Mehreen Faruqi (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Anti-Discrimination and Human Rights Legislation Amendment (Respect at Work) Bill 2022, and I'd like to associate myself with the comments made by my wonderful colleague Senator Waters. The bill implements those recommendations of the Respect@Work report which the previous government chose to ignore, including the introduction of a positive duty on employers to take reasonable and proportionate steps to eliminate sex discrimination in their workplaces and the prohibition of conduct that subjects another person to a workplace environment that is hostile on the grounds of sex. The bill also provides the Australian Human Rights Commission with a function to inquire into systemic unlawful discrimination.

Imposing a positive duty on employers to prevent sexual harassment, sex discrimination and victimisation, with accompanying enforcement powers, is so important. The Respect@Work inquiry found that the current system places a heavy burden on individuals to make a formal complaint. The positive duty on the employer to create and maintain a safe workplace would be a step towards achieving a cultural shift and signalling to workers that their employers are invested in actually creating a safer workplace for all of them. As the Human Rights Commission has said, positive duty would be a powerful tool to promote broad, systemic and cultural change that sits outside of the current adversarial framework of discrimination law, so it is really good to see this introduction of positive duty on employers through this bill.

However, the bill should do more, as described by my colleague Senator Waters. As noted in the Greens additional comments to the Senate inquiry into this bill, a core finding of the Respect@Work report and other work of the Australian Human Rights Commission was that sexual harassment and discrimination are often intersectional, with compounding effect. Though specifically targeted at sexual harassment and sex based discrimination, the bill really does present such a good opportunity to require employers to ensure their workplace is free from discrimination on any grounds. That opportunity should have been taken up by the government. There is no reason the positive duty and hostile work environment provisions should apply to preventing discrimination only on the basis of sex. I know that Senator Waters will be moving a Greens amendment for similar obligations to extend to other protected attributes such as race, age and disability.

The Greens are supporting the bill of course because it represents significant progress for women around the country who have so courageously spoken their truth about the harassment, bullying and abuse that they have been subjected to and who have made it clear in no uncertain terms that they will not rest until it stops. This bill is the product of significant effort, investigation and analysis into sexual harassment and other forms of gendered violence at work. The National Inquiry into Sexual Harassment in Australian Workplaces was announced by the previous government in June 2018 in the context of the Me Too movement and global recognition of the serious harm caused by the problem of sexual harassment in workplaces. The inquiry, conducted over 18 months by the Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Kate Jenkins, was a world first. The 930-page report is comprehensive, thorough, well researched and informed by extensive consultations with a wide range of stakeholders. It made 55 practical and carefully considered recommendations for reform to fix our broken system, all of which the Greens support.

As a proud feminist, I celebrate the work we have done in this country to address sexual harassment and other forms of gendered violence at work. We must continue this work, but we should be equally determined to eliminate other forms of systemic and structural discrimination in Australian workplaces—in particular racism, homophobia, transphobia and ableism. The Respect@Work report noted that, alongside gender inequality, other inequalities experienced by groups with less power in society also contribute to the sexual harassment of people from these groups and that addressing sexual harassment requires an intersectional approach. An intersectional approach to sexual harassment sees gender as intersecting with other forms of discrimination and systems of power. The report found that workers were more likely to experience sexual harassment in the workplace if they were LGBTQI+, First Nations, people from culturally and linguistically diverse communities and migrant workers.

As those in the chamber would know, the need to address racism is particularly close to my heart. It is a personal lived experience of mine and so many people in the community that I know. Racism compounds the sexism that women of colour and First Nations women experience at work and obviously in society at large. Unfortunately, in Australia, a nation built on genocide and racist government policies such as the White Australia policy, there is a deep reluctance to talk about racism and the persistent denial of the scale of the problem. But racism is pervasive in Australian workplaces.

In response to the global push for racial justice in 2020, Diversity Council Australia prepared a report titled Racism at Work. The report surveyed 1,547 workers across various sectors and found 88 per cent of respondents agreed racism is an issue in Australian organisations, and 93 per cent of respondents agreed organisations need to take action to address it. Only 27 per cent of survey respondents said that their organisations were proactively preventing workplace racism. Research respondents told of being singled out by their colleagues because of their race and being subjected to derogatory names, harmful stereotypes and constant taunting. They also told of having complaints downplayed or dismissed by management.

Racism in Australian workplaces also manifests in many other ways, such as businesses disproportionately filling fixed-term contracts with people of colour or failing to promote deserving people of colour. This racism in workplaces does cause immense personal harm, just as sexism and other forms of discrimination do, and for many of us this intersection of racism and sexism really heavily compounds disadvantage, harm and discrimination. So the government really does need to start acting on preventing such harm from intersecting forms of discrimination in all our workplaces and in our society.