Louise Miller-Frost (Boothby, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today in support of the government's Anti-Discrimination and Human Rights Legislation Amendment (Respect at Work) Bill 2022. This government is serious about equality for women from all walks of life. No longer are women largely excluded from the decision-making and priority-setting positions of government. I'm so proud to serve with so many experienced Labor women—women who have blazed trails in this place for future generations to follow. I'm proud to be part of an intake of new members of parliament that comprises more female members than ever and is more diverse in ways that mean we better represent the communities we serve.

One of the important things to come of this hard-fought greater representation of women is that the concerns and experiences of women won't be overlooked. This is not to say that there aren't many good men who are also aware of and determined to address gender equality, and I'm also proud to serve amongst them. But, with that many women at the table—that many women so rich in experience, knowledge and passion—the concerns and experience of women won't be bumped for other priorities. You have only to look at this government's priorities since taking office to see this. This morning 10 days paid domestic violence leave for all workers was legislated. The Minister for Women and Minister for Finance, Katy Gallagher, presented the government's women's budget statement. In the House of Representatives chamber this morning, the minister for industrial relations, Tony Burke, introduced the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Secure Jobs, Better Pay) Bill 2022. That bill implements the sole remaining recommendation of the landmark Respect@Work report not covered by this current bill I'm speaking to today. It will empower workers in predominantly feminised industries to more effectively argue for what they deserve: wages commensurate with the important work that they do. So it's absolutely crystal clear that the interests of women are at the heart of what this government does.

When I was 18 years old, at my very first job in a very large government department in Adelaide the workshops had pictures of naked women cut from girly magazines on the wall in my view, in public view. As an 18-year-old girl straight from school—a girls' school—and a new employee, I would walk into the workshops full of older men in their place of work with these pictures on the wall. To say it was uncomfortable is an understatement. Then, working as a waitress during university, I was harassed physically and verbally by patrons in a family restaurant on an ongoing basis. We'd like to think that this sort of thing is in the past, but then in working in the women's services sector I heard stories from women whose lives were changed devastatingly by sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace in our current time.

This bill implements the remaining legislative recommendations of the Australian Human Rights Commission's 2020 Respect@Work: sexual harassment national inquiry report. As Australia's Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins tells us in the Respect@Work report, Australia once led the way globally in tackling sexual harassment. Indeed, even before the federal Sex Discrimination Act in 1984 specifically prohibited sexual harassment at work, my home state of South Australia had introduced protections against discrimination on the basis of sex in 1975. Yet the Respect@Work report found that Australia's legislative framework for responding to sexual harassment is now out of date and lags behind other countries.

Indeed, the Human Rights Commission's most recent widely conducted survey of the national experience of sexual harassment found that sexual harassment in Australian workplaces is widespread and pervasive. According to their survey, one in three people had experienced sexual harassment at work in the past five years. Breaking this down by gender, two in five women and one in four men had experienced harassment at work. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were more likely to have been harassed than non-Indigenous people, and we know that there are additional barriers and challenges that people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds and members of the LBGTQI+ community face when targeted with harassment. So this bill forms part of the government's response to this challenge.

In substance, the bill introduces a positive duty on employers and people running a business to take reasonable and proportionate measures to eliminate sex discrimination, sexual and sex based harassment, hostile work environments and victimisation as far as possible. The bill provides the Human Rights Commission with the function of assessing and enforcing compliance with a positive duty. Crucially, the bill also makes a significant alteration to the Sex Discrimination and Fair Work (Respect at Work) Amendment Act 2021, passed by the previous government. It replaces a section which stated it was an object of the act 'to achieve equal opportunity between men and women' with an object 'to achieve substantive equality between men and women'.

The bill also expressly prohibits conduct that results in a hostile work environment on the basis of sex and ensures Commonwealth public sector organisations are also required to report to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency on its gender equality indicators. In totality, this bill should go a long way towards ensuring safer, respectful and more equitable workplaces for all Australians. No-one should be made to feel unsafe or unwelcome at their place of work. It's simply not right.

Of course, there remains much work to be done. Sexual harassment, as with most gender based violence, is really about power. It's about the power of one person to carry out their will regardless of the impact on others, to make another person feel the power imbalance that exists between them; it diminishes, humiliates and silences victims; and we know that it remains the case that too often too many workplaces are characterised by structural, entrenched power imbalances between men and women. So wherever we see gender inequalities in our society—and let's be honest, we find them everywhere—we must redouble our efforts to eliminate these inequalities.

We remember the thousands of women who marched on Parliament House and more than 40 other sites around Australia, and we remember the Prime Minister who would not go out to meet them, would not go out to hear their concerns. This, and the way we heard how women were treated in this place, is one of the reasons I decided run for the seat of Boothby. When I campaigned I heard from so many women—women and men, but mostly women—about their terrible experiences. We must redouble our efforts to eliminate these inequalities because they cause real harm. Enough is enough.

Debate adjourned.

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