Triumph of the Persisterhood: New laws will make women safer at work

Just over a year ago, writing for this masthead, I attempted to give voice to women’s collective rage – correction, their downright fury – directed at the Morrison government for failing to legislate all the recommendations from Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins’ Respect@Work inquiry into workplace sexual harassment.

Now I’m back – but this time I have a much happier task. Having just marked the fifth anniversary of #MeToo going viral, we can now note the significance of the Respect@Work Bill, which passed in federal parliament on Monday. It legislates the remainder of Jenkins’ recommendations, in particular the “positive duty” placed on employers to prevent sexual harassment.

Employers will have a “positive duty” under the law to prevent sexual harassment.Credit: Dionne Gain

In short, the Albanese government has done what the Morrison government could not – and would not – do to keep women safe at work. It is indeed historic.

Getting here wasn’t easy. It confronted powerful resistance. It is a testament to the power of women’s collective action and the persistence of many who warrant induction into the Persisterhood Hall of Fame. They include Jenkins herself.

Australia is, once again, poised to be a world leader in the response to and prevention of sexual harassment.

When Jenkins’ world-first sexual harassment inquiry was commissioned by then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull in 2018, it was informed by an epic 60 consultations and drew on 460 submissions from legal services, unions, women’s services, academic experts and, most importantly, victims. Anything informed by that breadth of experience and front-line expertise was bound to put forward transformative recommendations, which Respect@Work most certainly did.

The final report’s 55 recommendations – released in early 2020 – covered everything from a more robust legal and regulatory framework to more holistic support for survivors. And they included the game-changing positive duty that took the burden off victims and placed it firmly on the shoulders of employers to prevent sexual harassment from happening in the first place.

The Morrison government provoked outrage by cynically attempting to cherry-pick Jenkins’ recommendations when she had made clear they should be taken as a whole so they would be mutually reinforcing. The same government initially tossed the final report into then attorney-general Christian Porter’s drawer, where it sat for more than a year until 2021, when a series of highly publicised cases of alleged sexual assault reinvigorated calls for change.

The Morrison government seemed genuinely surprised by the strength of feeling in the community. To this day, I’m surprised that Scott Morrison and his many ministers for women, including his “Prime Minister for Women” Marise Payne, did not recognise the salience of the issue. But others, including Jenkins, did.

According to a survey undertaken by the Australian Human Rights Commission, rates of sexual harassment had increased from one in four people when the survey was last conducted in 2012 to one in three in 2018. Rates are higher among Indigenous women, women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds and disabled women.

But highlighting the troubling statistics to raise “awareness” would no longer suffice. Jenkins and those who backed the full implementation of the inquiry’s 55 recommendations understood this.

Despite the feminist maxim “what gets measured gets managed”, they understood that measuring a wicked problem from time to time, only to chronicle a depressing rise in perpetration, was not enough. Why go through the farce of highlighting the scale of the problem, only to do little about it?

As the legendary American feminist Flo Kennedy said to Gloria Steinem: “Honey, when you are lying in a ditch with a truck on your ankle, you do not send someone to the library to find out how much the truck weighs. You get it off!”

Those who helped us arrive at this moment wanted that truck off. And this week the Albanese government delivered the crane to lift it. It’s about time.

Kristine Ziwica is a regular contributor. Her book, Leaning Out, was just published by Hardie Grant. Twitter: @KZiwica