The national anti-racism framework, launched on Tuesday, intends to answer a critical question: how can racism be eliminated from Australia?
Launched by the Australian Human Rights Commission, the framework sets out 63 recommendations for the government to implement, steps that it believes can eventually stamp out racism.
Giridharan Sivaraman, the national race discrimination commissioner, said it was the first time Australia had a “comprehensive plan” to tackle “deeply embedded” racism across the country.
“Throughout our consultation process, we heard consistently from First Nations and other negatively racialised people that systemic racism is deeply embedded throughout Australia and requires an urgent national response,” he said.
The framework was developed after three years of consultations with hundreds of diverse community organisations, service providers, government departments and agencies, subject matter experts, and relevant community members.
“In Australia, the refusal to name and confront racism has prevented meaningful progress on eliminating it,” the AHRC document reads.
“The focus on multiculturalism and social cohesion hides or erases many communities’ lived experience of racism as well as the nation’s settler colonial foundations.”
Here are some of the framework’s key takeaways and recommendations:
Workplaces and legislative reforms
Workplaces, employers and organisations are singled out as key areas of reform.
The framework calls for reforms to the Racial Discrimination Act to include a positive duty to eliminate racial discrimination in all workplaces.
That includes government agencies, not-for-profits, businesses and service providers, with a particular focus on health, education, retail and hospitality, sport, housing and finance.
All these workplaces will need to actively take steps to eliminate racism, with the AHRC also recommending they be given powers to assess compliance.
The framework calls for all medium and large employers to develop strategies for hiring and retaining diverse staff, to develop and implement anti-racism training and to develop strategies that “include measures for preventing and responding to racism in the workplace”.
The AHRC also calls for legislative reforms to address religious-based discrimination.
The framework urges the government to legislate regulation that enforces the liability of digital platforms in the sharing of online hate.
The recommendations go further, calling for reforms that would address caste discrimination, as well as reviews of the governments migration and citizenship laws, “with particular attention given to inequities experienced by negatively racialised people seeking asylum, refugees and migrants”.
First Nations recommendations
The report makes extensive recommendations on the treatment of Indigenous communities in a variety of contexts.
It begins by saying the framework will work towards acknowledging “the systemic and structural nature of racism, including the historical and ongoing impacts of settler colonisation on First Nations peoples”.
The framework calls for the establishment of an independent mechanism to monitor and report on the status of the implementation of the 1987 royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody.
It says all governments should expedite implementing national preventive mechanisms for all places of detention, and that the federal government should raise the minimum age of criminal responsibility to 14.
The government should develop a nationally recognised definition of First Nations cultural safety, and prioritise the development of a Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community-controlled sector that can provide legal, health and support services.
Racism in health, education and the media
The framework includes individual sections covering health, education and media, broadly calling for greater representation of, and support for, First Nations and diverse communities.
It calls for the development and implementation of anti-racism training across all of these sectors.
The framework recommends the inclusion of anti-racism materials into school curricula that “recognise and reject racism,” and the development of a safe reporting mechanism for students, parents or teachers.
It calls for greater regulation of media organisations on reporting related to First Nations and “other negatively racialised communities,” as well as for regular audits of content to “assess biases and gaps in the representation of diverse voices”.
It calls on Australian governments to “identify racism as an urgent national health priority” with “significant impacts on the physical and mental wellbeing of First Nations and other negatively racialised communities”.
Data and evaluation
Finally, the framework also makes recommendations on data collection. It says“data on racism in Australia is limited, inconsistent across jurisdictions, and often ad-hoc”.
The framework recommends the development of a “National Anti-Racism Data Plan”, where communities with lived experiences of racism are “meaningfully engaged” in the design of a national approach to data on racism.
This includes the development of new population and administrative data standards on Indigenous status and ethnicity, strengthening data about different forms of racism and initiatives to address personal and structural barriers to reporting racism.
It calls on the government to increase funding to the AHRC and other anti-racism bodies to ensure the framework is implemented and maintained.
