One general manager settled a workplace dispute for me in less than an hour, and HR never needed to hear about it. At the Department of Internal Affairs, I took my concerns to HR on 4 February 2025 and was offered an informal pathway that went on for months. This post sets out how DIA HR handled my complaint, based on my lived experience and personal recollection, and puts ten questions to PSC HR.

Two white men cleared two other white men of sexual harassment complaints brought by their brown colleague. They never asked her a single question. They never approached a single witness. It was five months after DIA had already dismissed her. Here is what their General Manager Human Resources wrote to explain his decision.

A case management update in my ERA proceedings against DIA. Simon George's letter closed out three matters, including my sexual harassment allegations against two DIA managers, without investigating any of them. DIA is now asking the Authority to stop me writing about it. And PSC wants out of the case entirely, even though it was DIA's dismissal timing that pulled PSC into it in the first place.

PSA is the union we all pay into so it can stand beside us if our employer fails us. Two Pākehā colleagues who complained about me got an organiser without asking twice. I got refused, then ignored, for months. This is what actually happened.

For eighteen months I have been inside a process built to make sense to lawyers and almost nobody else. Now I am registering as an employment relations advocate, so other people do not have to learn it the way I had to.

A role named in an official transfer document. A dismissal letter signed the day before that transfer took effect. Two government agencies, each insisting she was never their responsibility. Part 18 asks why neither DIA nor the Public Service Commission has ever answered for the gap between those two facts.

On 2 July, an independent review confirmed exactly what I have spent the past several months documenting, based on what I saw firsthand while working inside a government programme. New Zealand's public service overhaul is meant to save $2.4 billion, and nobody can yet say what the automation behind it will actually cost.

There is a man in New Zealand who currently has around seventy active ERA cases. Each one of those cases is a person who was bullied at work, pushed out, silenced, or dismissed. Each one of them looked for help and found, in most cases, that there was nowhere else to go.