Indigenous leader: we need a brave conversation about racism

Senior partner and board member at KPMG has called out workplace racism against Indigenous Australians, labelling their historical treatment ‘essentially slavery’.

KPMG senior partner and board member Shelley Reys. Picture: John Feder

A senior partner and board member at professional services firm KPMG has called out workplace racism against Indigenous Australians and argued that the history of the Stolen Generations was “essentially slavery”.

Shelley Reys, an Indigenous leader who has been involved in business and Indigenous issues for 30 years, said racism existed even though Australians preferred to use the term “unconscious bias”.

Similarly, they had swapped the term Stolen Generations for what “essentially slavery was and what other countries called slavery”.

She said that while there was increased public enthusiasm for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and cultures, Australia could not move to true reconciliation without holding “big and brave and uncomfortable” conversations on Indigenous issues.

Ms Reys’ comments come as she celebrates her election by 600 KPMG partners to the board of the firm. She is the first Indigenous person on the board and her appointment is a rarity in corporate Australia.

She is chief executive of Arrilla Indigenous Consulting, a joint venture with KPMG, and had held senior positions over many years on several boards, including Reconciliation Australia and the ­National Australia Day Council.

In an interview with The Deal, Ms Reys, a Djirribul woman, said: “When I think about the temperature of reconciliation at the moment … we can see a raised enthusiasm year-on-year for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and cultures.

RELATED: Why we need to talk about racism

“We see more symbolism than ever before, flags, Indigenous motifs for NAIDOC, welcome to country … but we do need to keep our hands on the wheel and really pay some attention to turning goodwill, sentiment and symbolism into real action.

“And the only way we are going to do that is to move from safe to brave … we need to have the uncomfortable conversations about what is stopping us from really advancing in the ways that we want to.

“None of us likes to think of ourselves as racist, none of us likes to think of our organisation as having policies and ­procedures that through our ­unconscious bias make it difficult for people to participate in the way that they could and should.

“It is a conversation that we need to have because it (racism) does exist and when we have those conversations, we learn from one another, we take down our armour, we expose ourselves professionally and personally and that’s what we need to really do.”

However, she said, that some people were more comfortable with some words than others “so my major interest is that we have the conversation to begin with”.

“There are a lot of words that we have chosen to swap out for other words that are easier to hear and use because the difficult parts of our shared history are so recent,” she said.

“For example, Stolen Generations is a term that we came up with to describe what essentially slavery was and what other countries called slavery.

“We are more comfortable with the term unconscious bias than we are with the term racism but in the context of unconscious bias in the workplace, more often than not, it is racism. Whether it is conscious or unconscious is irrelevant.”