The 'irritant' of affirmative action
A bill has been introduced into parliament to amend the 1986 affirmative action act after a government-ordered review of the legislation resulted in a report called Unfinished Business.
The gist of the recommendations, most of which have been incorporated into the new bill, is summed up by the government's response to the Unfinished Business report. "The government agrees that the objects of the legislation should emphasise merit, replace the old union consultation requirement with a general statement of support for consultation and emphasise a facilitative rather than a punitive approach to compliance."
Peter Reith bemoaned the problems he was having with the Senate debate around the government-initiated bill, and seemed not to understand the opposition to some aspects of it. On November 30 at the "Celebrating Best Practice" luncheon during the Women in the Workplace — Opportunities for Business in the New Millennium seminar in Melbourne, he described the proposal to reduce the reporting requirements of business in relation to affirmative action procedures and policies as "removing an irritant".
Under one of his legislative proposals, if a company makes progress in implementing affirmative action strategies, its reporting requirements to the Affirmative Action Agency will be waived. While Reith maintains that reporting can be enforced again at the AAA director's discretion, how and when any future breaches of the affirmative action principles will be brought to the director's attention without any reporting requirements is not easily explained. Presumably the idea is that this will happen when complaints against the company flow again. So much for pro-active measures, but at least managers are a little less irritated overall.
The new AAA director, Fiona Krautil, was effusively praised by Reith in his November 30 address. She showed a startling naivety about the real opportunities women have in the work force when, in the AAA annual report to parliament on October 20 she called for "'women to vote with their feet' and target the 'women-friendly' organisations that provide the best opportunities and avoid those with a poor equal employment opportunity record".
Yes, Fiona, so many women in Australia can afford to pick and choose their employer. Don't worry about the unemployment figures and the increase in job insecurity; it's a veritable labour-favoured marketplace out there for most women.
Another of the recommendations made by the business-dominated team appointed by the government to review the legislation in 1998 was to change the name of the act from Affirmative Action (Equal Opportunity for Women) Act to Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Act. The review committee, chaired by the former director of employee relations for McDonald's Australia Ltd, Deanne Bevan, explained that the new name would "incorporate the terms 'women' and 'workplace' and reflect the act's commitment to fairness and merit".
Unless their eyes and ears are painted on, I can offer no explanation of their failure to notice that the affirmative action act's full name already contains the term "women", but I suspect that the addition of the new word "workplace" has less relevance than the junking of the words that Reith and Co. find to be the real irritants in the title of the law, and of the agency, now to be called the Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency.
The review team recommended the name change "in order to distinguish Australian affirmative action from the United States' former system of quotas and preferential treatment". For those of you who thought that affirmative action was a system of quotas and preferential treatment, this may be a surprise. Those who have been following closely what the Coalition government has done to the modest legislative gains forced by the women's liberation movement of the '60s and '70s may not be so taken aback.
Under the current act, changes by the Liberal government to affirmative action reporting requirements have already watered down legislation that, while welcome, was not that potent to begin with. The proposed bill, if adopted by parliament later this month, will be a setback for women's rights in a context of harsh economic rationalist policy and an anti-feminist ideological climate.
For so long as systematic barriers to women's full and equal participation in paid work exist, affirmative action remains a vital step on the path to equality. Without it, unfair hiring and firing practices, lack of promotion opportunities and limited access to non-traditional work will mean that women's participation in many areas of work will likely decline.
By Margaret Allum