report the details.)
Bornstein, who is in his mid-50s, grew up in Carlton, in inner Melbourne. His father, David Bornstein, was the state Labor member for Brunswick East. “My parents taught me to stand up for the underdog,” he says. If someone was getting bullied at school, he would intervene; when boys tortured seagulls in the playground, he would tell them to stop. He also copped his fair share. “I had a very Jewish name, so I had kids telling me they were going to gas me.”
“Bullying is particularly acute in command and control environments. The army, police. Hierarchical organisations where patronage is important.”
Not surprisingly, he has what he describes as a “visceral reaction” to the injustice of bullying and the deep and lasting damage it can cause. “Bullying makes people sick,” he says. “It ruins people’s lives.” When clients turn up for their first appointment, he gives them a lecture on mental health. “I’ll ask, ‘Do you have a proper GP? A referral to a psychiatrist? Are you considering medication?’ I’ve recognised that almost invariably their mental health has been compromised by the time they make the appointment.”
Workplace lawyer Josh Bornstein: “Bullying makes people sick. It ruins people’s lives.”CREDIT: SIMON SCHLUTER
I’d assumed that Bornstein would have compiled a detailed psychological profile of your typical bully, but he says he gave up trying that long ago. “There’s no stereotype. There are judges who bully. Surgeons. Whoever.” It’s got more to do with the workplace than the person. “Bullying is particularly acute in command and control environments. The army, police. Hierarchical organisations where patronage is important. Flatter work structures are less risky. I don’t see a lot in childcare.”
Research from the University of Wollongong, in 2014, suggests that bullying is more likely to occur in workplaces that are hot, cramped, crowded and noisy (think: battery hens), and where tools and equipment are shared.
According to Bornstein, bullying doesn’t even have to be top-down. It can be sideways, among peers, and bottom-up, with subordinates bullying their bosses. “Have you ever seen kids at school bullying their teachers Theoretically the teacher has the power, but it doesn’t always play out that way.”
People accused of bullying often rationalise their behaviour – their management style wasn’t abusive and intimidating, it was “robust and forthright”. Or they ridicule the complaint by removing each action from its context. “That’s why you see headlines like, ‘Unfriending on FB is bullying?’ If the unfriending happens in isolation, no it isn’t, but if it’s part of a wider pattern, then it is.”
One thing that has changed significantly is the victim’s ability to seek justice. “Until recently, there was no law to address bullying or that even used the word ‘bullying’,” says Bornstein. “I got sick of having to tell people that their only option was to make a workers’ comp claim, or to notify WorkSafe, the regulator, and in 99.99 per cent of cases the regulators did nothing. One, because they don’t have resources to deal with it, and two, because they were more comfortable dealing with physical injuries, not psychological harm.“
Brodie Panlock had red-blonde hair and a perky smile. She loved animals, and playing basketball. After leaving high school, in 2005, she rented a flat in Hawthorn, in inner Melbourne, and started waitressing at a nearby eatery called Cafe Vamp. “She was saving money to travel overseas with her older brother,” says her father, Damian Panlock. “They were planning it all out.”
At 18, Brodie was the youngest on staff, doing 12-hour days, six days a week. At first she enjoyed it, but then, after about two months, a number of her co-workers, the manager, Nicholas Smallwood, waiter Rhys MacAlpine, and the chef Gabriel Toomey, started criticising her. The way she dressed, the way she looked. They told her she was fat and ugly. Before long, they were kicking her and spitting on her. They put Ratsak in her bag, and held her down and covered her with fish sauce. The owner, a man called Marc Luis da Cruz, turned a blind eye.
At one stage, Brodie began an intermittent relationship with Smallwood, who continued to bully her at work. Late one night in September 2006, Brodie left her apartment and began roaming the neighbourhood. She came across a party, went inside, and asked someone there if the house had a balcony. It didn’t, so she kept walking. Soon after, she found a multi-level carpark, went to the fourth floor and threw herself off. She died three days later in the Alfred Hospital.
“Brodie never told us or her brothers about the bullying,” her father says. “The night before it happened, she gave her older brother a really big hug, but he didn’t think anything of it, because she was that way anyway.”
In 2008, a coroner’s report suggested that Brodie’s suicide was a result of the bullying. The case went to the Magistrates’ Court,where the men were fined : $45,000 for Smallwood, MacAlpine $30,000; Toomey $10,000; and da Cruz, $30,000. The Panlocks believed the men should be in jail, but the law didn’t provide for that. “There were no real consequences for them,” says Brodie’s mother, Rae. So she and Damian set about lobbying for change, holding talks at schools and workplaces and meeting with the then Victorian attorney general, Robert Clark.
Damian and Rae Panlock and their son Cameron successfully lobbied for changes around bullying legislation.CREDIT: VINCE CALIGIURI
Finally, in 2011, the Victorian government introduced changes to the Crimes Act, called Brodie’s Law , which imposed a 10-year jail sentence for bullying of any kind, in the workplace or otherwise.
