Where Do Our Tax Dollars Go: A Case Study (Part 18) - PSA, Union for Bullies

The views in this post are my own, based on my lived experience and personal recollection. My ERA proceedings against the Department of Internal Affairs are ongoing. All supporting documents and evidence will be disclosed through that process.

This is the story of an organisation which we all join and pay for so that it can help us if there are any issues that arise with our employers in public service. This is the story of PSA.

PSA was founded in 1913. It has grown into New Zealand's largest union, representing more than 90,000 workers across public service departments, state owned enterprises, and local government. Its own website describes what a member is supposed to be able to expect from it. Delegates are the first point of contact. Organisers exist to support delegates.

I had never had any experience with a union before I came to New Zealand. Not in the United States, not in India, not anywhere I worked across the Middle East. Where I came from, a union was something factory floors had, not something anyone in IT ever thought about. So, when I joined DIA, it never crossed my mind that I should join one too. I also believed (naively at the time) that a public service agency would be a responsible employer and would take their duty of care towards their employees seriously.

If you have read this series, you would know the history in detail. For the new readers, here is a brief summary of the events.

Simon Dannefaerd, the senior technical specialist who reported to me, began bullying me almost from the day he returned from leave, in my second week in the role. DIA would not let me raise it as a formal complaint for four months. It took my blood pressure spiking to a dangerous level in May 2025, and my GP attributing that spike directly to the bullying, before DIA treated any of it as something that warranted even a meeting. When that meeting finally happened, on 11 June 2025, I was told there would be no investigation at all. The conversation was redirected instead to my own mental wellbeing, whether I could manage the stress of the job. I went to Chief Executive Paul James after that, because I had run out of anywhere else inside DIA to take it. Two days later I was placed on special leave over a diary note I had never been shown or asked about.

It was a colleague of mine, Pākehā, who introduced me to the union. She had raised her own complaint about Simon Dannefaerd on 12 May 2025, and PSA had given her a delegate immediately, the ordinary channel, the way it's supposed to work. She and her delegate talked often as her case moved forward. In one of those conversations, she told her delegate what was happening to me too, including something Simon Dannefaerd had said, that he couldn't say anything to me because he was a big white man and I was a little Indian woman.

PSA doesn't normally let someone join in the middle of a live conflict; her delegate told her. But an exception could be made for me, because Simon Dannefaerd was causing me psychological harm and was a known bully inside PSA. Before I had ever paid PSA a cent, before I had asked them for anything, they already knew what he was. Knowing that, they let me join.

So I joined in June 2025, and I wrote to PSA almost immediately, to request them to represent me. At first, a delegate agreed to support me, a very kind person who was horrified at what has been happening to me at DIA. Then Janine Bridgeman found out. That delegate was instructed to stop, and all delegates were told not to mention my name in PSA discussions at all, as though I were something to be managed around rather than a member they represented. I only learned this later through documents later shared with me by DIA or through employees in PSA.

Kylie Matson joined PSA that same month too, in the middle of the exact same dispute, the one with me. Nobody asked her to explain herself first. She and Simon Dannefaerd went to Janine Bridgeman directly, together, and Bridgeman took them both on. This is the kind of direct involvement PSA's own website says is a delegate's job, not an organiser's. Typically, there would be a reason for this exception. It seems to me that when two Pākehā team members wanted to file retaliatory complaints against their brown manager, PSA just took their word for it and didn't need one. I don't know if there's a personal connection between Janine Bridgeman and Simon Dannefaerd outside PSA. I don't have anything that tells me one way or another. But given how completely and how quickly Janine took his side, and Kylie Matson's, over mine, it's a question I can't help asking.

Both of their complaints against me were lodged on 18 June 2025. That was the same day I was placed on special leave.

Eventually, DIA appointed an external investigator, Johanna Drayton, to examine all three complaints as one process, mine against Simon Dannefaerd, and theirs against me. Through her interview transcripts with Drayton, I came to know that Kylie had also joined in "the middle of a conflict," but she didn't need an exception to be represented. I don't know what made the difference for her. Whether it was her closeness to Simon, or something else entirely, I can't say.

Simon Dannefaerd didn't even have to ask. He told Johanna Drayton he had not originally intended to complain about me at all, that senior members at PSA raised it with him themselves and advised him to make it formal. He is also Pākehā.

Meanwhile, when I requested PSA for representation, I was told my membership had commenced after the relevant events had begun. I wrote to PSA on 2 July 2025, and asked by name for Fleur Fitzsimons, or the appropriate senior representative, to be told what I was facing. I told them exactly what that was, a bullying complaint about a colleague who by then had two active investigations against him and a known history of prior complaints, while I had been placed on discretionary leave, isolated from my team, and pressured through HR processes that hadn't followed fair or timely standards. I asked them to reconsider their decision to support me.

An organiser acknowledged receipt the next morning and said it had been passed to the appropriate organiser and assistant secretariat. Nothing came from PSA after that for more than a week. I wrote again on 10 July 2025, and asked for Fleur Fitzsimons by name a second time, saying I would deeply appreciate even a brief discussion with her. I was told again that my email had been forwarded and an update requested. Fleur Fitzsimons never responded, not to the first letter, not to the second.

