A landmark report aimed at cleaning up a toxic workplace culture in Australia’s parliament and other government offices found that one in three employees had suffered sexual harassment.
Just more than one quarter of those that experienced sexual harassment said a member of parliament was responsible, in the survey of more than 1,700 individuals.
About 37 percent of staff said they had suffered bullying.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison yesterday said that his government would likely support the report’s 28 recommendations, which include setting targets for gender balance and diversity across all parliamentary roles.
The report addresses “the power imbalance, the gender imbalance, the lack of accountability for behavior, as well as understanding the challenging and demanding work environment” in parliament, Morrison told reporters in Canberra.
Morrison ordered the independent inquiry to be conducted by Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins after thousands of women rallied across Australia to protest against sexual violence.
“While we heard of positive experiences of work within the Parliament, there were others who shared experiences of bullying, sexual harassment and sexual assault,” Jenkins said in the report. “Too often, we heard that these workplaces are not safe environments for many people within them.”
Morrison’s government has been criticized for refusing to hold an inquiry into claims that former attorney-general Christian Porter raped a fellow member of a school debating team in 1988 — allegations he denies. Porter has since resigned from the ministry.
There was also criticism of his handling of allegations that former government media adviser Brittany Higgins was raped by a fellow staffer in a minister’s office in 2019.
One of the individuals interviewed for the report said: “It is a man’s world and you are reminded of it every day thanks to the looks up and down you get, to the representation in the parliamentary chambers, to the preferential treatment politicians give senior male journalists.”
Multiple participants complained about the lack of women in senior roles, saying the workplace possessed a “male-dominated and testosterone-fueled culture.”
Rather than being held accountable, people who engaged in misconduct were often rewarded for, or in spite of, their behavior, workers said.
Among the recommendations in the report are:
‧ Party leaders and the heads of the parliamentary departments should come together, agree and deliver a joint statement to parliament acknowledging the harm caused by bullying, sexual harassment, and sexual assault in Commonwealth parliamentary workplaces and a commitment to action and shared accountability.
‧ A leadership task force will oversee the implementation of the recommendations made in the report.
‧ The government should set up a follow-up external independent review to examine the implementation of recommendations made in the report within 18 months.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees