Political staff pursuing “avenues to exercise their rights” is a clear sign that cultural change is under way in the Australian parliament, according to one of the leading architects of that change, Australia’s sex discrimination commissioner, Kate Jenkins.
In January the independent MP Monique Ryan’s chief of staff, Sally Rugg, launched a federal court case against Ryan and the commonwealth alleging “hostile conduct” and adverse action in breach of the Fair Work Act, including sacking her for refusing to work “unreasonable” additional hours. The case is slated to go to mediation next week.
Jenkins told Guardian Australia she did not want to comment on any specific cases. But she made a broad observation that more workplace complaints coming forward was “not a backward step” but instead evidence that people understood they had options.
She produced a landmark review of parliamentary culture in 2021 that found one in three staffers interviewed had been sexually harassed and a significant number of employees had been subjected to behaviour they characterised as bullying.
On Wednesday both houses of parliament endorsed new codes of conduct for MPs and staff, 12 months after Scott Morrison apologised in parliament to staff who had endured traumatic experiences.
Rugg posted on Instagram that she was “devastated to have just missed out on these new protections but am glad they’re in place now for current and future staff”.
“I hope that speaking out about what happened to me will help those staff too, and all other workers who aren’t able to speak up.”
The sex discrimination commissioner says enormous progress has been made in Canberra over the past couple of years because the most powerful people in politics had engaged in good faith with the ambition of improving the culture.
“I’ve been really impressed that there have been so many people who have put down what they’re doing, turned their mind to what needs to be done, you know, on committees, or whatever it might be,” Jenkins said.
“Every single thing they have done so far has had a degree of difficulty [attached to it] but I am really impressed there has been such goodwill. We’ve had 12 months of evidence that [reform] is hard, but they are getting on with it, they are not arguing back.”
Jenkins said parliament would always be a high-pressure workplace, and work intensification was flagged as a problem consistently during her review. But she said complainants through that process “didn’t all say that [they] had experienced bullying, so we do know that these [experiences] are not to be conflated”.
Jenkins said a really important component was the passage of legislation “to clarify the unfair dismissal laws applied, that the discrimination laws applied – and now, we have codes of conduct”.
“So I think even though we might see more issues or complaints coming forward and they might make the media, to me that is not a backward step, that people now have some avenues to exercise their rights.
“When I see that, I feel pleased.”
While parliamentarians on Wednesday lauded advances in workplace supports, family friendly sitting hours, and a new code of conduct, staffers told Guardian Australia that workplace demands were still enormous.
The Jenkins report cited “long and irregular hours of work was also identified as a factor that can ‘exacerbate the aggressiveness’” in the parliamentary workplace. Despite that finding, in June the Albanese government cut crossbencher MPs’ staffing allocation from eight to five.
In October Ryan told the Australian that her staff were working “unsustainable” hours with some working more than 70 hours a week. “It’s not healthy. I think it’s only a matter of time before we have a poor outcome with one of our staff members,” Ryan reportedly said.
One staffer told Guardian Australia “it’s not a surprise the case is about long hours”.
“A lot of people working for independents are facing that at the moment.”
A former Labor and crossbench staffer said the work demands “make these roles pretty exclusionary – it makes [political staffing] inherently a young person, or childless person or non-disabled person’s game”.
“It’s a barrier to participation, and it means you’re not getting many people’s best work. You’re working off adrenaline, so there is a high attrition rate.”
The staffer said that after the crossbench staffing cut “MPs had to pick between having a chief of staff, a policy officer or a media adviser – and if one body has to do all these jobs, that body is under a lot of stress”.
“There’s no way one person can do all that work for very long, you’re setting them up for failure.
“Stretched MPs and stretched staffers are desperately trying to do their best to represent constituents’ concerns and, if they’re unable to do that because of staffing levels, then I think that’s a problem for democracy.”
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, told the House of Representatives that Parliament House “will never be a typical workplace”.
“But it needs to be a safe workplace, a respectful workplace, a workplace that lives up to ideals our democracy is built on: equality, fairness, decency and respect for all.”
The Greens’ deputy leader, Mehreen Faruqi, told the Senate that the new code of conduct would “set an expectation of how we behave here” but how parliament changes “will depend on our commitment to changing culture”.
“We must keep an eye on each other and call out unacceptable behaviour – racism, sexism, bullying, intimidation and all forms of discrimination whenever and wherever it happens,” Faruqi said.
Faruqi said although the length of sitting days had been cut, “rushed hours motions to extend sitting times until late at night became all too common last year at the cost of people’s wellbeing” adding this was “not in the interests of carefully considered policy-making”.
