Workplace bullying was included as a specific risk to occupational health and safety in most States' workers compensation legislation more than four years ago. It's generally defined along the lines of 'unreasonable repeated behaviour that threatens, humiliates or intimidates or undermines a person and is a threat to health and safety'.
This is not completely unlike definitions of discriminatory 'harassment'. The Sex Discrimination Act 1984 defines sexual harassment to include an unwelcome act of a sexual nature which makes the person affected feel threatened, intimidated or humiliated, and which a reasonable person would expect to have had that effect.
Bullying and that particularly noxious form of it, sexual harassment in the workplace are thought to cause billions of dollars of loss and damage in the workplace. The most common outcomes are division, retreat from social participation, lost productivity, distress and emotional if not psychiatric injury, dramatically increased sick leave, absenteeism, and staff resignations.
Most victims try to pass instances of bullying off as minor, but they most certainly are not. Sexual harassment statistics kept by anti-discrimination agencies such as HREOC and state and territory equal opportunity bodies show the most common outcomes of complaints are victimisation, the departure of the complainant, enormous costs to investigate the case, and the eventual departure of the alleged harasser.
Australian 'larrikins' and good humour men appear to still operate under a mistaken impression that their intentions — nearly always, to get a laugh from their peers — is what determines whether or not bullying or discriminatory harassment is something for which they should be called to account.
Recently AFL Footy Show veteran Sam Newman made offensive references to Caroline Wilson, a colleague on another football show, during a 'spontaneous' skit involving a mannequin designed to look like Ms Wilson. He defended the skit as satire, though a number of senior women football administrators called it for what it was: a public put-down of a smart sporting commentator linked with her perceived sexual attractiveness, because she's a woman. It was also a very public bullying incident.
Newman is not alone in his misjudgment. On 28 April the leader of Western Australia's Opposition broke down in tears at a press conference. A couple of days earlier an unnamed woman staffer was revealed to have complained that in December 2005 Troy Buswell had 'sniffed the chair' she had been sitting in at his parliamentary office, in