Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My dear friend Angela Buckingham just published her first book, Powerful Princesses, with stories about women from history who, as she puts it, 'took action because they had a sense of responsibility or a sense of the rights that came with their special social status'. This year we have seen women from the legal and political professions take action because they had a sense of responsibility to ensure that other women do not have to experience the sexual harassment and gender inequality that they had experienced in their workplaces. While my female colleagues and I had, and still have, magnificent male bosses, colleagues and mentors when I worked in the legal profession, our experiences accord with the results of a report published this year by the Victorian Legal Services Board after surveying 2,300 lawyers. Two-thirds of women lawyers had recently been sexually harassed, usually by a senior male in the profession. The harassment was destructive to their wellbeing and careers, and commonly perpetrators engaged in serial incidents. Why didn't I call it out, and why is it rare for it to be called out in the profession? It's partly because it's too often women whose reputations and careers suffer when they do, partly because there's nowhere to go with a complaint, and partly because of a culture where everybody knows the men who are doing it but no-one does anything about it. It has to change, and those of us with the special status of being elected to this parliament should show the leadership to change it. So today I'm calling it out, and I'm asking everyone to join with me in doing so.