Workplace ‘re-education camps’ speak to culture of weakness

Joshua Brown leads the smoking ceremony at a health facility in Toowoomba.

Australia was once known as a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains. Now it’s more like a land of re-education camps.

Modern godbotherers of the secular variety don’t come knocking at home on a Saturday morning; they’re banging on your workplace door during the week.

Monday might see workers at a company trot off to an afternoon of “cultural sensitivity and awareness training” so they understand people are all shaped by their cultural background, influencing how they interpret the world around them and relate to other people. Tuesday morning, we might receive an hour of online cultural training from the Victorian Supreme Court’s ceremonial sitting “honouring First Nations people”.

Wait, this did happen. Think Lidia Thorpe – minus the obscenities. It was a showcase of politics, not law, of separatism, special rights, talk of treaties and sovereignty not being ceded. An acknowledgement of country wasn’t enough for this court. So, there were several.

On Wednesday, if all goes to plan for re-education chiefs, again in Victoria, at the bar this time, there will be a mandatory Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander cultural awareness training program to inculcate the same ideas into new barristers, still wet behind the ears. Maybe some rote learning too of acknowledgements of country – or for those with lousy memory, a small, printed card with the correct words.

Re-education camps are all the rage in 2024. The ABC, for example, is re-educating its staff about racism. It’s not entirely clear from its recent racism review what it means by racism. One respondent seemed to suggest that being labelled bossy was racist. Another thought that impartiality was limiting – read racist. But let’s not allow clarity to get in the way of Aunty’s re-education camps.

Some ABC staff will receive “vicarious trauma training” so they are properly supported from being indirectly exposed to another person’s first-hand experience of trauma. Other ABC staff will be “educated” about “diversity, cultural safety and psychosocial obligations”.

Meanwhile, over at Nine, workers will soon attend a re-education camp about workplace bullying, intimidation, and sexual harassment. Completion date is some time in 2034.

We shouldn’t mock all workplace “training” sessions. If you work somewhere dangerous, a safety session on day one is a terrific idea. If you’re working in the Indigenous health area, for example, learning about Indigenous health challenges makes sense. Young barristers should be trained about court procedure, pleadings and the like.

But if you have half a brain, you ought to know it’s a major career-limiting move to behave like a racist or to bully, intimidate or sexually harass your co-worker. If you don’t know that, then it’s time for your boss to give you the boot.

For some, re-education might not make an iota of difference. Thorpe could do with a level one lesson on manners (for toddlers) to understand that screaming obscenities at anyone – King or commoner – is vile behaviour. But who thinks she will change?

Still, to understand the popularity of re-education camps, you need to distinguish between the two most common varieties. Some involve workplace infantilisation: instilling in adults what any halfway decent parent would have taught their halfway sensible 10-year-old kid. Here the employer becomes the parent, educating all adult employees that being a bully is not OK, that sexual harassment stinks and being a racist is bad, and so on.

Many en masse re-education camps could be avoided if management cracks down on bad behaviour by individuals as and when it occurs. Last week, after a review found monstrous levels of truly awful behaviour, the Nine board released a statement that said: “Driving these behaviours is a lack of leadership accountability; power imbalances; gender inequality and a lack of diversity, and significant distrust in leaders at all levels of the business.”

The board should have finished the sentence after “lack of leadership”. Nine’s brand has been wrecked because, for years, the Nine board and senior managers appeared to be uninterested in punishing bullies and sexual harassers. If they had even one working ear, they would have acted long ago.

Instead, Nine has a “systemic issue with abuse of power and authority; bullying, discrimination and harassment, and; sexual harassment”. The failure of Nine managers and directors to enforce blindingly obvious workplace standards against those who behaved badly will inevitably result in collective punishment for all. Many current and future employees will have to grind their teeth quietly while being lectured not to behave in ways that would never have occurred to them.

Senator Lidia Thorpe stages a protest as Britain's King Charles and Queen Camilla attend a parliamentary reception in Canberra.

Mind you, there is a deeper cause to managerial incompetence and cowardice. One need only read a few unfair dismissal cases to understand that managing people out of the workplace is not so easy. Take, for example, recent reports of a veteran truck driver at Phosphate Resources who bullied one of his co-workers including by repeatedly joking that the co-worker “knew how to suck the boss’s (****)” and, after he was told to stop, doubling down by trying to humiliate the co-worker in front of others.

The Fair Work Commission said mitigating circumstances made the dismissal of the driver harsh and unfair. One reason was that while the driver had been required to attend a 30-minute session on the company’s code of conduct, that, apparently, was not long enough to explain serious workplace behaviour standards.

It’s not surprising then that some managers are choosing extensive re-education camps for the whole workplace rather than sacking an individual perpetrator. Still, sacking a serial bully or harasser is surely worth a shot.

At a pinch, infantilising re-education camps may offer a hint of social benefit for workers who missed basic decency training as a kid. But it’s hard to say the same about re-education camps that are purely ideological. These, known as “cultural training” courses, are often foisted on workers for political reasons.

If adults want to learn about Indigenous history and culture, or the history and culture of other groups, that’s a matter for them. But increasingly, workplaces are force-feeding workers a diet of cultural indoctrination.

Judges, for example, can look forward to “trauma-informed” training sessions to learn how to deal with defendants from different cultures. In addition to considering a defendant’s personal circumstances (which makes eminent sense), the NSW Judicial Commission manual recommends that a judge should also have an “acknowledgment and understanding of a person’s … collective circumstances including the broader social, political and historical context”. In other words, racial and cultural stereotyping is back in fashion in judicial re-education camps.

Perhaps there is an upside, even as sensible people groan under the intrusion of myriad coercive re-education camps into their workplace. More people may come to realise how humourless, puritanical and grim life would be under the heel of a Greens government.