Whistleblowing is at last gaining ground in the news, and whistleblowers of all stripes have stories to tell of targeting and mobbing. Would it shock you to learn, however, that simply standing up for your kid, who was following the behaviour policy of a school, could lead to a secret “non-criminal” file being held on you by the Police, the contents of which you are not allowed to see?

The Corruption Perception Index, a subjective index of how people view public services, was released by Transparency International at the end of 2012, New Zealand ranks 1st with Denmark and Finland with a score of 90, indicating that it’s perceived as very “clean”.

As a New Zealand immigrant of five years, and in a world which is seething with revolution, it has been fascinating to learn about the great mismatch between the perception of corruption in New Zealand, and how much corruption there actually is.

Although this is a story of personal experience, it’s actually not just me saying that. A glance at Wikipedia shows that I’m in good company, with the Head of the New Zealand Serious Fraud Office Adam Feeley, believing that there are fundamental misconceptions about New Zealand’s ranking as one of the world’s least corrupt countries.

“All that survey tells us is how people feel about life here. How they feel and what is actually happening are quite different things. The CPI is nothing more than a perception.” Feeley points to the results of a more recent survey conducted by the SFO which found only 37% of New Zealanders think we are ‘largely free’ of serious fraud and corruption. And 60% think those who commit financial crime are not held to account.

This fault line between the perception and reality of corruption is extremely telling about New Zealand, and one of the reasons why we’re returning to the UK.

Corruption is a global reality, but there are unique dangers where there is high corruption with a corresponding lack of awareness of it!

And that’s particularly true when considering the subject of whistleblowing, as I have unfortunately had cause to discover, having pursued a matter where a school expelled a child, and her sisters, who reported bullying as per the school’s own behaviour policy. The school maintained they’d done nothing wrong and the matter eventually went to Human Rights mediation and settled just before Christmas.

This action has given us a crash course into the kinds of abuse that whistleblowing incurs, as well as just how wide that gap between perceived and actual corruption is.

The final outcome of the Human Rights mediation were seven statements and NZ$9,000, roughly £4,500. This was mediated eventually by the Director of the Tribunal as a last step before considering issuing proceedings.

The statements were very hard to get, I’m talking blood and stone. The only reason the school agreed to them is because if they had not they would have become historically the first Steiner School in the world to have been taken to Human Rights Tribunal for discriminating against children, of whom one of them was reporting severe bullying as asked to do by school policy.

After all that time, and having used gaps in Private School Law to throw the children out of one of only two private Steiner Schools (most have been publicly funded in NZ for over two decades), the school actually then claimed they couldn’t pay until they received their annual Government hand-out; so much for independence!

My kids are pleased that we’ve got this result, and they can see the value in standing up for yourself using available process, not violence - in spite of the generous lashings of flak that we’ve received for following this through, unbelievably from both sides of the raging controversy over Steiner education.

Over the last year I’ve found both solace and support in following a lot of other people on Twitter who’ve been very active in whistleblowing, mainly in health. Some are doctors, many are patients who have become politicised about the issues through terrible personal loss, and all are taking a lot on the chin to bring issues of corruption, negligence and mismanagement to light.

Of course any reading about or by whistleblowers, highlights the fact that it does seem to always bring a lot of flak. There must be patterns in that flak, but that doesn’t stop aggressive attacks always subjectively feeling as if they come out of left field and I’m guessing that many whistleblowers have had that experience.  I hope this story will show that, however gruelling whistlblowing in health is, doing it in education is certainly no soft option.

The main weapon used against whistleblowers seems to be smear campaigns of one sort or another. Again, I’m sure there are many variations but from my observation of others and my own experience they seem to come in three basic but adaptable shapes - “It’s all about you”, “you’re mad”, and “you’re a pedophile”.

So let’s get down to the dirt shall we? When this New Zealand Steiner school decided to expel a bullied child and her sisters in direct contravention of their own behaviour policy, we objected as loudly as we could given the immediate realisation that we were in a legal vacuum of private school law. We handed out leaflets to parents explaining what had happened, at the time feeling sure that this would sort the problem out, as there were many parents flagging up bullying at the school.

But the staff hosted a meeting at the school, to which we weren’t invited but which was all about us. Subjectively I really have no choice but to describe such a meeting as “secret”.