I also requested PSA to represent me against Andy James's complaint, since DIA treated that as a different matter, one that wasn't even ongoing when I first joined PSA. When an answer finally came from PSA, it came from an organiser named Josh Trlin. PSA would not support me, he wrote, now or in the future. I don't know why he chose that phrase rather than limiting his answer to the Simon Dannefaerd matter alone, unless he meant it to cover everything, Simon, Kylie, Andy James, all of it. Why would PSA even treat these as part of the same conflict, when DIA itself was treating the Andy James complaint as something entirely separate from my complaint about Simon? The way I see it, DIA and PSA were each actively working against me in supporting all retaliation complaints against me.

Refused by PSA at every stage, I paid for a lawyer myself. Close to twenty thousand dollars, money I did not have spare, while everything above was still actively running against me. I understood then why so many people cannot afford to see a case like this through. Employment lawyers in New Zealand are expensive, and an organisation that never has to account publicly for what it spends fighting a single member has very little incentive to stop.

By October, I had stopped asking PSA to represent me. I started asking them to investigate themselves instead. I formally complained about Janine Bridgeman directly. I told them her conduct broke the rules PSA had written for itself, the duty to advance a member's interests individually, the authority every member has to be represented, the entitlement to representation that comes with full membership, a delegate's duty to actually represent the person in front of them. I asked PSA to suspend her pending an independent investigation, one external to the Wellington team that had handled everything so far, since that same team was the one I was complaining about. I asked them to disclose who had known about her involvement and who had authorised it. Nothing came of any of it. I repeatedly raised the complaints, asked them questions, which they declined to respond to and did not find anything wrong with Janine’s conduct after speaking to her and some other people. So their investigation was similar to what DIA did. They were the investigators, witnesses and decision makers.

Through Privacy Act disclosures, I later found that Janine Bridgeman had been in direct contact with DIA HR around the time the decision was made to place me on leave, a step that appears to have been influenced by her communications with them. I wonder why Viktoriia Bragina would let a PSA organiser influence her in taking HR decisions in a conflict between DIA employees. Does PSA routinely intervene in decisions like that as they support one PSA member against another?

Then, on 6 November 2025, an email arrived out of nowhere from Janine Bridgeman. An invitation to a PSA rally I had never registered for. It was sent to my personal email, alongside DIA staff at their work addresses. I had no reason to be on that list. She had no reason to include me. It seemed to me like an intimidation tactic, a form of bullying, showing up in my inbox from the person representing both people who had complained about me, for something I had never asked to be part of.

I have been writing to the complaints team to no avail. So I wrote to the National Secretaries, Duane Leo and Fleur Fitzsimons, first in November 2025. That was never acknowledged. After months of inaction on their behalf, my advocate, Allan Halse, wrote to PSA's National Secretaries, Duane Leo and Fleur Fitzsimons, in March 2026, then again in May 2026. One letter was finally acknowledged about a month later, however, no action has been taken since. Fleur Fitzsimons had already gone unanswered to me directly twice by then, in July 2025. This made three more.

I am uploading a document with screenshots as supporting evidence. Access it here - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IT1Te7R7wcbjarj8C7w1jCNSqKV8l52T/view?usp=drive_link.

Readers can see the details of my experience through these documents and maybe help me understand why Fleur Fitzsimons and Duane Leo would not engage with us. Are they scared of Janine Bridgeman? Is she bullying them the way this series has documented Simon Dannefaerd bullying people at DIA, so afraid of retaliation that they won't act? In his case, there is a documented pattern. Viktoriia Bragina told me herself that Fraser Buchanan had raised a complaint about him. Andy James told me Simon had yelled at him on Andy's very first day. And I witnessed his conduct toward my colleague myself, the one whose complaint against him opens this piece. In Janine Bridgeman's case, we don't have that kind of pattern on record, because PSA doesn't release data about complaints made against its own organisers. We can't OIA them either, since PSA isn't a public service agency under the Crown.

What I can tell you is that in the formal notice my advocate sent PSA, this line is stated plainly. In every instance where PSA made a representational choice, it supported Pākehā members over me. PSA has never disputed that sentence. I have now filed a complaint about all of this with the Human Rights Commission. It is still open. What happens next will show whether the Commission treats what I've described here as what it seems to me to be.

I don't know what to call this if it isn't racism. I don't understand why an organiser representing the man I had complained about would also be the one asking DIA's HR whether I had been placed on leave yet, or why HR would engage with that question from her at all. I also don't know how many PSA members have requested them for support and have been treated the same way I was.

If you are a PSA member and you believe you've been let down the way I was, you don't have to accept that nothing can be done. In March 2026, the Employment Court ordered MERAS, the midwives' union, to pay $50,000 to a member after finding it had breached its duty of good faith toward her by supporting another member's complaint against her instead of representing her own. That case went through the Employment Relations Authority first. I am happy to help PSA members who want to pursue the same path.

In the next part of this series, I will share updates on how DIA continues to "investigate" my sexual harassment complaints against Andy James and Fraser Buchanan, and Andy James's own complaint against me, even though none of us is currently a DIA employee. Watch this space for the role DIA HR has played in retaliatory complaints against me as a whistleblower who spoke up against corruption and bullying.