A Queensland prison officer who was sacked for leaking information to Mt Isa MP Robbie Katter has had an appeal against her dismissal rejected.
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Belinda Johnson, who had been a Queensland Corrective Services employee since October 1998, was accused of making "inappropriate and excessive" use of departmental informational and communication resources and was sacked in April last year.
Central to Ms Johnson's dismissal was a November 11, 2012, email to Mr Katter that included a report on an incident at the Townsville Correctional Centre that day, which included personal details of a particular offender.
Ms Johnson had become the Townsville branch president of the Together union and, from June 2012, was an active member of Katter's Australian Party.
"There was no dispute that Mr Katter and (Shane) Knuth, who are members of the Legislative Assembly and members of that party, were frequent recipients of emails sent from the appellant's departmental email account, and that documents which had been stored on her departmental computer were attached to those emails," Industrial Court of Queensland president Justice Glenn Martin said in his recently published decision.
It was not disputed that most of those emails concerned the activities of Katter's Australian Party."
- Justice Glenn Martin
"The appellant admitted that from June 2012 she had forwarded a significant number of emails from her work computer which were not concerned with her duties as an employee or with the office she held in Together Queensland.
"It was not disputed that most of those emails concerned the activities of Katter's Australian Party."
Ms Johnson appealed her dismissal on several grounds, including the allegation that others had used her email account.
In one email sent to Mr Katter from Ms Johnson's account, she wrote on October 8, 2012: "Good evening. I don't know why but for some reason some of my emails have gone to you and some others. As they are confidential reports, could you please just delete them."
Justice Martin outlined QCS commissioner Mark Rallings' consideration of that email, which he described as a "red herring".
"He said that it was 'likely to have been a belated attempt to address what was significant disregard of QCS policy with the release of confidential information about an inmate to an unauthorised person'."