The purpose of the meeting was to give parents in the class (of 17 boys and 5 girls) an opportunity to vent about us - which they did. Myths were created at the meeting which we found out about through other parents who attended and sure enough more than one parent reported that someone said at that meeting that you should be careful not to let your child stay the night at our house and that the Police had been involved when someone did let their child stay over. That would appear to relate to no 3 above. The other two on my list were obviously mentioned at this meeting as well.

Meanwhile we soon discovered more about the legal vacuum regarding children’s welfare at private schools, including the Law Commission’s recommendations to close these loopholes. We published about it, and our publications drew others towards us with similar testimony about the school spanning four decades.

Following these expulsions and after a difficult six months, during which we tried home-schooling (a vibrant scene in Auckland), exhausted and with an eye to our immigration status, we re-enrolled at another local school about 3 or 4 miles away from the Steiner school.

It was a struggle for all of us to re-approach any school after such a nasty experience, and I thought we were doing quite well too, until one day rumours started to come to this school and things started to unravel. Charlie Kingston, a mother who I’d actually began a tentative association with because our middle daughter became firm friends with one of her daughters, suddenly vetoed our kid when she became party to these ‘rumours’. Some weeks after this ‘shift’ in her attitude we discovered that she’d been to the lower school Head, complained about us and stated that she did not want her child associating with ours, meaning that we had to involve our child in knowledge of her targeting for the second time. She was 6.

At the time, as I became progressively more fearful of going back into the playground, it seemed to me that the school was pretty powerless. The Head of lower school and the school Head felt sorry for me, and could see my distress, not necessarily because they had particular insight, but because tears would just embarrass me, however hard I tried to keep them in check.

But even though it seemed to me that the school could do nothing, from Charlie Kingston’s point of view it seems that the the school’s attempts to protect us from any targeting did work, too much for her anyway, apparently, as I can only judge by the fact that this mother decided to go to the police and filed a complaint that we were intimidating her.

We knew nothing of this of course, and never saw her again once we left to travel to Europe, where my mother was dying. We would never have found out about it if she hadn’t decided to boast about it online, on the blog of Alicia Hamberg, another person that we only came across because of Steiner education.

Charlie boasted on this blog that the policeman she’d talked to had commented on our mental health, that we were “mentally a little unstable”, in the course of his duty in taking her complaint of intimidation. She also wrote on the blog that “you need to take what they say with a pinch of salt”.

The Steiner critics’ severe attacks on our Human Rights stand on bullying, is certainly a story of contradictions. But suffice it to say here, that in approaching this blogger, Charlie had identified a fruitful source of smears and rumour and Alicia gleefully posted Ms Kingston’s statements on her blog to go with her other negative opinion of us and “hope they fail the mediation”, sentiments.

When we were tipped off about this we decided to investigate and looked for the policeman concerned, one Kevin Morgan. He turned out to be the same officer who had threatened to arrest my husband for peaceably leafletting outside the school regarding the expulsions, when he had hared up the road with his siren on, arriving seemingly before he’d even been called.

This officer declined to answer as to whether he’d made such a comment, neither were we allowed to see the original complaint of intimidation made by Charlie Kingston, so we went to the Independent Police complaints Association and asked again through them.

Eventually we were assigned to a Senior Sergeant, Kim Stewart, who looked at the case and paid Ms Kingston a visit. The upshot was, in his own words: “I note the Mrs Kingston advised me that there was no mention of your mental health in her meeting with S/Constable Morgan” and “I conclude that I did not find that the officer made reference to you as being “mentally a little unstable””.

That’s right, Charlie Kingston admitted that she defamed a policeman on Alicia Hamberg’s blog in order to try and destroy our reputation. That is the true state of affairs, here referred to by Ms Hamberg as our harassment of poor Ms Kingston: “Unfortunately, to protect a comment author from harassment and threats, I’ve removed three comments from this thread. I cannot even begin to explain what utter disrespect I feel for the thuggish behaviour displayed by the NZ/UK couple.”

And that brings me back to the corruption index, because in “settling” this matter, the police have made it very clear to the Privacy Commission that we are not to be allowed to see the contents of the original complaint of intimidation made against us. The physical file apparently “cannot be located”.

