Reflections on Becoming a “Villain”

On dehumanisation, public service, and what happens when moral certainty turns people into symbols.

I didn’t enter public service more than 30 years ago because I wanted to be liked.

But I didn’t expect to be labelled a villain either.

I moved into the role of CEO of VicForests in 2019 as an experienced public service executive with a reputation as a safe, but firm, set of hands. I had worked in difficult, high-stakes areas of public policy — areas where decisions affected livelihoods, safety, and in some cases, lives. I understood controversy. I understood scrutiny. I understood that leadership in contested fields requires resilience. I gave frank and fearless advice. I raised concerns. I strove to lead with integrity.

I understood the organisation (a government owned commercial harvesting company) and was excited about the challenges of running a commercial business. I knew it would be challenging and that plenty of people opposed what it did. But I believed criticism could be met with openness, information and a willingness to listen and adapt. An approach that had always worked for me in the past.

What I was not prepared for was immediate personal dehumanisation.

Overnight, I became an “environmental vandal”. Not an official implementing government policy. Not a career public servant working within the law and subject to ministerial and judicial oversight. Instead I became a caricature. A moral offender. Evil.

I remember the first cartoon drawn of me. My likeness exaggerated, inserted into a narrative of destruction. It was framed as satire. It did not feel like satire. It felt like a signal: this person is fair game.

And once you are fair game, the rules shift.

When Critique Becomes Personal

Robust disagreement about policy is legitimate. It’s healthy. Democracies depend on it.

But we have drifted from contesting ideas to targeting individuals.

Public servants in contested portfolios are increasingly treated as moral adversaries rather than professionals doing their jobs. The logic seems to be that if you administer a policy someone opposes, you become personally responsible.

Not the Government – the public official.

While I have always accepted the additional accountability associated with being an executive public servant, I can’t and won’t accept that accountability requires tolerance of personal attacks.

And it wasn’t just a few extreme voices. Even professionals used their positions to personally attack me. For example, a high-profile academic used parliamentary processes to make pointed criticisms of my leadership and character rather than government policy settings. He referenced me in publications in ways that were less like scholarly engagement and more like personal signalling.

It was a sobering lesson in how institutional authority can be used to personalise disputes. Debate about forestry science, regulation and policy is entirely legitimate. Using formal processes to single out individuals doing their job is not.

And the higher the profile of the person making these attacks, the greater the permission and encouragement is given to others. The behaviour becomes normalised. Righteous. Good.

When critique shifts from systems to people, something corrosive sets in. If taking on a difficult portfolio means you — and your family — become fair game for caricature, harassment, parliamentary theatrics and vilification, rational people will step back. That won’t produce better outcomes. It will produce a quieter, more risk-averse public service.

Fewer capable people will put their hands up for visible, challenging roles. Advice will be more cautious. Leadership will become more guarded.

The checks and balances hardwired into our political system based on fearless public administration will weaken.

The anti-human edge

One of the most confronting aspects of the experience was encountering strands of environmental rhetoric that felt less pro-nature and more anti-human.

Most environmentalists I have worked with care deeply about both people and nature. But on the extreme edges of environmentalism there are voices that frame humanity itself as the problem. People become pollutants. Industry becomes moral failure. Economic activity becomes sin. Within that framing, those who work in resource sectors are not just wrong — they are harmful by association.

Once humans are cast as the enemy, dehumanising individuals becomes easier to justify. If someone is portrayed as standing in the way of planetary salvation, personal attacks can be rationalised as righteous. It is a short step from “this policy damages forests” to “this person destroys forests” to “this person is evil”.

Once that step is taken, nuance disappears. So does empathy.

I have worked in other areas of public policy where the stakes were extraordinarily high. I’ve made decisions affecting safety and human life. Those areas were contested. They attracted scrutiny and political pressure. But I had never encountered stakeholders as personally vicious, or as willing to dehumanise individuals, as I did in environmentalism.

I heard the stories of staff members’ children being verbally abused in schools. Of children picking up their home phone with an anonymous caller telling them, “your mother is going to hell”. And I listened to the messages left on the office line that were so threatening we referred them to the police.

Disagreement is legitimate. Dehumanisation is not.

The gendered undercurrent

There was another layer to the hostility.

It surfaced in tone. In language. In the way my appearance was emphasised in cartoons.

I posted a simple acknowledgement celebrating the women of VicForests — foresters, planners, corporate professionals — recognising the complexity of their work and their contribution in a challenging environment.

The response from some was swift: “Real women don’t destroy nature.”

There is a particular irony in being attacked through narratives influenced by ecofeminism — an ideology that draws parallels between the oppression of women and the exploitation of nature — while being personally policed for failing to conform to an approved version of womanhood.

The message was clear: women are expected to nurture, to protect, to align instinctively with preservation. If you lead in a resource sector — even in a governance capacity — you are not just morally wrong. You are betraying your gender.

It was not policy critique. It was identity policing.

The cost of dehumanising individuals

In highly moralised debates, institutions rarely absorb the full force of anger. Individuals do.

It is easier to attach blame to a face than to a statutory framework. Easier to cartoon a person than to engage with regulatory architecture, economic transition or democratic mandates.

And there’s an exposure asymmetry between accountable senior public servants and anonymous keyboard warriors.

In my case, I was no longer viewed as a relatively anonymous public servant doing her job, I was the visible “face” of native forestry. The villain. And once this happened my intent no longer mattered. My integrity no longer mattered. My humanity became secondary to the narrative.

We should ask ourselves what happens when this becomes normal.

If we allow ideological certainty to justify dehumanisation — particularly in the name of protecting nature — we risk eroding the civic norms that make progress on solving some of humanity’s greatest challenges possible.

If this happens, nature loses.

We all do.