I recently dropped off a copy of my debut novel Unspoken to a friend and, sitting down for a cuppa and a catch-up, noticed David Gillespie’s book Toxic at Work: Surviving your psychopathic workmates, from the dominant bullies to the charming manipulators sitting on the dining table. I picked it up, flipped through a few pages and laughed. After twenty years as a political staffer, I recognised the character traits immediately. And as the two books lay side by side – one non-fiction, the other political crime fiction – I realised they were both circling the same uncomfortable truth: some workplaces are built for winning, not wellbeing.
While Australian Parliament House continues to face allegations of a toxic workplace culture – and similar concerns have emerged from parliaments across the country – the reality is far broader than our houses of parliament.
At the federal level alone, there are 150 members of the House of Representatives and 76 senators, each with political offices spread across suburban shopping centres, remote towns and capital cities. Add state and territory parliaments and the scale of Australia’s political workplace network becomes far more significant.
In many ways, an MP on his election also becomes a small business manager. At the federal level, political staff are not public servants in the traditional sense. They are employed under the Members of Parliament (Staff) Act, creating a far more personal and politically dependent employment relationship.
An MP is simultaneously an elected representative of the parliament, a defender of the party brand and directly responsible for managing the expectations of a modern workplace and the welfare of its employees. Unlike other government agencies, there is no middle-management layer sitting between the staff member and the parliamentarian. The culture, expectations and emotional tone of an office effectively rise and fall on one personality.
Of course, it’s not just the MP driving culture. Running parallel to most parliamentary offices is some version of the political machine, creating expectations, factional tensions, pre-selection anxiety and campaign pressures. And given the increasingly adversarial nature of politics, it’s easy to see how constant exposure to conflict and political combat can slowly shape the culture and emotional tone of a workplace.
Regardless of the way others may spin it, the political mission always comes first. ‘You’re nothing if you’re not in government’ was drummed into me over many years.
None of this excuses poor behaviour, bullying, harassment or assault. Parliament must do better. It is completely unacceptable that any person feels unsafe, intimidated or unsupported in their workplace. Expectations have rightly evolved over time. I still remember sitting at my desk in the mid-1980s with smokers on either side of me. What was once normalised is now rightly considered unacceptable. But understanding how these cultures develop matters if genuine reform is ever going to succeed.
Over recent years, political workplaces have finally been forced into some uncomfortable and very public self-examination, with major reviews pulling back the curtain on behaviours and pressures many staffers had quietly borne for years.
For many outside the bubble, the findings were confronting. How could a workplace like this exist in modern Australia? they asked. But for many longer-term political staffers, desensitisation had taken hold long ago, and the decision to speak out can become far more complicated than outsiders might imagine.
Is it my responsibility to intervene? Does the person affected actually want this escalated? What is the truth? Will escalation genuinely help, or will it simply leak and become a public media event to the detriment of everyone involved? And yes, sadly, will it damage the brand?
These are questions often weighed inside highly pressured, time-poor political offices where responsibility for workplace culture and behaviour is often unclear.
One of the strongest themes running through the Jenkins review was how often staffers admitted to accepting behaviours and conditions they would never tolerate elsewhere. Most of us feel a deep sense of privilege and gratitude for the opportunity. Over time, loyalty, pressure and the constant pursuit of political success can blur the line between what is demanding and what is simply unhealthy.
That creates a difficult tension for modern reform efforts. Systems like the Parliamentary Workplace Support Service, stronger protections and clearer reporting pathways are important and necessary. But political workplaces are still fundamentally built around highly personalised power structures where elected officials operate with enormous autonomy and public legitimacy. Parliament is not a conventional workplace, even when reforms try to make it behave like one.
When I sat looking at those two books on the dining table, it struck me that they were exploring the same thing: what happens to people working inside systems shaped by pressure, ambition, loyalty and survival. That is the world I tried to capture in Unspoken. Not because politics is uniquely toxic, but because it exposes something broader about human behaviour when winning becomes the overriding measure of success in the workplace