Where Do Our Tax Dollars Go: A Case Study (Part 16) – Nobody’s Job
The author is a party to live proceedings before the Employment Relations Authority. Nothing in this series constitutes legal argument or formal evidence. All content reflects the author's personal experience and recollection.
There is a man in New Zealand who currently has around seventy active ERA cases, and many more clients beyond them. 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.
The man is in his seventies. He has been doing this for over twelve years under his current organisation, and for years before that through the union movement. In that time, he has helped approximately fourteen hundred workers navigate a system that was never designed with them in mind. Apart from minimal drawings in some periods, he has never drawn a wage. His organisation survived on commitment because there was certainly no money. This brave man works on a no-win no-fee basis for most clients because most clients cannot afford anything else. Surveys of the workers who came to him found that 89 percent had depression, anxiety, or PTSD at the time they first made contact. He is not a counsellor, and he is not a lawyer. He is an advocate who charges no fees until a case is won, in a country where legal representation costs hundreds of dollars an hour and most bullied workers have already lost their income, their health, and months or years of their lives. He filled the role of support person because that role was otherwise vacant.
He is one person doing the job of many institutions.
His name is Allan Halse. He runs CultureShift NZ. If you are being bullied at work right now and you have run out of options, his website is allanhalse.com.
New Zealand has a Public Service Commissioner with a mandate for workplace integrity. It has WorkSafe, a regulator with specific responsibilities under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 for managing psychosocial harm. It has unions whose entire stated purpose is protecting workers. It has HR departments in every government agency, funded by the taxpayer, staffed by professionals, operating under written policies that use the word bullying. It has the Human Rights Commission, which exists to address discrimination and harassment. It has the Employment Relations Authority, the body workers must turn to when every internal process has failed them. Every one of those institutions exists, is resourced, and is legally required to act.
What Allan Halse has built and sustained over more than a decade is extraordinary by any measure. He has represented approximately fourteen hundred workers, worked hundred-hour weeks for years, and is still carrying seventy cases in ERA. That record deserves recognition. It also demands a question. When one person's extraordinary commitment is the primary answer New Zealand has to workplace bullying, that is not an inspiring story about one man. It is a damning reflection on every institution that should have built something better and did not.
The government's own Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment released a report on workplace bullying in 2021 and concluded that businesses are not managing bullying as a health and safety risk, that employment relations pathways for responding to bullying are not working well, that the requirements for raising complaints are inappropriate and unclear, and that the employment relations pathway can be re-traumatising for complainants. That was the government's own assessment of its own system. Nothing substantively changed after it was published.
Allan has argued for years that the ERA cannot rule on the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015, that WorkSafe has never prosecuted a single workplace bullying case despite sufficient evidence of serious psychological harm in multiple cases, and that workers are therefore forced through an employment relations pathway designed for dismissals and contractual disputes, not for the sustained pattern of harm that bullying represents. Allan has raised this with Ministers. He has raised it at the Parliament. He has raised it in ERA hearings and in the media. The response has been consistent: acknowledgement, then inaction.
Allan does not see isolated incidents. He sees the same organisations appearing in his caseload repeatedly. He sees the same tactics deployed against different workers in different roles across different agencies. The complaint is minimised. The complainant is investigated. The process takes long enough that the worker breaks before it concludes. The institution closes ranks. When someone names that pattern clearly and persistently enough to be effective, the response is also consistent.
Allan Halse has been the target of no fewer than five strategic lawsuits against public participation, all brought by former employers of his clients. These are known as SLAPPs, strategic litigation against public participation, used to financially exhaust the person speaking out rather than to resolve the underlying dispute on its merits. The case that eventually led to the liquidation of his original company began in 2018 when he advocated for a rest home worker, the case settled, and the rest home then pursued him through the ERA for seven years across seven ERA determinations and seven Employment Court decisions. He spoke publicly about clients who were at risk of suicide because he believed silence enabled the harm. The ERA fined him $52,000 for it. The rest home's legal costs over that same period were funded, in part, from public money. The worker whose case started all of this had long since moved on.
Counter-allegations were made against Allan in the course of that campaign. They will be made against anyone who stands up loudly enough and long enough. They were made against me at the Department of Internal Affairs. They are made against the majority of workers who come to Allan for help, after those workers raise concerns. The allegation directed at the person who names the bullying is not a coincidence. It is a method. It is the same method documented across case after case in this series: counter-allege, investigate the complainant, make the process expensive enough that the person cannot sustain it. New Zealand has no mechanism to formally distinguish between a genuine complaint and a retaliatory one, and that gap is not an oversight.
Allan has described workplace bullying as the last taboo, and he draws the parallel with domestic violence. Forty years ago, domestic violence was not named in public life in New Zealand. There was no language built around it, no law designed specifically for it, no institutional expectation that something meaningful would be done. Then people started speaking, and kept speaking, until the silence became untenable and the harm became undeniable. Law changed. Language changed.
