The Fair Work Commission has upheld the RSPCA's dismissal of an executive manager for leaking to the media, providing confidential documents to his union and undermining his chief executive, describing his conduct as "reprehensible" and "duplicitous".
The RSPCA terminated the manager's employment in October last year after he went to The Canberra Times and his union, United Voice, with concerns over the organisation's concreting of a rabbit warren at the organisation's ACT headquarters in Weston.
He provided the union with confidential minutes of meetings of his employer's workplace health and safety committee, which he chaired on occasions.
The Canberra Times ran an article on September 10, referring to the organisation's then chief executive's denials that the concreting of five of 57 rabbit holes posed a threat to animal welfare.
On September 19, the RSPCA suspended the manager on full pay pending an investigation into his conduct, which also involved disparaging remarks to other employees about the chief executive.
He was provided with written details of the allegations against him, and responded to them on October 2.
The organisation's acting chief executive handed him a dismissal letter two weeks later in a meeting in a cafe.
Commissioner Barbara Deegan rejected the manager's argument that it was justified in the circumstances to provide confidential information to the media and his union.
She said he had first made complaints about the chief executive's behaviour to the RSPCA's governing council in late August, and it had acted "immediately" to investigate them.
"On all the evidence it is not open to the [manager] to claim that he was forced to take the action he took through some reluctance on the Council's part to respond to his concerns," the commissioner said.
Commissioner Deegan also said the manager had "questionable" motives in going to the media and the union.
She said it was "reprehensible" for him to attempt to lay full responsibility for the concreting of the rabbit warren at the feet of the chief executive, when it had in fact been the WH&S committee's decision.
"I do not accept that the [manager] was so concerned about the rabbits or the 'reputation' of the RSPCA that he believed he had no option but to go to the union, and through them to the press. These concerns are not apparent from the minutes of the WH&S meetings, and his decision to leak the documents contributed to, rather than saved, the [RSPCA] from reputational harm."
The commissioner said she was satisfied that his true motivation was to undermine the chief executive.
She found that he had continued to foment dissent in the workplace despite assuring the governing council that he would do everything in his power to calm things down.
Commissioner Deegan said it was unlikely that the relationship of trust could ever be restored, given that the manager's misconduct "occurred at the very time the Council had commenced investigating his concerns and in the face of his repeated assurances that he would maintain confidentiality and assist to calm the concerns in the workplace".
"Such duplicitous conduct is not justified by any concerns the [manager] may have had for the welfare of junior staff."