Anatomy of a deflection: How Bandt palms off questions on party bullying allegations

Greens party leader Adam Bandt has defended his party’s handling of bullying allegations against Senator Dorinda Cox and declared the embattled West Australian has his full support.

But Bandt and his deputy, Senator Mehreen Faruqi, repeatedly ducked questions on Monday about the party leadership’s response to the allegations brought to his office by former Cox staffers, deferring to parliament’s support service.

Watch how the Greens leaders deflected questions at a press conference in Canberra:

Last month, this masthead revealed that 20 staff had left Cox’s office over three years, with several lodging formal complaints alleging a hostile culture where employees felt unsafe.

Four former staff – Aunty Esther Montgomery, Sarah Quinton, Vivienne Glance and Lou Hendricks – put their names to allegations against Cox, while another 11 spoke anonymously.

The allegations included that Cox had made staff cry, that they had become distressed after confrontations with her in the office and that she had bullied staff. Complaints were made directly to Bandt’s office in 2022 and, subsequently, to the Parliamentary Workplace Support Service (PWSS), which was established in October 2023.

Cox, a Yamatji-Noongar woman, said in a statement last month that there was “disappointingly significant missing context” in reporting about her office, which was responsible for five portfolios and Australia’s largest electorate.

But, she added, “as the employer, I take responsibility for any shortcomings in what has occurred during this period and I apologise for the distress this may have caused”.

On Monday, Bandt refused to answer questions about what he and his office had done about the staff exodus, and in relation to the complaints about the senator.

“We take a very clear approach to this. Everyone is entitled to a safe workplace. And when a number of complaints several years ago were brought by staff members in other political parties in this place we had a big discussion here, rightly, about how we were going to ensure that in parliament, everyone was entitled to safety,” Bandt said.

“Whenever any staff member wants to raise a matter, there has to be confidence that it’s going to be looked at independently, that it’s not going to be treated as a party political matter, that it is going to be looked at independently. Now, as a result, some pretty important institutions have been established here. One of those is the PWSS.

“And there’s now a new institution [the Independent Parliamentary Standards Commission] that is going to be operational soon. The PWSS has the power to receive complaints from staff members, but also to investigate and also make findings.”

Asked if he had full confidence in Cox, Bandt said: “Yes, I do.”

Faruqi said all political staffers deserved to be safe in their workplace “and the Greens are very serious of providing that safety to every single staff member in this workplace”.

She did not answer when asked why the national Greens had not responded swiftly to the allegations, while the NSW and Victorian branches had both done so in relation to complaints about state MPs in recent years.

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