Where Do Our Tax Dollars Go: A Case Study (Part 13) - It Only Takes One

The views expressed in this article are my own. They are based on publicly available information, published government data, and my professional experience in public sector transformation.

When a public servant is being harmed at work, they are told there are places to go.

WorkSafe New Zealand, because workplace harm is a health and safety matter. The Public Service Commission, because it sets the standards for how the public service treats its people. The Human Rights Commission, if the treatment carries a thread of discrimination. The Privacy Commissioner, if personal information has been mishandled along the way.

Four agencies. Four funded bodies. Four doors that are supposed to open.

In this article I am going to follow one of them. I have chosen WorkSafe, because its mandate is the plainest and its data is the most public. But I want you to hold the others in mind, because the conclusion I reach about WorkSafe is not unique to WorkSafe. You could walk through any one of those doors and arrive in the same place.

That is the thing I want you to understand before we begin. This is not a story about one bad agency. It is a demonstration of a principle. One agency acting on the mandate it already holds is enough to change the outcome for every person currently caught in the loop. And if that is true, the question that follows is one every one of these bodies should have to answer.

I contacted WorkSafe on 25 June 2025.

I did it because that is what you are supposed to do. There is a programme called Mentally Healthy Work. There is a notification form. I filled it in. I described what was happening to me at work. I named the harm. I did not include everything, because there was no way to attach everything. I assumed they would ask me for the rest. So I asked them if there was an option of emailing them the documented evidence.

An automated reply confirmed they had received my email. That was the last I heard from WorkSafe for five weeks. No call. No email asking what had happened or what I had experienced or what I could show them. Nothing.

On 30 July 2025, at 1:49 in the afternoon, I received an email.

WorkSafe had completed what they called a desk-based workplace assessment. They had contacted the Department of Internal Affairs. The Department had provided documentation. WorkSafe reviewed that documentation and concluded that DIA was adequately managing the risk of psychosocial harm in the workplace.

They directed me to my GP. They suggested I call or text 1737. Then they told me they would now close the file.

I read that email several times because I couldn't believe it. I thought it must be a mistake, there must be another step. But it was a final verdict.

At no point during that process did anyone from WorkSafe ask me what had happened. The assessment of whether my employer was managing the risk was built entirely on information provided by my employer. I was the person who reported the harm. I was never asked to describe it.

I want to be precise about what WorkSafe actually tested. Their question was whether DIA had systems and policies in place. DIA produced its policies. WorkSafe looked at the policies and was satisfied.

WorkSafe publishes its own data on this. That data shows that forty three percent of New Zealand employers have no policy at all to manage bullying and harassment. So the bar DIA cleared, having a document, is the same bar that nearly half of all employers in this country would fail. The document existed. WorkSafe checked for the document. Whether it had protected anyone was a different question. That question was not asked.

I had raised a formal bullying complaint months earlier. My EAP counsellor had recommended in writing that I be separated from the person I had named. That recommendation was ignored. I had documented the harm over months. None of that was part of WorkSafe's assessment, because none of it was sought.

The file was closed in five weeks based on a desk-based review of my employer's paperwork.

WorkSafe's own published position explains why. It states that it is unlikely to intervene in one-off cases, that people experiencing harm should speak to their employer first, and that because bullying concerns often involve employment relations issues, the Employment Relations Authority may be better placed to deal with them. What happens when employees go through the ERA process is another post in this series.

So the regulator created to enforce the duty to protect workers from psychosocial harm directs the harmed worker back to the employer who owed the duty, and then onward to a separate forum to argue it out alone.

I understand there are practical reasons why an agency might not investigate every individual complaint. Investigations take time. They can add stress for everyone involved. These are genuine considerations. But there is a consequence that follows when redirection becomes the standard answer to every case, before anyone has heard the facts.

When every case is redirected, no case stays with the regulator. When no case stays, no case is ever placed beside the next one. When cases are never placed beside each other, a pattern never forms. When a pattern never forms, nothing crosses the threshold that would require action.

The redirection is not a gap. It is a mechanism. It is what prevents the evidence from gathering into something that demands a response. Each worker takes their experience somewhere else, alone. The regulator never has to hold the whole picture in its hands.

There is a question that follows from this that I cannot answer. Neither can WorkSafe. Or any other agency, any other data source in the nation.

How many New Zealanders take their own lives each year in circumstances where workplace harm played a significant role?

We do not know.

In 2022 WorkSafe commissioned a study that reviewed coronial findings between 2017 and 2021. Of 1,678 findings examined, 197, around twelve percent, were assessed as work-related. Within those, seventeen were cases where work was found to play a predominant role, central to explaining the death.

Seventeen.

In case you are wondering, the number that is acceptable in any society is zero.

Seventeen is seventeen times something that was never supposed to happen once. And each of those deaths did not end with the person who died. It moved outward into a family, into friendships, into a team, into a community. The count already understates the harm.

And seventeen is not even a reliable count.

It is what surfaced in the closed coronial findings reviewable for one study, over one period. Before that study, in WorkSafe's own words, there was no robust consideration of work-related suicide in New Zealand at all. Official data collection in this area is scarce. The researchers recommended that an agency such as WorkSafe routinely assess these deaths and keep an official record so the prevalence could be monitored over time.

