One of the Albanese government’s most senior female advisers, the deputy prime minister’s chief of staff, claims she has been barred from her office and had no direct engagement with her boss in five months, since she complained about colleagues’ undermining behaviour and he allegedly responded by telling her to find another job.
Richard Marles’ chief of staff, Jo Tarnawsky, alleges her boss effectively sacked her without warning in a phone call on 30 April, the day after they returned from a challenging but successful visit to Ukraine, for which she says he had credited her.
“This is the job I’ve wanted since I was 12,” Tarnawsky tells Guardian Australia. “I’m still in shock. I’ve never had a performance issue raised and so to have this happen to me … I never, ever, ever thought I’d be in this position.”
A former diplomat who was deputy official secretary to David Hurley as governor general, Tarnawsky has worked for Marles before – almost a decade ago when Labor was last in office. After the 2022 election, as she was about to take up a private-sector position, Marles contacted her and persuaded her to run his office instead.
“I didn’t expect to come back,” she says. “So this is the dream. This is why you don’t want to leave it a day too early. It was a dream until it was a nightmare.”
Marles chairs the government staffing committee that oversees hiring and staff conduct. Tarnawksy says she has not been face to face with her boss since 16 May. She says she has been moved into a specially created temporary job elsewhere in Parliament House, required to give 24 hours notice to enter the ministerial suite, and has resisted what she alleges was pressure to hand over the code to her office safe whose contents are highly classified. She still doesn’t fully understand why Marles decided she should go.
“Whatever it was, before the phone conversation he never once raised anything with me,” she says.
A spokesperson for Marles told Guardian Australia on Wednesday that he disputed her characterisation of events.
“A number of the assertions and recollections are contested,” the spokesperson said. “Ms Tarnawsky remains a member of staff. Ms Tarnawsky has been treated with respect and courtesy. At all times, the wellbeing of staff, including Ms Tarnawsky, has been front of mind. Out of respect for Ms Tarnawsky, and the prospect of legal proceedings, it is not appropriate to make further comment.”
In a ministerial office, the chief of staff’s position is pivotal – both strategic and managerial.
Tarnawsky says relations gradually become difficult with some staff in her office. She did not involve Marles until things came to a head on the April overseas trip.
Representing Australia at the Gallipoli Anzac Day commemorations, the deputy prime minister, who is also the defence minister, went via the United Arab Emirates and planned a stop afterwards in Poland with a quick swing into Ukraine to announce more Australian military support.
In the UAE, Tarnawsky received word that planned Ukraine meetings were no longer possible and Marles’ already-slim program had collapsed. The situation placed enormous pressure on Australia’s new ambassador, who had only presented his credentials a day earlier.
Tarnawsky says she worked around the clock, calling on high-level diplomatic contacts across the world to help directly engage Ukrainian officials. The effort locked in replacement meetings and avoided an embarrassing and expensive cancellation.
But the salvage operation also meant rerouting, travelling into Ukraine by road and reducing the size of the party. She says some staff were disappointed. Others complained, as she frantically stitched things back together, that the chief of staff had not adequately consulted them.
After overhearing what she describes as a derogatory conversation on the VIP flight home, and having been excluded from some staff activities, Tarnawsky says she decided to raise the situation with her boss.
To avoid putting him on the spot, she says she sent him a long text message as he went to the forward cabin to rest.
She alleges there was a pattern of some staff withholding information and disrespecting and undermining her. She asked Marles for more vocal support, especially given her efforts on Ukraine.
“It is the single-biggest thing I have pulled off in my career,” she wrote. “Given the same circumstances and the same ridiculous time pressures, I’d do it again.”
Tarnawsky told Marles she had discovered she had been recommended for another senior job but she considered her current position “an honour” and wanted to stay where she was.
“I just need to work out if I’m still valued in this role, and if you want me to stay.”
Initially he was supportive.
“He says, ‘Jo, I know what you did to pull off the Ukraine visit, and as I’ve said to you, it was amazing,’” she says, reading from his reply. “‘You should feel proud. I believe I’ve praised you in front of others, but I’ll make sure to do that again. I have not heard the negative talking. People are careful around me, but I don’t doubt what you say. I know things are not going well. I value you and value the job you have done for me. More than that, I am deeply grateful.’”
He suggested they speak the next afternoon. Before the flight landed, she says he made a point of singling her out for praise in front of the others.
But the next day, she says, it was a different conversation.
Her message had alleged there was a disrespectful staffer cabal in the office and he took issue with that. Tarnawsky said while there might be things he could do to reinforce her authority, she says she had plans to improve internal engagement and only asked that he didn’t inadvertently feed “the dynamics”.
“And then he says, ‘Is that it? Because I don’t think this is fixable,’” she recounts.
