Government responds to Kate Jenkins’ Respect at Work report

MARISE PAYNE, MINISTER FOR WOMEN: As a government we are committed to making all Australian workplaces safe and free from sexual harassment.

LAURA TINGLE, CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: It has taken 13 months for the Morrison Government to respond to the Respect at Work report which it received from the Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins in March last year.

MARISE PAYNE: I’ve actually just seen the full tome and if she adds all that detail, we could be here for some time, just saying.

LAURA TINGLE: Today Scott Morrison and his new Attorney-General, Michaelia Cash, celebrated the significance of last year’s report which aims to prevent and address sexual harassment in the workplace – a problem the report found has affected 39 per cent of women and 26 per cent of men and imposed a $3.8 billion annual cost on the economy.

SCOTT MORRISON, PRIME MINISTER: Sexual harassment is unacceptable. It’s not only immoral and despicable, and even criminal, but particularly in the context of the Respect at Work report, it denies Australians, especially women, not just their personal security but their economic security by not being safe at work.

LAURA TINGLE: But things happen at their own pace with this Government. Not only did it take the Government more than a year to respond to the report, it didn’t actually release its full response today until around two hours after Morrison and Cash emerged just after 9:00am to talk about their plans for dealing with Jenkins’ recommendations.

That meant reporters, as is now a standard practice for this Government, had no information on which to base questions except that revealed by the two ministers at the press conference.

You might remember a similar scene playing out when the Prime Minister released the report of the Royal Commission into Aged Care.

ANNE CONNOLLY, REPORTER (March, 2021): You’ve had this report since Friday. You’ve given us half an hour’s notice to attend a press conference. You tabled the report while we were here.

How can we ask questions that are relevant to what is in the report without knowing what’s in it?

LAURA TINGLE: The Government’s approach made it pretty difficult to get a comprehensive take on what the royal commission had to say about aged care and it was a problem today too when trying to assess how the Government was dealing with 55 recommendations from a report which spanned almost 1,000 pages, especially given the PM’s strong rhetoric.

SCOTT MORRISON: Kate Jenkins’ report, Respect at Work, is a game changer. It is changing the very narrative that will drive the appropriate actions needed right across governments and across our society.

We believe our response, a road map for respect, will do the same thing.

LAURA TINGLE: So the first message about the Government’s response sounded pretty impressive.

SCOTT MORRISON: All 55 recommendations are either agreed, wholly in part or in principle, or noted where they are directed to governments or organisations other than the Australian Government, or the Government is able to achieve the intent of the recommendations through other means as set out in the report.

LAURA TINGLE: The crucial words here, of course, are recommendations agreed wholly, in part, in principle or noted and, in fact, much of the initial focus of the press conference, given the shocking stories emanating from Parliament House itself in recent months, was on the announcement that members of parliament and judges would in future by subject to the Sex Discrimination Act which was not actually a recommendation of the Jenkins’ report.

MICHAELIA CASH, ATTORNEY-GENERAL: We will be subject to the same law as anybody else which will means you will be subject the same consequences.

LAURA TINGLE: When the Government’s actual 25-page written response to the inquiry was released around 11:30, the picture was a little more complicated.

The Government has agreed to 40 recommendations, agreed in principle to five, agreed in part to one and noted nine.

But it’s not so much in the numbers of recommendations adopted as the significance of the ones it has not agreed to.

Crucially it hasn’t adopted Jenkins’ recommendations for amendments to the Sex Discrimination Act which would put the onus on employers to take reasonable and proportionate measures to eliminate harassment.

KATE JENKINS, SEX DISCRIMINATION COMMISSIONER: There’s never a guarantee that your recommendations will be accepted. That the 55 recommendations have been actually accepted and the majority of them in total, I think is a good outcome for the future for Australian workers.

It has taken some time to get a response to this report, I know that. I’m pleased with the response we’ve got.

LAURA TINGLE: But in cautious language, she clearly indicates the need to press the Government further on that crucial issue of expressly requiring employers to eliminate sexual misconduct.

KATE JENKINS: The one that I am very interested in pursuing is the positive duty on employers under the Sex Discrimination Act. I think it would be a real missed opportunity with such comprehensive reform for the Government to not at least consider some kind of positive duty be put into the act.

LAURA TINGLE: And while the Government was somewhat unclear today about how exactly it would enact a system which brought judges and particularly MPs into the act, Jenkins thinks it is possible to achieve this.

KATE JENKINS: I feel like we are at turning point where that is changing in the corporate world and I think it’s well timed for members of parliament and judges to be subject to the same standards as everyone else.