“The introduction of discriminatory employment quotas and employer intrusion into the private lives and political beliefs of employees have eroded the rights of workers in NSW. Shamefully, Labor and the unions have cheered on this process. One Nation will stand up for workers by restoring fairness and free speech, getting Left-wing identity politics out of the workplace.”
Workplace Discrimination
After 24 years of Left-leaning government in NSW (16 years Labor, 8 Left-Liberal) the Public Service has been over-run by politics. The emphasis on employment according to race, gender and sexuality (rather than merit) has created a backlash, lowering morale and performance throughout the public sector.
Why wouldn’t white men be resentful of the label ‘stale pale males’ being placed over them, with the enforcement of gender-based employment quotas? Why wouldn’t the public be concerned that safety standards in policing, firefighting and train driving have been compromised by the abolition of merit recruitment? If the best person for the job doesn’t get the job, safety is at risk.
Divisive identity politics is a social justice disaster. Yet both Gladys Berejiklian and Michael Daley support it. There is no need for discriminatory employment quotas in Australia, a nation with more female than male university graduates, lawyers, GP doctors, vets, office managers, teachers and public servants.
Rule 26 of the Government Sector Employment (General Rules) 2014 facilitates positive discrimination within the NSW Government, in favour of various identity categories plus refugees. Public service job applicants are asked: “Are you from a racial, ethnic or ethno-religious group which is a minority in Australian society?” The Berejiklian Government has created gender quotas across the NSW public sector, such as doubling the number of women in trade-related work on government projects by 2023.
One Nation will abolish employment discrimination in the NSW public sector based on identity politics (race, gender and sexuality). We will return to a traditional, fairer definition of social justice: helping people on the basis of individual need. We will restore the principles of merit selection and fairness in NSW. The best person for the job must get the job.
Loss of Workers’ Rights to Privacy and Political Freedom
Another workplace problem needs to be addressed, one that extends beyond NSW Government employees. In Australia today the workplace has become a political place. Employees are being forced into virtue signaling campaigns, PC-language control, personal declarations about their sexuality and political indoctrination ‘training courses’ that have got nothing to do with the core functions of their work.
This is an invasion of privacy and a breach of the rights of workers. Employers in the public and private sectors are acting as if they own all aspects of their employees’ lives – not just their time at work, but what they do out of work hours, including during their home life. It’s an attempt to own and control the beliefs, feelings and behaviour of their staff, 24/7.
As with so many aspects of identity-Left politics, this is a reversion to primitive times and primitive thinking. In the Middle Ages, feudal lords controlled the lives of their workforce, known as serfs. Following the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the trade union movement, labour was freed from these indentures.
Now the Left has re-introduced censorship and control of workers through a range of politically motivated campaigns. These include monitoring ‘Words At Work’ (PC-language control), the introduction of ‘unconscious bias’ and ‘diversity and inclusion’ training and checking on the private lives of staff in areas such as domestic violence and attitudes to same-sex marriage. A growing number of employers are even surveying the sexuality of their workers, so as to meet identity quotas.
Incredibly, union leaders have cheered on this loss of workers’ rights. For ideological reasons, the ACTU has endorsed the Leftist push, forgetting that its first obligation should be to protect its members from the unreasonable exercise of employer power. The so-called party of the workers, the ALP, has also caved in to the will of the bosses, supporting the big banks, Qantas, Telstra, Woolworths, the ABC and other big corporates in crushing the privacy rights of workers.
These intrusions are aimed at reshaping the political views of staff, forcing them to accept Leftist identity politics and the need for ‘diversity’ and identity ‘inclusion. Often they are presented under the slogan of “employees bringing their whole selves to work”, meaning all aspects of personal identity, including sexuality, need to be declared and known in the workplace.
Most people don’t want to do this. They don’t see their job as an expression of their sexuality. They want to leave a good part of themselves at home, reflecting the intimacy and dignity of their privacy. This is true of heterosexuals as well as the LGBTI community. It should be a basic workers’ right not to participate in political and identity campaigns at work that have nothing to do with their work.
Importantly, the Leftist workplace push lacks a sound evidence base. It is founded on a series of fallacies – pure political propaganda. There is, for instance, no peer-reviewed evidence that ‘diversity’ improves corporate performance. US management consultancy firms have advanced this notion as a way of making money, but it is nonsense.
International metadata analysis has shown that the gender composition of corporate boards has no impact on corporate performance. And why should it? Ability and corporate culture drive corporate performance, not genitalia.
Already in the Australian financial sector, the foolishness of hiring people this way has been exposed, with the failure of ‘diversity’ policies at AMP and the major banks. In fostering high-level performance, there is no substitute for merit: hiring the best person for the job, irrespective of skin colour, gender and sexual preferences (who people sleep with).
In employment policies, discriminatory quotas have been justified by the invention of the doctrine of ‘unconscious bias’. This argues that people have lost control of their faculties, hearing voices in their heads, telling them to only select and promote people in the workplace who look like them (that is, other white men). There is no evidence base for this theory in behavioural science.
In 2017 the Prime Minister’s Department and its Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian Government (BETA) conducted the largest, most credible study of recruitment practices in an Australian workforce (the Federal public service). It found the only type of bias (conscious or unconscious) was against older white men. Women, ethnic groups and Aborigines had benefited from extra promotions. There is no reason to believe the NSW public service is any different. Unconscious bias is a Leftist fraud, the equivalent of a medieval superstition.
One Nation will implement four policies to protect the rights of NSW workers. We will:
- Abolish all forms of political virtue signaling, PC-language control, personal identity declarations, training indoctrination programs and intrusions on domestic/private life in NSW Government and local government workplaces.
- Require all NSW Government departments and agencies to disaffiliate from the Diversity Council Australia and like-bodies that engage in divisive, primitive identity politics.
- Seek to pass laws covering all other NSW workplaces (private and public) to protect workers against intrusive political correctness and identity politics. This shall be achieved through free speech laws and a prohibition on employers intruding on the domestic/private/identity lives of staff, where such actions are unrelated to staff responsibilities.
- Administer provisions (1) and (3) through the reformed NSW Anti-Discrimination Board (as per earlier One Nation policy announcement). With Labor and the unions having abandoned the rights of workers in this area, One Nation takes the issue seriously. We will stand up for workers where others have failed.
