A recent ruling of the Victorian court of Appeal in the case of Austin Health v Tsikos marks a significant advance in the appreciation of how unconscious biases can serve to activate and embed discrimination in the workplace. The complainant, Christina Tsikos had been employed as an orthotist/ prosthetist by Austin Health in 2009. The …
The harms of discriminatory hiring practices Discrimination in recruitment is a long-standing problem that adversely affects women and other protected groups, but also ultimately impacts organisations negatively when discrimination results in talented people being overlooked for jobs. Sometimes the discrimination flows from deliberate and conscious decisions to hire only from certain groups or to exclude …
Recently Barnaby Joyce in a radio interview, claimed that incorporating the Voice in the Australian Constitution would be contrary to the principle of equality. It would give special and distinctive status to Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders. We disagree with this proposition most emphatically. The stance of Symmetra is that giving a Voice to Indigenous …
As we discussed in our two previous posts, employers, large and small, in Australia must now contend with an entirely new set of legal obligations when trying to render their workplaces free of sexual harassment. Firstly, the principal duty falls squarely on the employer who must act proactively and systematically to take steps to …
The legislative landscape surrounding workplace sexual harassment and violence in Australia has undergone a profound change recently. The change is reflected in two principal areas: The first area concerns who bears the primary legal responsibility for addressing sexual harassment and what processes should be implemented and followed to combat it; The second area concerns classifying …
Australia was at one time (in the 1970s and 1980s) lauded as being in the forefront of tackling the scourge of sexual harassment in the workplace and elsewhere. Since then, it has fallen behind. Sexual harassment has remained a perennial and intractable problem in the Australian workplace – as it has in other countries. Until …
There is no denying that contemporary businesses face a new set of challenges in the workplace. With the world around us constantly changing and evolving, there is little time to adjust to the transformations that are taking place in our everyday experiences. Today, the need for a diverse, equitable, and inclusive (DEI) workplace culture is …
A massive paradigm shift and a new conceptual approach to workplace mental health hazards is about to be established by law in Australian workplaces. What has already begun and what will continue to be implemented are laws and regulations at both Federal and State levels, requiring employers to implement comprehensive and systemic measures to minimise …
Gathering DEI data in organisations is often a first step in implementing a comprehensive DEI strategy. However, DEI surveys and data-gathering exercises may expose organisations to legal pitfalls. In particular, these surveys must comply with changing privacy and data protection legislation which has been expanding rapidly across the globe in recent years. This legislation impacts …
Diversity and inclusion have become the DNA of any business that has succeeded in creating a safe and diverse workplace for all employees. Many leaders have taken a renewed approach to establishing diversity and inclusion mechanisms in their workplaces, including the idea of inclusive leadership. This is why Symmetra has partnered with Herbert Smith …