Sharma keeps digging

• mickysavage
• 2 years ago
• Categories: employment, labour, Parliament, parliamentary spending, uncategorized, workers' rights

Last night a 4,761 word rant was published on Gaurav Sharma’s facebook page.

In it he really lays out the dirt and shows what a corrupt regime the Ardern Government has become.  Nah just kidding he goes on a big bleat about three of his staff members.

From the looks of it he may have breached all sorts of confidentiality agreements.  I suspect lawyers are looking into this now.  And for one former staffer he has renewed the sense of dread that is often a feature of being the victim rather than the perpetrator of bullying.

From Thomas Coughan at the Herald:

One former staff member speaking to the Herald anonymously urged Sharma to move on.

“Stop dragging this out,” they said.

“This is a breach of our confidentiality. It’s bringing up past trauma – we’ve already lived it once,” they said.

The staffer had previously spoken to the Herald about how Parliamentary Service, the employer of staff who work at Parliament and in electorates, had to arrange counselling for them after working with Sharma had made them feel depressed and want to self-harm.

They were staggered that Sharma, knowing this, would seek to relitigate their employment in public.

The staffer said that all of the former staff Sharma had fallen out with had kept confidentiality and tried to move on.

The episode only hit the public domain when Sharma decided to go public with his own claims of bullying. The staffer said they had done the right thing by Sharma, but he had not done the right thing by them.

“We’re all moving on – we kept our end of the bargain and didn’t say anything about it,” they said.

“Him bringing it up again is triggering me,” they said.

The contents of Sharma’s facebook post suggest that Sharma has this extraordinary ability to focus on the most trivial issue possible and make it into a big thing.

For instance:

• He raised 66 specific issues against staff member AB.  They are not detailed but unless AB is a serial killer it is really difficult to understand how such a long list could be collated.  My interpretation is that Sharma is fixated on the most trivial of incidents and converts them into really big things.  The issues include drinking in his Wellington office.  Anyone who knows Parliament will appreciate that this is not an unusual event.
• He again fixates on the “inappropriate use of Parliamentary Services resources” and complains that the staff member was flown to Hamilton.  PS has said this was normal and part of team building.  It really assists for the Wellington contact to be more than an email address.  For Sharma to again focus on this shows an inability to let the most trivial of events go.
• Without a shred of self awareness that he kicked this all off he complains that “this person has gone to the media and made claims against me”.  He wants an expensive public inquiry into such issues as whether or not this particular employee turned up late to work.
• Staff member CD appears to have had an episode of day drinking one day instead of going to work.  If I had worked for Sharma I would have been tempted to do the same.
• For the life of me I cannot understand what Sharma’s beef against staff member EF is.

One comment from Sharma sums up things well:

Ask yourself how any of this makes sense?

He wants an independent public inquiry into employment issues, such as if a staff member turned up late to work, that have obviously been dealt with on a confidential basis.  He claims that the screenshots he previously provided are evidence of systemic bullying when they appear to show nothing more than understandable work stress.

Judging by twitter his reputation is in free fall.  The overwhelming effect of the allegations is Meh.