Taken aback, she says she suggested they could sit down in person the next day to discuss how to deal with things before they departed again for meetings in Hawaii with the US defence secretary. But she says his tone changed and he wanted to “finish this now”.
“He then claimed that there’d been issues for over a year,” she says. “He’s never raised them with me before.”
He told her she was not going to Hawaii.
“It’s at this point he says, ‘I don’t need you to travel … I don’t know why you’re on any of these trips.’”
Tarnawsky says she was stunned. She asked if he was telling her to look for another job. He told her he was.
After the 45-minute conversation, Tarnawsky says she went to the prime minister’s office. His chief of staff, Tim Gartrell, confirmed that Marles had called him the night before.
Among the options open to her, Tarnawsky says Gartrell mentioned a “mutual termination package”.
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“I didn’t say anything but my mind’s in a spin,” she says. “And I’m thinking, ‘I don’t know what that is and this doesn’t feel very mutual.’”
Guardian Australia sought a response from the prime minister’s office but a spokesperson had no comment.
Tarnawsky’s legal representative, Marque Lawyers managing partner Michael Bradley, alleges it amounts to an adverse action. He says his client only agreed to look for another job because Marles told her to go.
The Labor government has championed industrial fairness and better treatment of women, particularly in parliamentary workplaces. It has overseen the establishment of the new Parliamentary Workplace Support Service. Tarnawsky has had access to support from the service.
Last month the government passed legislation to establish the new Independent Parliamentary Standards Commission to monitor the behaviour of parliamentarians and their staff, which began operations on 1 October.
On Wednesday the House of Representatives voted to establish a joint committee on parliamentary standards to oversee the new codes of conduct.
“The Albanese government is committed to improving workplace behaviour and culture at Parliament House,” Marles’ spokesperson told Guardian Australia.
Back in May, Tarnawsky alleges she was forced to take leave before a temporary position was created to move her out of Marles’ office. Since then, she has been mentoring other chiefs-of-staff and preparing guidance for future arrivals, with peers and other staff unaware of the real situation.
She alleges she was presented with a non-ongoing three-month contract – without a lawyer present – despite remaining employed in her own job. Refusing to sign it without legal advice, she ultimately agreed when it was explained that a temporary job in a different area required a new contract. She insisted on specified conditions, including written assurance that it did not override her existing substantive position.
“She’s been literally left in a legal and practical limbo where the reality does not reflect the legal construct and she quite reasonably doesn’t have a clue where that leaves her,” Bradley says.
Tarnawsky is also subject to conditions. She must give 24 hours’ notice to enter her office, where her personal effects remain.
Bradley calls that “extraordinary for anyone – let alone a very senior officer”.
“It was her office – she ran that office,” he says. “She was in charge, and these are measures you might take against someone who was reasonably perceived to be some kind of security risk or safety risk. There has never been any suggestion of anything like that. It just seems to have been a matter of convenience to the minister and the government that she kind of disappear.”
She didn’t. At the beginning of July, she moved into the Office of Staff Support – still within Parliament House. The same week, she turned up at the press gallery’s annual gala, the Midwinter Ball, making a private protest. Among the floor-length ball gowns, she wore a suffragette-white pantsuit.
Now on leave again, Tarnawsky says she still has no clarity about what happens next. The temporary position expired on 30 September. She is applying for jobs and says Gartrell has offered to be a referee.
She retains her top-level security clearance which she argues would be revoked if she posed a risk.
She alleges a member of Marles’ staff contacted her and demanded she surrender the code to her office safe, which contains highly classified defence material signed over specifically to her.
She refused but says she offered to come and open it. They did not take up her offer, she says.
Guardian Australia has been told it is routine for staff to facilitate other staff members’ access to protected documents when required, provided they hold the relevant security clearance. Marles’ spokesperson did not respond to Tarnawsky’s allegation about the safe.
Tarnawsky says the situation has left her shattered. She is applying for jobs with no assistance from her employer and having to lie about her circumstances.
Bradley calls it “an intolerable burden”.
“It’s had devastating consequences for her,” he says. “She’s been carrying this secret for the government effectively for many months, and having to tell lies and conceal the truth from colleagues and others – very successfully – and that’s come at an extreme personal cost.”
Tarnawsky can’t understand why Marles and the prime minister’s office have chosen this path. If they wanted to get rid of her, she says, “there are so many other better legal, ethical, humane ways to deal with it than what they’ve done”.
“This government has done so much, at least outwardly, to improve parliamentary workplace culture and to remind people that it’s safe for women,” Tarnawsky says, fearing “it’s just better window dressing now”.
She says she’s taking a risk speaking up but she can’t carry the corrosive secrecy any more, nor leave others to face repeats of her alleged experience.
“We can’t be complacent. There are still issues – despite these new structures, despite the public rhetoric – about working in Parliament House. And if I am the most senior female chief of staff on the hill and I am not safe, that’s a problem.”