David Lillis: Workplace Bullying and the Education and Workforce Select Committee

Recently I published a submission that I had made on the Health and Safety at Work Amendment Bill and indicated that I had asked to make a related verbal presentation to the Education and Workforce Select Committee (Lillis, 2026). The 5-minute presentation, given on 30 March, covered workplace bullying. See:

https://vimeo.com/showcase/10758097?video=1112765018

The presentation begins at about 42 minutes 28 seconds but all of the presentations are of great interest. These select committee submissions provide welcome opportunities to make a difference!

The Presentation

Thank you for the chance to present today and to draw attention to a gap between the intent of the Health and Safety at Work Amendment Bill and the reality of both public and private workplaces.

Amongst other research, the 2025 Public Service Census reported workplace bullying across the public service at 12.1% of workers (Public Service Commission, 2025). In Statistics NZ’s Survey of Working Life of 2018, some 300,000 people reported bullying (Stats NZ, 2018), and in 2022 Professor Bevan Catley and colleagues reported an overall prevalence of 18% from four industry sectors (see Catley, 2022). Certainly, it is present within education where I have worked, including our universities.

Bullying remains pervasive, despite education and media exposure, and too many people suffer career and reputational damage and psychosocial damage. Recognising a degree of subjectivity in identifying and reporting bullying and, recognising the difficulty of creating pragmatic and workable legislation, clearly more effective standards and expectations are necessary.

Definitions

The Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 defines “health” as including both physical and mental health, but mental health is not discussed there. It specifies standards relating to physical, biological and chemical hazards, but is silent on the most pervasive hazard - systemic psychosocial harm.

In turn, the Bill redefines critical risks and specifies the duties of officers. Of course, Persons Conducting a Business or Undertaking must prioritise critical risks but manage all risks.

The Missing Critical Risk

The Bill limits the power of revising new Schedule 1A to an amendment relating to any hazard that is consistent with the Bill’s definition of critical risk - a risk that is associated with a hazard described in Schedule 1A of the Act, or a hazard that could result in a death or notifiable injury, illness or incident. However, legislation that covers workplace harm remains inadequate if it fails to discuss mental health and fails to classify severe bullying as a statutory critical risk.

Plausible Deniability and Officer Duties

The Bill seeks to clarify and bound the diligence duties of officers such as Chief Executives and directors. However, Chief Executives and Human Resources already use the existing framework to maintain plausible deniability regarding toxic workplace cultures – essentially covering-up.

If the Bill constrains the scope of officer duties inappropriately, it will insulate senior leadership from accountability, allowing them to classify bullying as an operational issue rather than a failure of governance.

Financial Waste and the Cover-Up Culture

Bullying brings fiscal as well as psychosocial implications; in other words, financial waste.

Currently, the Crown manages the consequences of bullying, partly through health and safety interventions, but also through confidential settlements and Non-Disclosure Agreements.

However, using taxpayer money to fund confidential settlements is a gross misuse of public funds. It obscures the true scale of psychosocial harm from both WorkSafe NZ and the Office of the Auditor-General which superintends public organisations in their use of public resources and how they operate, and thereby provides protection that allows serial perpetrators to move between government agencies.

Curiously, neither the Act nor the Bill mention “Human Resources”.

Proposed Legislative Solutions

I propose six recommendations before the Bill proceeds to its second reading:

1. Agree on a clear definition of workplace bullying for use within the Act, such as the definition used by Employment New Zealand and Worksafe New Zealand, involving repeated and unreasonable behaviour that can cause physical or mental harm.

“Workplace bullying is repeated and unreasonable behaviour directed towards an employee or a group of employees that can cause physical or mental harm. Bullying can be physical, verbal, psychological or social. It could include victimising, humiliating, intimidating or threatening a person.”

2. List severe psychosocial harm and persistent workplace bullying explicitly as critical risks under the new Schedule 1A of the Bill.

3. Introduce liability for extreme cases of workplace bullying, and for Chief Executives who fail repeatedly to act on known systemic bullying.

4. Include a termination policy for proven bullies within the public sector in order to end the present culture of recycling of perpetrators.

5. Include a clause that prohibits the use of confidential settlements, thus ensuring full transparency, effective external auditing and fiscal responsibility.

6. Include a clause specifying that the roles of Human Resources are not only to support management but also to ensure that workers are engaged, productive and supported.

This Bill must be extended to include mental health and bullying as health and safety concerns. Doing so would signal that Government acknowledges the problem and takes it seriously.

References

Catley, Bevan (2022). Workplace bullying in New Zealand: A review of the research

WKS-7-Mentally-Healthy-Work-in-Aotearoa-New-Zealand-workplace-bullying-new-zealand-essay-11%20(7).pdf

Lillis, David (2026). A Submission on the Health and Safety at Work Amendment Bill

https://breakingviewsnz.blogspot.com/2026/03/david-lillis-submission-on-health-and.html

Public Service Commission (2025). Unacceptable behaviour

https://www.publicservice.govt.nz/data/public-service-census/integrity/unacceptable-behaviour

Stats NZ (2018). Survey of working life: 2018

https://www.stats.govt.nz/reports/survey-of-working-life-2018/

Dr David Lillis trained in physics and mathematics at Victoria University and Curtin University in Perth, working as a teacher, researcher, statistician and lecturer for most of his career. He has published many articles and scientific papers, as well as a book on graphing and statistics.