The Mullins Minute: ACT Treasury Knew the Truth in 2001

A minute from September 2001, a letter and an email from May 2002, and a letter of December 2003 are difficult to reconcile. Set side by side, they raise questions that deserve an answer.

Public administration runs on paper. A minute is written, endorsed, initialled and filed, and the officers who sign it are taken to know what it says. That is the purpose of the ritual: nobody can later claim not to have been told. When the paper survives, it fixes the record. When it disappears, as I am told the departmental copies of the documents discussed here have disappeared, the surviving copies take on a weight their authors never anticipated.

The documents concern Mark Mullins, who in 2001 was a Manager in the Revenue Management Branch of the ACT Department of Treasury and Infrastructure. They are a minute of 26 September 2001, a letter and an email of 9 May 2002, a covering letter of 19 December 2003, and a public interest disclosure of 12 October 2005. The copies that I hold have been examined by a professional document examiner and accepted as genuine. That claim should be tested like any other, and the officers whose signatures appear are best placed to test it. What follows tries to distinguish carefully between what the documents say on their face, what Mullins contends, and what I infer.

A Minute Written Without Concealment

On 26 September 2001 Mullins wrote to the Under Treasurer seeking approval to accept a directorship of a New South Wales Aboriginal housing and education co-operative. The position was unpaid and would take about one weekend a month. Because the community was based in New South Wales and the role carried no statutory obligations, he saw no prospect of a conflict of interest, and he undertook that if one arose he would withdraw from any decision-making affected by it.

He attached his curriculum vitae and explained that the skills the co-operative wanted came from his years as a high-school teacher at St Mary’s Senior High School in Sydney’s west, between 1987 and 1989. The minute is, in other words, a document of disclosure. It puts Mullins’s background, qualifications and outside interests before his superiors in writing.

It recorded two further matters. Mullins reported that since starting in his position he had, on more than one occasion, heard Angel Marina use pejorative language about his Aboriginal heritage in his presence, and that he had raised this with Graeme Dowell, the Director of the Revenue Management Branch. And he recorded that Tu Pham, then Deputy Under Treasurer, had expressed concern that his cousin, Isobel Coe, was one of the leading activists at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, which Pham said both the ACT and Commonwealth governments considered politically divisive and an undesirable association for a senior ACT Government employee. Mullins wrote that he disagreed, and that the presence of a permanent protest site could not by itself be seen as divisive.

The endorsements are visible on the page. Dowell wrote “supported” and dated it 28 September 2001. Pham signed on 4 October 2001. A further endorsement at the head of the page, dated 5 October 2001, is, that of the Under Treasurer, Howard Ronaldson.  By early October 2001, then, three of the most senior officers in the department had read, signed and supported a document that recorded a complaint of racial denigration by Angel Marina.

Marina’s Letter of 9 May 2002

On 9 May 2002 Marina, then Manager of the Rates and Land Tax Section, wrote to Ronaldson as Chief Executive under the heading “Allegations Against Mr Mark Mullins.” The letter, stamped confidential, asked for a formal investigation into Mullins’s “unethical behaviour” and described him as a compulsive liar unsuitable for senior management. It then reported that unnamed friends within the Australian Federal Police had told Marina that Mullins’s cousin had a criminal record, and from that drew the conclusion that “Aborigines are compulsive liars and criminals.” It added that a recruitment consultant at Ernst & Young had confirmed that assessment. It ended by asking that Mullins be dismissed on account of his supposed unethical behaviour, “the general disposition of Aborigines to lie and the criminal records of his family.”

The annotation on the copy records that the letter was tendered in the ACT Supreme Court in March 2017, and that Ronaldson confirmed to the court he had seen it, remembered the racist remarks and the signature and notation at the top were his. Meaning the Chief Executive of a government department received a written request to dismiss a senior officer because Aboriginal people are liars and criminals, and remembered it years later.

There is something else in the letter. Marina attached Mullins’s application for his substantive position and said it showed “limited Public Sector experience” and “unrelated qualifications, being a Bachelor of Arts Degree and a Diploma in Education.” Marina’s own description of Mullins’s qualifications is the one the department had already been given, in writing, by Mullins himself. Nothing had been concealed.

