Council avoided one claim, but a manager's conduct still cost it $18,000
A senior Hamilton Zoo manager's conduct came close to sexual harassment, Employment Relations Authority member Nicola Craig found on 3 August 2026.
The finding came in a personal grievance case brought by a former zookeeper who worked at the Hamilton City Council run zoo from 2017 until she resigned in December 2020. Over her three years there she raised a wide range of concerns, including micromanagement, unclear processes, thin training and development opportunities, heavy workloads and animal welfare issues, the determination records.
At the centre of her complaint was a senior manager who moved from a newly created operations role into the zoo's top job. The zookeeper told the Authority he sought her out when she was alone, pressed her for information about colleagues, and began texting her late at night to catch up after she ended a relationship with another staff member. He once messaged asking if she missed him, with a winking emoji, and told her that no matter how hard she worked, she would not get anywhere because she lacked the right relationships with management. The Authority found her evidence about him credible.
"The behaviour comes very close to amounting to sexual harassment," Craig found, adding there was no explicit sexual element but an insidious quality to the manager's conduct, including asking her out for coffee and telling her their relationship was good enough that he would push back against more junior managers on her behalf. The Authority also found it more likely than not that the manager tried to pry information from her about other staff to use against them, and pointed to one occasion it said could be read as a threat to pull funding from a project she had proposed, after she raised concerns about staff fatigue.
Hamilton City Council said it could only respond to concerns it was made aware of, and pointed to steps taken once culture issues surfaced, including a new roster guaranteeing consecutive days off, an external health and safety review and five new keeper positions. The Authority found the council knew of difficulties at the zoo during the manager's time there but waited until it had firmer evidence before acting. A separate grievance over the council's failure to respond to complaints was dismissed, because it related to events after her employment had already ended.
The zookeeper's bid to prove she was constructively dismissed also failed. She resigned in December 2020, saying in her notice that her mental health was severely compromised. But the manager had left the council 14 months earlier, and Craig could not find evidence linking his earlier conduct to a resignation that came more than a year later, noting the zookeeper's departure was not sudden and that she had sought reference letters from colleagues at least a couple of weeks beforehand.
"In conclusion the behaviour by the Zoo's most senior manager was unacceptable," Craig found. The Authority ordered Hamilton City Council to pay the former zookeeper $18,000 in compensation for humiliation, loss of dignity and injury to feelings, without deduction, after finding she had not contributed to the manager's behaviour in a blameworthy way. Costs were reserved, with the parties encouraged to resolve that question between themselves.
