When Dr Stacy Oon applied for a promotion to a $200,000 job at the University of Wollongong, the pre-interview activity she was sent to complete might have looked familiar.
After all, Oon had drafted it herself because her manager at the university, Alyssa White, had asked her to.
“It was not an above-board process, and it’s why we communicated using our personal emails,” she told a corruption inquiry on Wednesday.
The Independent Commission Against Corruption is probing allegations University of Wollongong staff, including White, subverted recruitment practices, helping her friends and associates secure jobs on at least 10 occasions.
On day three of the public inquiry, counsel assisting Emma Bathurst, SC’s questions traced how Oon had first met White while the pair worked at the University of Sydney in university governance.
“The higher I went, the closer I started to work with her … I would say I developed strong respect for her, I looked up to her, I would want to be a friend,” Oon told the inquiry.
After White left to work at the University of Wollongong, she encouraged Oon to get a job there too.
When Oon arrived at the governance team in early 2024, a sense of “desperation” prevailed due to its inability to attract staff, she told the inquiry. White had a plan included creating a new role of associate director of governance, Oon said.
“She felt I would be great at the role, and she wanted to support me as much as possible to demonstrate my qualities,” Oon said.
That support extended to asking Oon to draft the pre-interview screening task other candidates would also complete, sending her the interview questions in advance, and reading feedback about how she planned to answer them, the inquiry heard.
Asked by Bathurst if it was inappropriate for a candidate in a competitive recruitment process to be given a “heads-up” of the proposed interview questions, Oon conceded it was.
During this time, the pair’s friendship had developed and they were “communicating all over the place”, Oon said. “We would even be texting at 2am so our conversations would drift from work to, like, dinner and then back to work,” she said. Oon referred to her as “boss lady”, the inquiry heard.
Asked if she should have declared her close friendship with White on conflict of interest forms, she said: “I acknowledge that I should have thought deeper into it.”
After making numerous concessions that the methods used to secure the job undermined the integrity of that recruitment process and conflict of interest rules, Commissioner Paul Lakatos asked: why had Oon done it?
She pointed to a terrible workload and poor culture and “this feeling that no matter what we tried or did we couldn’t get any additional resources to help us.”
At this point Oon began to cry, reaching for the box of tissues in the witness box.
She went on to describe White as a “very impressive person” from when she met her at the University of Sydney. “I felt that she understood that I had all this potential,” she said.
“She said that I was a great employee, I trusted her, I didn’t question her decisions.”
The inquiry went on to examine how Oon used her personal email address to send certain job candidates, identified by White, the questions in advance, including Emma Pinfold and Sharon Yap.
It is also examining allegations university management improperly awarded lucrative contracts worth thousands to Aspirall Consulting. Over the coming weeks, it will also probe if staff failed to manage a conflict of interest relating to the employment of Professor John Dewar as interim vice chancellor and the university’s concurrent engagement of consultancy firm KordaMentha, where Dewar was also a business partner.
The inquiry continues on Thursday.
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