Dozens of complaints of the most serious workplace offences, including rape and sexual assault, may go unreported each year, after parliament’s employee support service altered its reporting methods.
The service, which received 40 complaints of bullying and 28 instances of harassment during its second year of operations, has been slammed by a senator who alleged she was sexually harassed in Parliament House. Victorian independent Lidia Thorpe said the service was potentially hiding misconduct from the public under the proviso of protecting complainants’ privacy.
A senator has alleged she was sexually harassed in Parliament House in Canberra.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
The number of complaints of rape or sexual assault, sexual harassment, assault, and stalking and intimidation was not provided in the Parliamentary Workplace Support Service’s most recent annual report because there were fewer than 10 individual complaints of each offence.
The service was established as a recommendation of the Jenkins review into Commonwealth parliamentary workplaces, launched following a number of sexual misconduct allegations, including a rape allegation made by former staffer Brittany Higgins.
During a truncated reporting period following the PWSS’s establishment – from October 2023 to June 2024 – there were 30 complaints of the offences, accounting for 9 per cent of reports. However, the offences were separated into individual line items in the service’s most recent account, but were only reported as having fewer than 10 offences.
The PWSS said their reporting processes had been “refined” between its first and second years of operation, and declined to provide like-for-like data.
“The 2024-25 report has categories with numbers reported as ‘<10’, which includes zero. This ensures all people in small cohorts are afforded privacy and no individual case can be identified. We are not able to comment on specific matters or provide any data that may identify individuals,” a spokesperson for the PWSS said.
The new reporting method means there is no way to determine how many complaints of rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment, assault and stalking or intimidation are reported each year to the service. Under the current reporting system, the number of undisclosed complaints could be as high as 36. Similarly, 18 cases of drug and alcohol use, or family and domestic violence complaints, may be left out of reporting.
After making public allegations of sexual misconduct against former Liberal senator David Van, independent senator Lidia Thorpe made a complaint to the PWSS. Thorpe said the service failed to properly address her complaint. Van denies the allegations.