The Panlocks wanted the law to be adopted nationally. The federal Labor government, then led by Julia Gillard, was largely on board, but the idea was opposed by employer groups and the Liberal opposition, then led by Tony Abbott. In 2013, Gillard managed to establish national anti-bullying legislation , to be overseen by the Fair Work Commission. It wasn’t an ideal solution: the Commission can’t jail anyone or even issue fines. But it does have the power to intervene directly to have the bullying stopped, either by conciliation or via a Stop Bullying Order.
Such orders can be surprisingly prescriptive: one I read specified that the alleged perpetrator “shall not exercise on the balcony in front of, or in the vicinity of, [the victim’s] desk between 8:15am and 4:15pm”. The bully wasn’t allowed to comment on the victim’s attire or appearance, send emails or texts or even talk to the victim without someone else being within earshot. Such
For years, the Panlocks received funding from WorkSafe Victoria to give talks at schools, TAFEs and prisons. But the money has dried up, and they now work off their own bat. “We ask kids: ‘Do you even know what you are doing?’ A lot of the time, they don’t understand their own actions.” The Panlocks
In the decade since, the number of applications for Stop Bullying Orders have remained roughly steady, at between 700 and 800 a year. Only a handful of these have resulted in an order; the rest were either dismissed or mediated. (Wider data on workplace bullying is difficult to come by, since most complaints are resolved before they reach the Fair Work Commission.)
But the Commission’s provisions have significantly raised awareness around the issue. “We tell people, ‘You don’t have to put up with it,’ ” says Damian. “There is always a better job. You can always get out.”
In purely evolutionary terms , bullying works. Animals who are good at it invariably gain and maintain better access to food and mating opportunities. This explains a lot about certain top-ranking primates, such as film boss Harvey Weinstein and former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, who clearly viewed access to women, preferably young, vulnerable ones, as the spoils of office.
Unfortunately, the Darwinian benefits of bullying seem to have become part of humanity’s collective DNA, a sinister biological imperative that society has attempted to curb, if somewhat clumsily, through anti-bullying initiatives, Stop Bullying Orders and multiple-choice online-training modules. Seen like this, our mounting concern about bullying is a sign of our better natures prevailing.
But there might be another factor at play. In material terms, life for those in the West is better than at any time in human history. We suffer less pain and earn more money; we store our farm-fresh food in intelligent fridges and drive cars with heated seats. We are, by any objective measure, stupidly coddled. “As a result, we’ve become more sensitive to suffering,” says Nick Haslam, a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne. “This has made us increasingly concerned for victims of harm, especially since the 1980s, which has led to a strong move towards fairness and equality.”
“If the person being bullied gets to decide what counts as bullying ... then you have an increased risk of the concept being misapplied.”
Haslam believes this is a good thing. But he also believes it has spawned a semantic outgrowth known as “concept creep”. The original definition of bullying was formulated in 1973 by a Swedish psychologist and accomplished amateur jazz pianist named Dan Olweus. In his groundbreaking book, Aggression in the Schools: Bullies and Whipping Boys , Olweus stipulated that bullying was “unwanted aggressive behaviour that is repeated over time and involves an imbalance of power or strength”.
Ever since then, however, the concept has expanded to include all sorts of behaviour that he could never have anticipated. “Olweus saw bullying as a particular peer aggression among children,” says Haslam. “Now it includes adults and office workers and electronic media. He also said that it had to be repeated. Now, a single instance of aggression can be seen as bullying.”
Haslam is most concerned about the “subjectifying” of bullying. “If the person being bullied gets to decide what counts as bullying, if they felt bullied even though objectively this was not the case, then you have an increased risk of the concept being misapplied, which can have serious implications.”
Being called a bully is like having someone spill coffee on your reputation: it takes a long time to get the stain out. And the allegation doesn’t need to be malicious: for a behaviour to be bullying, it has to be “unreasonable”. But who’s to say what’s “unreasonable”, and in what context?
In 1973, a Swedish psychologist defined bullying as “unwanted aggressive behaviour that is repeated over time and involves an imbalance of power or strength”.CREDIT: GETTY IMAGES. POSED BY MODEL.
Shortly after her death, it was revealed that Labor senator Kimberley Kitching had been suspected, in 2021, of leaking the contents of a Labor tactics meeting to the Liberal party. (Kitching, who revelled in her nickname, Mata Hari, after the World War II German spy, had previously told journalists that she thought Penny Wong would be weak on China.) It could be argued then that, given her apparent disloyalty, cutting Kitching out of sensitive emails and strategic meetings wasn’t ostracising her or shunning her or bullying her; it was, indeed, perfectly reasonable behaviour.
Ernest Hemingway said that going bankrupt happened two ways: gradually, then suddenly. The same could be said about cultural change. Shifts in the way we think about bullying were happening in schools long before the workplace. In 2003, Australia introduced the National Safe Schools Framework, which proposed strategies to make schools safer and more inclusive, including by providing child-protection education in the curriculum, teaching teachers how to recognise abuse, and conducting police checks on school staff. Importantly, schools were encouraged to develop their own anti-bullying policies. These days, you’d be hard-pressed to find a school that doesn’t have such a policy featured front and centre on its website. Which is more than can be said for federal MPs, who aren’t subject to any code of conduct.