That record was not built. Why would you measure the existence of a problem but not its size?

The reason the number does not exist is the same reason my file was closed in five weeks. An agency that redirects individual cases does not accumulate them. An agency that does not accumulate them does not count them. An agency that does not count them can say, accurately, that it does not have the evidence to act.

We are looking at a problem whose size was never measured, by the one body created to measure it.

Australia uses the same legal framework we do. New Zealand commentators have noted this directly. What differs is what gets done with it. WorkSafe's own research records that in Australia, Safe Work Australia routinely reviews coronial findings and codes work-related deaths, including deaths by suicide, as a matter of course. Across Australian jurisdictions psychosocial risk is now actively regulated, with some regulators requiring regular reporting on psychosocial matters from employers. Same law. Different behaviour. Different outcomes.

The Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 in New Zealand is unambiguous. Psychosocial harm is a workplace risk. Employers have a legal duty to manage it. WorkSafe exists to ensure that duty is met.

WorkSafe, the Public Service Commission, the Human Rights Commission and the Privacy Commissioner are funded, between them, by tens to hundreds of millions of dollars of public money every year. They are funded to be there for the worker who is in exactly the situation I was in.

Now consider what would change if WorkSafe treated even a small number of public sector cases as what they are under its own Act. The employer would be required to demonstrate a safe system of work. That demonstration would require data. That data would have to be collected. Collection would make patterns visible for the first time. Visible patterns would require the Public Service Commission to account for them. That accountability would make HR processes answerable. One decision made differently at one point changes everything downstream.

These agencies publish the data. WorkSafe's own survey found that thirty five percent of workers reported being exposed to at least one offensive behaviour in the previous twelve months.

In April 2025 WorkSafe released its first ever good practice guidance on managing psychosocial risk at work. The New Zealand Institute of Safety Management noted it arrived quietly, with no announcement to the sector bodies working in this space. What NZISM also noted was that during the development of that same guidance, WorkSafe disbanded the internal team responsible for understanding and building capability around mentally healthy work.

The notification pathway stayed open. You could still file a concern. I did, in June 2025. What was no longer there was the specialist team that was supposed to know what to do with it.

In March 2026 the Public Service Commission released a new Code of Conduct. When asked whether it had developed any framework to evaluate whether the Code was working, any monitoring mechanism, any key performance indicators, the answer was the same across every question. The information does not exist.

One agency published guidance and dismantled the team that understood the problem. Another published a code with no way of knowing whether anyone follows it. Both did it within twelve months of each other. Both used public money to do it.

I do not think that is a coincidence. In my experience, across everything I have documented in this series, this is a pattern. And I do not believe it is unique to these two agencies.

And this is where I return to where we began.

I chose WorkSafe for this article. But I knocked on the other doors too.

I contacted the Human Rights Commission in June 2025. I was seeking an investigation. The response I received explained that the Commission does not investigate. It uses dispute resolution. It talks to the people involved and helps them communicate with each other. I was directed to Employment New Zealand instead.

I contacted the Public Service Commission in October 2025. PSC is the overseeing body for the public service. It sets the standards. I told them what was happening. They told me to go to Paul James, the Chief Executive of DIA, because he was my employer. I told them that going to Paul James was what started the retaliation. They told me to go to the ERA.

PSC released its new Code of Conduct on 30 March 2026. I was dismissed on 31 March 2026.

I filed a complaint with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner in 2025. In October they told me it would likely take at least six months to assign it to an investigator. In May 2026 they wrote to apologise for the delay. It has still not been assigned.

I went to WorkSafe. You have already read what happened there.

Four agencies. Every one of them funded by the public to stop exactly what was being done to me. And every one of them sent me to the ERA. What happens to people once they get there is its own story, and I will tell it later in this series.

Think about what that means. The same psychosocial harm these four agencies exist to prevent is waiting for the worker at the end of the road the four agencies sent them down. The wait, which can run for years, is harm. The silence that so many are worn down into signing is harm. The system does not resolve the injury. It extends it, and then it buries it.

So I keep asking.

Was WorkSafe right to close my file in five weeks without ever asking me what happened, because my employer had a policy on paper.

Was the Human Rights Commission right to tell me it could not investigate, only mediate, and send me to Employment New Zealand.

Was the Public Service Commission right to send me back to the Chief Executive whose organisation was the problem, and then, when I said so, to send me to the ERA.

Was the Privacy Commissioner right to take more than six months to assign an investigator, while the dismissal it was meant to scrutinise had already happened.

Or is the truth simpler than any of that. That every one of these agencies already knows it can send the worker somewhere else, and that somewhere else is always the ERA, and the ERA is where so many people are worn down until they sign their silence away.

It only takes one of them to do the job it is funded to do. Just one. And the entire structure that moved me from one closed door to the next, all the way to a forum designed to outlast me, stops working the way it was built to.

I am still waiting to see which one it will be.

If you are an agency, a ministry, or a person with the authority to change this and the seriousness to act on it, you can reach me directly through this site.

This article discusses workplace harm and suicide. If any of it is close to home, please reach out to someone you trust. You can call or text 1737 at any time.