news
Heather Mansell-Brown arrives
at Brisbane Supreme Court.
Photo: Claudia Baxter/AAP
Activism taken too far?
Aged care advocate sued
for troll-like tactics.
By Conor Burke
A
ged care advocate Heather Mansell-
Brown was in a Brisbane court in
June, accused of defamation. She
is being sued by Maxine Noone, a clinical
care manager at the Yallambee Millmerran
Retirement Village in Queensland. The case
relates to a number of comments Mansell-
Brown posted on social media in 2017,
claiming mismanagement and malpractice
at the facility.
Mansell-Brown is said to have made
personal attacks on Noone in some posts,
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alleging that Noone had lost a previous
job due to drinking on duty and “missing
narcotic drugs”, as reported by The
Courier Mail.
This is not the first time Mansell-Brown
has been accused of taking her activism
too far, and there have been claims that her
group has directed online abuse at many
prominent figures in the aged care sector.
Mansell-Brown’s husband, William
Brown, was mistreated in a Bundaberg
facility, and since then she has been
vociferous in her criticisms of the aged
care system. She has created an advocacy
group on social media and has written
op-eds in the press.
According to one such piece for the
ABC, she claimed that “working with the
Queensland Nurses Union, we set up the
Safe Staffing Now page and the Mandatory
Staff Patient Ratio petition”.
The petition on change.org currently has
314,598 signatures.
One fellow aged care advocate told
Aged Care Insite that they had been
attacked online several times by “her and
her cohort”, referring to Mansell-Brown.
The online abuse included personal insults
and attacks on the advocate’s late mother,
who had also been abused in aged care.
Another advocate, Dr Sarah Russell,
told Aged Care Insite that she too was
a victim of online abuse at the hands of
Brown’s group.
Russell wrote an op-ed about online
abuse, mentioning the alleged online
targeting of Yallambee at the hands of
Mansell-Brown and her group, after
being contacted by a volunteer worker
at the home.
The volunteer was “very concerned
about the impact the online bullying was
having on several staff and volunteers”.
Russell said this prompted further online
abuse, and she became a target as she ran
for office in the recent federal election.
“The abuse began with private messages
criticising my meetings with aged care
providers. I was asked when am I having
lunch with George Pell?” Russell said.
“Sara Matthews [apparently one of
Mansell-Brown’s fake Facebook identities]
appeared in a comment on my Facebook
page, alerting people not to vote for me
because I am ‘a liar’. I immediately deleted
and blocked. My strategy has been to
ignore, delete, block. The problem is
Mansell-Brown and her trolls have so many
fake Facebook IDs.” ■
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