Subjectively, since it’s about us, but we’ve done nothing wrong, I’d have to describe this file as “secret”, just like the meeting at the school, as we’ve no idea what is in it. Still, as this is a whistleblowing situation, it’s a safe bet that it’s likely to be some version of the three things I mentioned above.

There’s a dirty irony that a complaint of ‘intimidation’, against us, turns out to be nothing more than a secret file, occasioned by someone who’s admittedly lied about the matter, and now held by the police, who will not allow us to know the contents, even though it is not a criminal matter, and the police are apparently very comfortable protecting a woman who admittedly slandered one of their own in a public forum.  The likelihood that this file contains further slanderous reports is, on balance, fairly high, yet not knowing what it is, we can do nothing about that.

Intimidation? What intimidation?

So apart from all the other crap we’ve had thrown at us, this is the high cost to us of whistleblowing in education. It hasn’t been easy, but we’ve learned fast. As far as New Zealand’s perception of corruption versus the actual levels, we have clearly wasted no time in getting to the dirt because this is a propaganda bureau, surely.

In the information we have been allowed to see there is a paragraph called History,

“They have come to the attention of Police before when they were embroyled [sic] in a dispute with the Titirangi Rudolf Steiner School...They were protesting over what they called a “bullying” issue at the school. Steve Paris was handing out fliers and Angel Garden was filming this activity. Police [KMF734] [the same one Charlie complained to] attended and warned Paris about blocking traffic to the school on Helius [sic] Place. He was ordered off the road and told he could hand his fliers out from the footpath.”

Although no-one has put their name to it, this paragraph, written on the 23rd of September 2010, which must have been around the time the complaint was made, the use of inverted commas to describe our reports of “what we called “bullying”” at the school hardly seem without prejudice.

It also doesn’t mention the fact that Kevin Morgan not only ‘warned’ Steve, but also threatened to arrest him when he was already on the pavement which was obviously caught on camera.

Whistleblowing is never easy. If it was, there wouldn’t be a need for a Perception of Corruption Index at all, but where Police are prepared to collude to this extent, it’s hard, as the target, not to see corruption, whatever the general perception might be. I’ve thankfully got no other experience to weight it against, but I’d say that this level of harassment, just for exercising your democratic rights, is pretty high, so it would seem unlikely that it would be just us.

And in fact we know it’s not, because we have already documented David Mollet who was targeted at the Christchurch Steiner school, who tried to have him deported, and who has also been the subject of pedophile slurs.

Without breaking confidentiality I can share that there are two other very similar situations known to me in New Zealand at the moment. And that’s only referring to ones which have involved appeal to other agencies, not the many, less specific testimonials we’ve received which also tally with the many (mainly anonymous) testimonials of exactly the same sorts of unaddressed bullying in Steiner Schools worldwide.

In such a small country, it’s not an exaggeration to describe these cases as amounting to a tendency. There are only two Steiner schools in Auckland (smaller initiatives spring up around the place which may grow, but two actual schools), and they both have complaints about bullying, victimising behaviours towards others sitting in the Ministry of Education, the ERO (NZ equivalent to OFSTED), and the Privacy Commission, none of whom have shown any interest whatsoever.

Private schools in New Zealand still exist in a vacuum as far a children’s welfare is concerned, and the Bill that was meant to change that was simply commandeered by the National (Tory) Minister of Education, and used to funnel more unconditional grants to Private Schools instead - perhaps to help them pay off Human Rights settlements.

And whistleblowing in New Zealand can result in a secret non-criminal police file in a country where even the Serious Fraud Squad acknowledge that there is a stunning mismatch between the perceived level of corruption and what’s really going on.

On a personal level, I’m obviously pretty bloodied by all this, these kinds of experiences make you wary of people, and that’s probably the worst thing about them for outgoing friendly types.

Nevertheless we are all, as a family, proud to have stood up for ourselves in this most famously litigious educational movement. We hope our statements and more importantly, the fact that we politely stood our ground to get them, will encourage other families or individuals targeted in this manner, or similar ways, not to give up.

So what’s the point of a Perception Index for corruption, when it doesn’t reflect the reality at all? Below is a humorous highlight of the show we made to lobby MPs about private school law.

It appears that despite public perceptions, mowing through democratic rights in New Zealand is actually rather like taking candy from a baby.