The employee was found to have breached the Code of Conduct for comments they posted to social media. The number of posts to the account was considerable. The content of many were unremarkable or innocuous opinions, while other comments were variously political and disrespectful to differing degrees.
In proposing a sanction, the sanction decision-maker expressed a view that the employee’s conduct was ‘serious’ on the basis that ‘much’ of the content was ‘offensive and discriminatory’ to a group or groups of people. The decision-maker did not identify which posts informed their preliminary view of the seriousness of the employee’s conduct.
The failure to identify which posts were offensive was problematic. It meant the employee had to assume or ‘guess’ which of the more than 200 posts informed the decision-maker's preliminary view. In the MPC’s view, as the employee was not sufficiently informed of the case against them, they were denied the opportunity to give a meaningful response to the proposed sanction. This was a denial of procedural fairness. The MPC recommended the sanction decision be set aside.
