Sally Rugg loses bid to remain in Monique Ryan’s office as the pair head to trial

Independent MP Monique Ryan’s former chief of staff Sally Rugg will not continue to work in Ryan’s office during her legal action against her former boss, as the pair prepare to take their high-profile case to trial. 

Last Friday, Rugg’s legal team filed for an urgent injunction in the Federal Court that would have staved off her resignation from Ryan’s office during her action, arguing that Ryan had effectively forced her to resign. 

The application was dismissed on Tuesday morning by Justice Debra Mortimer, who said keeping Rugg in the role would not be in the best interests of all parties.

“Even on the most favourable view of Ms Rugg’s submissions about how responsibly they might each try to behave, I do not consider the situation is likely to be tolerable, let alone productive and workable, for either of them,” Mortimer wrote. “The applicant’s submissions to the contrary had a significant degree of unreality about them.”

Rugg, an activist and leading advocate for marriage equality in Australia, launched the lawsuit against Ryan in the Federal Court in late January over an alleged breach of the Fair Work Act’s “general protections” provisions. 

In documents lodged on January 25, Rugg sought to prevent Ryan’s attempts to dismiss her after a dispute over working hours. Rugg claimed she was denied her workplace right to refuse to “work additional hours that were unreasonable” and that the Commonwealth engaged in “hostile conduct in the workplace” as a result. 

Rugg alleged Ryan was the “principal actor” in the above allegations.

In a statement released later on Tuesday after the hearing, Rugg’s legal team said she is “disappointed” the application was waved away.

“The focus will now turn to preparing the case for trial which will consider whether 70 hour working weeks, almost twice the ordinary working week of 38 hours, is unlawful under the Fair Work Act,” the statement said.

“The issues to be considered at trial could have far-reaching ramifications for all Australians who work in industries where long hours are expected and normalised.”

In an affidavit dated January 25 released by the court last week, Rugg detailed some of the early disagreements between her and Ryan about work hours and responsibilities, which Rugg said led her to “work 70 or 80 hours a week”. 

She said she was initially encouraged to apply for the role of “media adviser”, before being corralled into a “hybrid” role covering the duties of four advisers after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese cut staff allocations to crossbench MPs from four advisers to one.

“During sitting weeks of Parliament, a standard day was at least 12 hours, and there were many days where I worked even longer than that,” Rugg said. “Whether I should perform even more work on top of those hours has proven to be a source of friction and dispute with Dr Ryan.”

Among the earliest disagreements was one related to community engagement work in September, which Rugg felt didn’t fall into her wheelhouse. Another disagreement later that month occurred when Ryan expressed disappointment over the work of another adviser to MP Kate Chaney. 

“Dr Ryan said that I should be making a file like Ms Chaney’s one for her, and it was not good enough that she had to ask me to produce work to prepare for Parliament, because it was my role to completely prepare her for a sitting week,” Rugg said, describing her boss’s facial expressions as “very angry”. 

At about 10pm that day, Rugg sent Ryan lengthy text messages to smooth things over. 

A couple of months later, on November 15, Rugg recounts a three-month probationary catch-up with Ryan, where she remembered Ryan saying she didn’t think “it’s working out” because Rugg was unwilling to carry out community engagement or work “longer hours or on the weekend”. 

Rugg said Ryan was expecting her to carry out the work of “four different roles”, and that the bar set for her was “far too high”.

She remembers Ryan saying: “It is out of [my] control that the prime minister has cut my staffing allocation, and I need the work to be done and that is non-negotiable.

“You don’t understand, I need to be the best. This is bigger than Kooyong,” Ryan is quoted as saying. “I want to be the prime minister one day, and I need to know my staff are prepared to work hard for me.”

In her affidavit from early February, released by the court on March 3, Ryan disputed Rugg’s claims that the latter had applied for a job in the minister’s office as a media adviser, citing Rugg’s cover letter attached to a job application received in July last year. 

The cover letter quotes a passage where Rugg says “as your chief of staff” she would look to foster a relationship built on “multifaceted trust”. Rugg asked Ryan to trust in her “loyalty as a confidant”, an “ally”, and a “definitely-not-patronising personal cheerleader”. 

Ryan said in her affidavit that she grew concerned over Rugg’s performance in November, when it became “clear” that Rugg wasn’t “doing the job that I needed her to do”. She said Rugg seemed to love Canberra, being around the media “where it’s all happening”, but wasn’t “interested” in engaging with the electorate. 

“Engaging with my electorate was the most important part of her job for me,” Ryan said in an affidavit dated February 2. 

Ryan said in her affidavit that she issued Rugg with a formal warning in November, after her former chief of staff knowingly boarded a plane home from Canberra infected with COVID-19. 

Ryan, the only sitting MP to routinely wear a mask into Parliament, said she was “very disappointed”, describing the decision as “extremely irresponsible and, morally, the wrong thing to do … given that it had the potential to place other people’s health at risk”. 

Ryan said Rugg’s thinking at the time was that “half the plane” could be COVID-positive “with or without her” on it. Ryan said she was both concerned with the fact that the move was illegal, and what the press might make of it if reporters got wind of it. 

“Both of those concerns significantly undermined my trust in Ms Rugg,” Ryan said. “For Ms Rugg to knowingly get on a plane with COVID seemed a wilfully selfish thing to do.”

Mortimer ordered the case to be listed for case management before March 20.