Morrison forces women to keep playing ‘whack a mole’

Is this what women marched for? Is this what the countless expert advocates, women’s organisations and victims imagined, when they spent weeks preparing all those submissions and attending all those consultations for the Respect@Work inquiry into sexual harassment?

Surely not. Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins made 55 recommendations after that inquiry to make workplaces safer for women. But last week, the Morrison government ensured that only six of those recommendations made their way into law and scuppered attempts by Labor and the Greens to implement the centrepiece of Jenkins’ report – a positive duty on employers to prevent sexual harassment from happening in the first place.

Protesters at the Women’s March 4 Justice at Treasury Gardens in Melbourne on March 15.Credit: Eddie Jim

Make no mistake: history will remember this moment as a key milestone in Australia’s #MeToo journey – and Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his newly minted taskforce for women will prove to be on the wrong side of that history.

The government also joined with One Nation to block other amendments to the Sex Discrimination and Fair Work (Respect at Work) Amendment Bill. These would have changed workplace laws to ban sexual harassment, protected victims of sexual harassment from massive legal bills, and reviewed the Fair Work system to ensure that sexual harassment – using the definition in the Sex Discrimination Act – was expressly prohibited.

This was a significant missed opportunity. When the “world first” sexual harassment inquiry led by Jenkins was commissioned by the Coalition government in 2018, in the heady days after #MeToo first went viral, 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.

And when the final report’s recommendations were released in early 2020, they were described as “revolutionary”, covering everything from a more robust legal and regulatory framework to more holistic support for survivors.

Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins.Credit: Arsineh Houspian

The report’s central recommendation of a “positive duty” on employers to prevent sexual harassment from happening in the first place was billed as a potential “game changer”, taking the burden off victims (who, as the last four years have shown, pay a great price for coming forward) and placing it firmly on the shoulders of employers to take more steps to prevent it from happening.

Now, four years later, I am profoundly disappointed this is where we have landed in Australia ... and not for lack of trying: I refer you to those 60 consultations and 460 submissions. Not to mention a historic women’s March 4 Justice earlier this year.

This is not what brave women like Catherine Marriott, Chelsey Potter, Christie Whelan Browne and Brittany Higgins hoped for when they came forward to share their experiences. “It’s devastating to see a real opportunity for positive change be denied for all the working women in this country,” Higgins said after the legislation passed.

Marriott, who filed a complaint with the National Party about Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce’s behaviour, allegations he denies, concurred. “I have no words for how frustrated, hopeless, sad – words escape me – I am at this,” she said. “This was a real opportunity to say sexual assault and harassment in the workplace is not OK.“

Brittany Higgins speaks at the March 4 Justice in Canberra.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

I am all the more resentful of this lacklustre effort given the cynical games the Morrison government played when it launched its long overdue response to the inquiry. It took more than a year and another wave of #MeToo allegations for Scott Morrison and his new Attorney-General Michaelia Cash to pull the Respect@Work report out of a drawer.

And at a press conference in April of this year to announce the government’s long-overdue response, Morrison and Cash led the media to believe that they had accepted all 55 recommendations “in part or in principle”, but they didn’t make a copy of the full response available for another two hours, meaning journalists couldn’t interrogate that claim. It later emerged the government had not accepted many recommendations at all, merely “noting” them.

More than anything, I am devastated for victims, who have been effectively told by the Morrison government to keep playing a game of whack a mole when it comes to sexual harassment. Because, despite the spin and bluster, that is exactly what these changes – or more accurately, lack of changes – mean.

Here’s some important context: the 2018 Australian Human Rights Sexual Harassment in Australian Workplaces Survey indicated that rates of sexual harassment had increased from one in four people when the survey was last conducted in 2012 to one in three people in 2018. That increase, curiously, maps almost directly on to the period of federal Coalition leadership.

Now the Coalition government has well and truly nailed its colours to the mast of its intransigent, deeply sexist patriarchal ship.

The National Women’s Safety Summit starts today and Morrison, in an act of chutzpah not seen since the day Tony Abbott appointed himself minister for women, has reserved the opening keynote address for himself. He and his government will have some serious explaining to do. How can all those women’s safety advocates and victims attending this week’s summit not conclude, after the events of last week, that their time and effort are in vain? That the summit is anything more than a talking shop?

I am reminded of a famous Maya Angelou quote: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.”

Kristine Ziwica is a regular contributor. Twitter: @KZiwica

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