I know this from both sides of that parallel. I spent twenty years in a home where coercion, isolation, and the systematic dismantling of my credibility were daily realities. When I walked into the Department of Internal Affairs and experienced sustained bullying, I recognised the architecture immediately. The setting had changed. The toolkit had not. Isolate the person. Attack their credibility. Control the narrative. Deploy every available institutional mechanism to protect the person causing the harm and exhaust the person naming it. The damage is comparable. Workers lose their health, their income, their careers, and their grip on what is real. Some lose their lives. Allan's clients have included people who were contemplating suicide as a direct consequence of what was being done to them at work.
There is also a cost that every New Zealand taxpayer is carrying, whether they have been told about it or not.
When workplace bullying occurs in a public sector agency, the taxpayer funds the HR department that mishandles the complaint. The taxpayer funds the external investigator appointed to examine it. The taxpayer funds the lawyers defending the institution at mediation and at the ERA. The taxpayer funds the sick leave, the replacement staff, and eventually the settlement. The capability that walks out the door because a capable worker could not survive what was being done to them is also drawn from the public account. Earlier in this series I documented how the Department of Internal Affairs spent close to a million dollars pursuing a single whistleblower through the ERA. That figure is not the cost of the bullying. That is the cost of defending and concealing it. All they had to do was the right thing by one person. Instead, they spent close to a million dollars of public money making sure they did not have to.
Consider what that worker faces at the end of the process, if they last long enough to reach it. Under the Employment Relations Act, compensation for hurt, humiliation, and injury to feelings is assessed in three bands. Band 3, reserved for the highest level of harm, starts at $50,000 and has rarely exceeded $100,000 in published determinations. That amount is taxable. It does not cover legal costs. It does not replace lost income, lost career trajectory, or the years of proceedings that preceded it. The ERA also frequently declines to categorise severe bullying as the severe harm it plainly is, which means workers whose lives have been comprehensively dismantled are sent home with Band 1 or Band 2 awards while the institution that dismantled them bills close to a million dollars in legal fees funded by the taxpayer. A friend told me that if what happened to me had happened in the United States, I would be sitting on millions of dollars in compensation. That is not because the harm would have been greater there. It is because New Zealand has decided, in law and in practice, that this harm is worth less here. This is not a system that creates consequences for bullying. It is a system that absorbs them.
Australia made a different choice. The Fair Work Commission provides a specific legal pathway for workers experiencing bullying. A worker can apply for a stop bullying order. It is a formal acknowledgement in law that bullying is a health and safety issue requiring its own dedicated remedy, separate from the employment relations framework that was not designed for it. New Zealand has not built that. Every worker here without legal representation, without financial resources to sustain a multi-year process, without an Allan Halse willing to take their case on no-win no-fee terms, is navigating a system that the government's own research confirmed is not working.
What would working actually look like. These are not radical proposals. They are the minimum conditions for a process that could be described as fair.
ERA proceedings should be recorded, so that what is said under oath carries the accountability that sworn testimony is supposed to carry in every other part of the legal system.
Perjury in employment proceedings should carry real consequences. Right now, it doesn’t which means the same tactics used in the workplace, retrospective allegations, retaliatory investigations, and false testimony, can continue unchecked inside the very process meant to stop them.
WorkSafe should enforce the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 as it applies to psychosocial harm. It is already legally required to do this. It has not done it in any consistent or meaningful way.
Senior leadership including CEs in public sector agencies should be subject to formal upward feedback processes. Persistently poor results on culture and safety should trigger independent review, not be absorbed and filed.
The code of conduct that governs public servants should not be a document. It should be a compliance framework with real consequences for the agencies and the individuals who authorise breaches of it, not for the workers who name them.
Internal bullying complaint processes should not sit within HR functions that report to the same leadership whose conduct is in question.
The right to a psychologically safe workplace should be treated as a fundamental right, not an aspiration that organisations are permitted to ignore without consequence.
New Zealand should follow Australia in creating a dedicated stop-bullying pathway that treats this as the health and safety issue the law already says it is.
The knowledge has been here for years. The MBIE confirmed it. Allan confirmed it. The workers confirmed it with their health, their silence, and sometimes their lives. We are still waiting for the government that decides the cost of inaction is higher than the cost of acting. The question for New Zealanders is how long we are prepared to keep waiting.
Allan Halse has been asking that question through every case, every hearing, every worker he sat beside who had no one else. He has funded the fight from his own resources. He has done it while being sued, fined, liquidated, and labelled. Allan could have retired. He had earned that.
Allan Halse is still asking the question that I am also asking through this series. We owe him the courtesy of asking it ourselves, loudly enough that someone in a position to answer cannot keep pretending not to hear.
You will find a great deal written about Allan online, positive and negative. The persistence and volume of the attempts to discredit, bankrupt, and silence him will tell you something important about the system he has been challenging.
Draw your own conclusions.
If you are experiencing workplace bullying and have run out of options, allanhalse.com is a place to start.
There are other advocates and no-win no-fee employment lawyers in New Zealand doing important work for bullied workers, and this article does not diminish that. It focuses on Allan Halse because his record, his methods, and what has been done to him in response together tell a story about what this country does to the people who refuse to look away.