For some time now, these former pupils have been filtering into the workplace, like emissaries from a brighter future, to enlighten their Boomer bosses. “Younger people have different values and expectations,” says Michael Bradley, managing partner at Marque Lawyers, which acted for “Kate”, the deceased woman who accused Christian Porter of rape (Porter denies the allegations), and still represents former Australian of the Year and sex abuse survivor, Grace Tame. “They have more enlightened attitudes around diversity and fairness that then work their way up the food chain.”
“Younger people have different values and expectations. They have more enlightened attitudes around diversity and fairness that then work their way up the food chain.”
The end result looks a lot like an extinction event at the top end of town; all that bloated corporate megafauna sinking into the bubbling goop, taking their bonuses and stock options with them. In January, Jack Truong, chief executive of the construction giant James Hardie, was sacked for “intimidating and threatening” behaviour, triggering a near billion-dollar fall in the company’s market value. (Truong denies any wrongdoing.) The same month saw Cleanaway Waste Management CEO, Vik Bansal, resign in a “mutually agreed” decision with the board, following multiple allegations of bullying and harassment. (Bansal pocketed $1.5 million on his way out.)
Ian Smith was shown the door in 2015. The then 57-year-old had been brought in as CEO of Orica, the mining company, in 2012. He was known for his aggressive manner, but then the board was seeking a “change agent”, a no-nonsense bulldog capable of axing 2000 jobs and maintaining the company’s profitability. “We had to turn the whole company around,” Smith tells me on the phone. “There was incredible pressure.”
Ian Smith was shown the door at Orica following allegations of bullying and aggression. CREDIT: BRIANNE MAKIN
But the bearded, bullet-headed Smith was a handful. One former Orica staff member tells me she saw Smith “eviscerate” the company’s head of investor relations during a meeting. “It was no secret he was a bully,” she claims. Smith agreed to have his behaviour monitored, but it didn’t appear to help. In 2015, after more reports of what the company described as “excessive aggression”, he was let go.
Looking back, Smith seems to be in two, or three, or possibly even four minds about his time at Orica. Yes, he’s a “forthright person” with a “robust style”. Yes, maybe he “went too far”. And yes, more “transparency in business is a good thing”. On the other hand, his behaviour at Orica was never “dysfunctional”. “It’s not the way I behave in a normal run-of-the-mill interaction,” he tells me. And besides, sometimes shit just happens. “How do we engender resilience in these circumstances?” he asks. “That’s the other side of it.”
“There is an obvious risk that reasonable management action by an employer could be perceived as bullying by an employee who doesn’t agree with the employer’s perception.”
Lawyer Michael Bradley agrees that it’s a fine line. “Part of the difficulty is that the employment relationship is not and can never be an equal one. So there is an obvious risk that reasonable management action by an employer could be perceived as bullying by an employee who doesn’t agree with the employer’s perception.” It’s crucial, then, “that employers ensure they’re not personalising the approach they take to performance management”.
Unfortunately, it can be hard to unlearn old habits. “I was born and bred in Broken Hill,” Smith says. “And in a place like that, a bully is a person who gives it but can’t take it. In that environment, you always give robust feedback and you expect others to give you robust feedback on your feedback.” When I ask Smith why he thinks there is so much attention paid to bullying these days, he blames the media. “Bullying stories are pretty easy for you guys to report. And they also reflect the suspicion the public has about how horrible the corporate world is.”
One thing’s for sure: all the hand-wringing over bullying has changed the business landscape. “There has to be a balance between transparency [about bad behaviour] and productivity,” he says. “Boards are getting so cautious now. They are trying to avoid controversy by appointing safe people in the top jobs, at the expense of appointing people who get the job done.”
After his daughter Brodie’s death , Damian Panlock dreamt of retribution, of exacting some kind of justice on the men who had bullied her. But then he realised they weren’t worth it. “I’m a better person for not having done anything,” he tells me.
The men went on with their lives. The cafe owner, Marc Luis Da Cruz, reportedly sold his house and moved to Queensland. Nicholas Smallwood also went to Queensland. Rhys MacAlpine stayed in Melbourne. Damian doesn’t know what ended up happening to Gabriel Toomey, the chef: “All I know is that he didn’t initially turn up to the coronial inquest.”
Vamp closed in 2010, but it was cold comfort to the Panlocks. For years, they would lie awake each night, wondering what they could have done differently; why they hadn’t noticed anything, why Brodie didn’t confide in them. The pain was unrelenting; they took medication for depression.
“But you know, there was one good thing,” Damian tells me. “The night that Brodie jumped, there were two young blokes walking by, a young apprentice plumber and his mate. They actually saw her fall.” The two men had to scramble over a barbed-wire fence to get to her. “They cut themselves up pretty bad doing it,” he says. “When they got to her, they put a jacket under her head and stayed with her until the ambulance came, so she wasn’t alone.”
Damian’s voice quavers. “That just shows you what we’re all capable of. It shows you the decent side of us, as humans.”
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