There’s a lot of complicated details surrounding the allegations that the deputy prime minister’s chief of staff has levelled against her boss. Peeking into broken relationships is rarely nice, and that includes professional relationships in politics. As the truism goes, there are always two sides.
Richard Marles’ chief of staff, Jo Tarnawsky, alleges that in a 45-minute phone call on 30 April after she raised a complaint about other staff behaviour, her employer told her to find another job. She further alleges that wasn’t fair.
Tarnawsky says she raised claims that other colleagues had undermined and ostracised her. She alleges Marles initially said he’d heard “no negative talking” and then a day later told her he’d had concerns about her performance for a year and she should find another job.
Her lawyer, the Marque Lawyers managing partner Michael Bradley, argues that amounts to adverse action – being punished, instead of protected, for raising a concern.
Tarnawsky further alleges that since May she’s been barred from her office without 24 hours’ notice and has been asked – and has refused – to hand over the code to her office safe, which contains classified documents signed over specifically to her. And she says she hasn’t heard from Marles in five months.
Through his spokesperson, Marles has said that “a number of the assertions and recollections are contested” and that he had her welfare in mind “at all times” – something he later restated himself in parliament, along with praise for the employee he first hired when he was a parliamentary secretary 12 years ago.
In answer to an opposition question in parliament on Thursday, Marles said that “in this moment, I feel deeply sad that events have got to where they have”.
“This is obviously very difficult,” he said. “Let me say that, in the way in which I’ve tried to manage this, I have done so with Jo’s welfare in mind at every moment.”
He did not respond to her allegation that he has not contacted her in five months.
There’s a curious fact in all this that’s easy to overlook.
There was, it seems, a cultural clash
Tarnawsky has not been sacked. Officially, she remains employed as the deputy prime minister’s chief of staff. According to her version of events, steps have been taken to ensure she can’t do the job. But she has not actually been terminated.
This raises a question: why not?
Tarnawsky says before she raised her complaint, relations between her and some staff had become strained. According to others familiar with how the office ran, her way of doing things did not always go down well with some colleagues.
She was a well-regarded bureaucrat and diplomat who’d done a stint as Marles’ chief of staff in the Gillard government and returned after the 2022 election from the office of the governor general David Hurley. There was, it seems, a cultural clash in the office.
Whatever has ensued in the office in recent months, it’s clear the relationship between the deputy PM and his chief has been irrevocably damaged. Both Tarnawsky and her boss acknowledge she can’t work for him any more. And yet, her employment status remains unresolved.
Despite being shocked by the 30 April phone call, Tarnawsky says she offered immediately to try to find another job. She says she asked for time to do that and to “depart with dignity”.
But that has proven more difficult than she expected. She alleges that the government’s response to her situation has only increased the pressure.
There is an understanding in government that when trust is broken between a minister and a chief of staff, there’s no coming back from it. There’s also an expectation that, in those circumstances, the chief will just accept their fate and depart. Certainly, the government expected Tarnawsky to agree to go – and quietly – offering her temporary employment and counselling support to help.
But while she says she was happy to find a job, she drew the line at signing anything described as a “mutual termination agreement”. She argues it is Marles who wants her to go and that it wasn’t “mutual”. Nevertheless, the heart of her legal complaint is simpler than that. She alleges she raised a complaint and was punished for it and she says that wasn’t fair.
After some back and forth in which lawyers became involved, she accepted a specially created temporary job while she searched for something permanent outside politics. She has been doing that job for three months. It expired on 30 September.
Some will say, why does it matter?
Still, Marles hasn’t terminated her, nor has any other solution been found to the limbo in which she appears to be stuck, other than the proposed “mutual” agreement.
Perhaps the reluctance to terminate her job is out of kindness. Marles has said how much he admires her social conscience and how grateful he is for the work she has done in his employ. Perhaps someone in government thinks terminating her would be a bad look – for her or for them. Perhaps there’s some other reason. She says it’s the lack of resolution that has caused her the most pain.
No doubt some will say, so what? It’s an individual employment dispute. Why does it matter?
Well the now very public stalemate has shone a light on the role of the new Parliamentary Workplace Support Service and what, exactly, it is supposed to do. The PWSS emerged from that searing national public reckoning towards the end of the Morrison government with how women in particular, and staff in general, are treated in parliamentary workplaces.
In relation to human resources issues, the PWSS’s establishing legislation says it is there to “advise and assist” both members of parliament and the staff they employ.
In this case, Tarnawsky was given access to free counselling through the PWSS – until she was informed there was a limit and she had exceeded it and was being cut off, a determination ultimately reversed after she engaged a lawyer.
But while it was providing her counselling services, the PWSS also engaged its own lawyers to deal with her, having received a referral about the employment situation from Marles. That seems quite a complicated load to manage.
When the legislation was introduced to establish the PWSS, the finance minister, Katy Gallagher, described it as “an independent human resources entity for staff and parliamentarians”.
She said it would provide professional development and training for staff, support and resources to “professionalise” office management practices, access to coaching and early intervention supports including “policy, process and guidance to manage suspension and termination decisions”, and training and guidance on the code of conduct and behavioural standards.
She did not mention resolving disputes. Yet that is one of the functions contained in its legislation. What’s more, it is empowered to “advise and assist” both sides.
It’s hard to see how the PWSS can resolve complaints independently if it is advising and assisting both parties. And yet, that’s what it’s doing in the case of Tarnawsky’s dispute with Marles.
The public focus on this dispute might help clear up how that works.
Because on the face of it, there’s an obvious question: how does an organisation work for both sides in an intractable dispute and resolve it without benefiting one side more?
Karen Middleton is Guardian Australia’s political editor