The Same Afternoon

At 3:33pm that day Mullins emailed Pham under the subject line “Racist Attack By Mr Angel Marina on Me.” He told her he had received Marina’s letter from Chris Roberts that morning and quoted the request for his dismissal. He noted that Marina had attached copies of his application to Ernst & Young and of his application for his policy position, and asked how Marina had been able to access them. He reminded her that his application of 2 July 2001 had contained conditions precedent concerning Marina and an indemnity that she had executed on behalf of the department, and observed that Marina’s actions might have triggered it. And he suggested that, given Marina’s “most emphatic denial” of any involvement with missing monies, the department should take “a long hard look” at Alan Wylucki’s concerns about possible fraudulent activity in Marina’s area.

Marina’s letter had itself denied Wylucki’s allegations and any involvement in the theft of $130 million that Mullins had identified as missing from Treasury. I record that denial because it belongs to the record. What these documents establish is that by the afternoon of 9 May 2002 the officer who would later become Acting Chief Executive had been told in writing what Marina had said, what he had attached, and what the department’s own obligations were. The copy of the email carries a stamp marking it as a numbered document in a fraud enquiry.

December 2003

According to Mullins’ later disclosure, on or about 14 December 2003 his then lawyers, Bradley Allen, lodged a public interest disclosure with Mike Harris about the way Pham had conducted the grievance process concerning Mullins and five other Treasury officers. It also alleged that she had refused to investigate his complaints of racial vilification against Marina. Five days later, on 19 December 2003, Marina allegedly wrote to Meredith Whitten, the Director of Corporate Services in the department, under the heading “Academic Qualifications, Mr Mark Mullins.”

Marina states that he is attaching all the correspondence, emails and the academic transcript he has “received or sent” in the course of investigating the qualifications Mullins claimed. He says that the head of the Transcripts and Student Records Section at the University of London has confirmed that the transcript and qualifications claimed are false and that the university has no student record of him. He adds that Mullins has lodged copies of the false transcript with other organisations, that he suspects offences under the Crimes Act 1900, and that the matter should be referred to the ACT Police Fraud Squad. He then invokes both the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1994, describing the matter as “disclosable conduct,” and section 9 of the Public Sector Management Act 1994. The letter is copied to Pham, who was then Acting Chief Executive. Some of the attachments said to establish the university’s confirmation are not in my possession, and others have clearly been altered, so that confirmation must be read as Marina’s assertion, not as an established fact.

The annotations on the copy show what happened next. Whitten’s signature and the date 19.12.03 appear at the top. A handwritten file note says the matter was “discussed with Mr Marina” and was to be actioned on the writer’s return in January 2004. The copy to Pham carries a notation reading “19.1.04 to CE.” I read the date as 19 January 2004, but the handwriting isn’t totally legible. The Director Corporate Services had the allegation on the day it was written, and no action is recorded until the new year.

Three Questions the Documents Raise

The first concerns the qualifications themselves. In May 2002 Marina described Mullins’s qualifications as a Bachelor of Arts and a Diploma in Education, and the department had held the same information since the minute of September 2001 and the curriculum vitae attached to it. The December 2003 letter concerns a University of London transcript that appears in neither of those earlier descriptions. And it raises a precise question: where did the transcript come from, and who put it before Marina?

The second concerns how the documents were obtained. The letter shows that Marina investigated a colleague’s academic record himself, corresponded with an overseas university and compiled the file. It does not say how he obtained the transcript. In 2002 Mullins had asked Pham in writing how Marina had come by his applications. In 2005 he alleged that Marina had been meeting both Pham and Whitten from at least November 2003 about acquiring documents concerning him that Marina would not lawfully have had. Whitten and Pham are the addressee and the person copied on this letter.

The third concerns sequence. Marina was the subject of Alan Wylucki’s concerns about possible fraud in his area, which Mullins had urged the department to examine, and he had been accused in writing of racially denigrating Mullins. The letter accusing Mullins of fraud arrived five days after the disclosure to Pham about her own conduct. Sequence is not proof of motive. But a reader is entitled to ask who should have investigated.

