Rochelle Hicks was betrayed by everyone who should have protected her

Regional Transport and Roads Minister Jenny Aitchison and NSW Premier Chris Minns. Picture: NewsWire/Monique Harmer

Rochelle Hicks should have been celebrating another milestone in her stellar career as a senior NSW government executive right about now.

Instead she’s spent the week putting her much-loved home in Coffs Harbour up for sale and obtaining an apprehended violence order against Ian Brown, the Indigenous adviser who threatened to kill her.

Her entire world has come tumbling down in just six months. But it wasn’t Ian Brown who shattered her life.

Hicks could have dealt with him – indeed was about to, immediately and forcefully.

She was the second most senior executive in charge of the $2.2bn Coffs Harbour bypass project, a woman making enormous strides in a male-dominated field.

She’d kick-started the project and got the first major construction going.

She’d dealt with men like Brown before. But when she told her bosses she was going to kick the thug off the project, they were panic-stricken.

Brown would stay in his contracted role “because he is Aboriginal and a cultural knowledge holder”, they said.

At every step, Hicks’ mealy-mouthed bosses tried to minimise the threat to her life. They didn’t just abandon her; they tried to get her removed from her job, while they dithered about how to deal with Brown without upsetting the local Aboriginal land council.

Rochelle Hicks at Coffs Harbour. Picture: Liam Mendes/The Australian

But the greatest act of cowardice didn’t come from the conniving bureaucrats. It came from the Minns Labor government, elected only last year on a platform of integrity and transparency, and in particular, a pledge to do the right thing by women in the workforce. What a farce.

After The Australian broke the story last year, Chris Minns and his Regional Transport and Roads Minister Jenny Aitchison trotted out a series of statements we now know to have been completely wrong. All based on false information provided to them by Transport for NSW, including that Brown had been entirely removed from the project from day one.

But instead of owning up, Minns and his ministers doubled down. When Nationals MP Sam Farraway sought to have the TfNSW documents made public, Labor tried to block him on the spurious grounds that it was being done “for political purposes”.

It wasn’t a political issue until Labor turned it into one. It was about a woman who had been treated appallingly. Who should have been protected by her employer and wasn’t.

A Labor apparatchik “backgrounded” crossbench MPs before the vote, suggesting Hicks was mentally unstable.

What the government was attempting was a cover-up, aided by the Greens.

Greens MP Cate Faehrmann. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Gaye Gerard

Greens MP Cate Faehrmann said the move was “a blatantly political motion that will further traumatise anybody involved”, adding dramatically: “Imagine an entire day of budget estimates in February being spent on this issue!”

Yes, imagine spending a day of parliament’s time finding out why a woman had been so abjectly failed by all around her.

Faehrmann couldn’t seem to get her head around it.

As it happens, the documents revealed a second female TfNSW executive was in fear of Brown but felt compelled to attend a ­project “walkover” at which he was present, despite Hicks’ plea that he be banned from the event.

Senior manager Tammy Hosking believed she was being “punished” for reporting Brown’s threat to kill Hicks.

All that women like Hicks and Hosking were asking for was a safe workplace.

They were failed by everyone who should have protected them, right up to the highest officeholders in the land.