The Case for the Department

A fair account must give the department’s side its due. An agency that receives a written allegation that an employee has lodged a false academic transcript, supported by what purports to be a university’s confirmation, cannot simply set it aside. The public interest disclosure and public sector management legislation imposed duties of their own, and an Acting Chief Executive who sat on such a letter would have been open to the opposite criticism. Nor is it enough to say that a person who has made a complaint cannot be investigated for anything afterwards. If the transcript was false, the department was right to look.

But the department’s position has to be reconciled with its own file. The qualifications had been disclosed in 2001 and endorsed by the people who later received Marina’s accusation. The man making the accusation had been the subject of a written complaint of racial denigration that the same officers had seen. And Mullins’s 2005 disclosure contends that Pham, being the subject of the earlier disclosure to her, and subsequently to Harris on 22 December, was conflicted and should at the least have excluded herself from the process. That contention is Mullins’, and the answer to it is the department’s to give.

The Disclosure of 12 October 2005

On 12 October 2005 Mullins lodged a further public interest disclosure with Glen Gaskill, Director of Public Sector Management and Industrial Relations. The covering email, sent at 10:45am and copied to an officer of the Commonwealth Ombudsman’s office, Maureen Colley, shows read receipts for both recipients, Gaskill’s at 11:21am that morning. Both therefore had it in hand that day. Neither of these disclosures have been actioned, as required by law.

The disclosure records that Mullins’s lawyers had lodged their disclosure with Harris almost two years earlier and that Harris had not responded. It records that Pham had not responded to a separate disclosure he made to her in December 2003 concerning the Belconnen Pool. It contends that in accepting and actioning Marina’s disclosure without first inquiring into how Marina had sourced the documents, and in then terminating his employment while he was on sick leave, Pham engaged in conduct of the kind described in section 4(2)(a) and (b) of the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1994 (ACT) and potentially committed the criminal offence of reprisal under section 25. It asks that all the issues be fully investigated and that any criminal conduct be referred to the appropriate authorities. These are Mullins’s contentions, and the words he chose were “it appears” and “potentially.” They are allegations awaiting an answer, and they should be read that way.

What the Documents Cannot Tell Us

There are limits to what can be drawn from these pages. They do not record whether Mullins ever claimed University of London study, or what he said in answer to the allegation. They do not show what Harris did with the December 2003 disclosure, or what became of the 2005 disclosure at the Ombudsman’s office. The circumstances of the termination are described in Mullins’s account and are not independently documented in this set. Each of those gaps is a place where an official record should exist, and where its absence is itself a question.

What Accountability Requires

It would be easy to read this story as a single act of discrimination followed by a single act of retaliation. The documents do not require that reading, and I do not rest on it. What they establish is more modest and, for that reason, harder to dismiss. A department was told the facts about a senior officer in 2001. It received a letter in 2002 whose own description of those facts matched what it already knew, and whose stated ground for dismissal was that Aboriginal people are liars and criminals. It was warned the same afternoon, by the officer concerned, about how the accuser had obtained his material. And in December 2003 it received a different accusation from the same man, with the same senior officer copied in.

An agency that endorsed the facts in 2001 owes an account of the accusation it acted on in 2003. That account should say who examined the transcript, how it reached Marina, whether anyone asked the question Mullins had put in 2002, and whether anyone with a conflict stood aside. A department can lose a file. It cannot easily lose the memory of the people who signed it, and they are still able to say, on the record, whether the signatures on these pages are theirs.

Note on sources

The documents discussed are a minute of 26 September 2001, a letter of 9 May 2002 and a same-day email, a covering letter of 19 December 2003, and a disclosure of 12 October 2005 with its covering email.

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Bakchos is the founder of Blak and Black, an Australian media and advocacy platform established in 2010. Bakchos writes from the intersecting perspectives of Wiradjuri heritage, Jewish identity, and humanism.

© Bakchos, October 2026

BLAK AND BLACK  |  MEDIA AND ADVOCACY  |  EST. 2010