Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Just briefly, the Greens support this amendment to the Anti-Discrimination and Human Rights Legislation Amendment (Respect at Work) Bill 2022, and I thank the member for Kooyong for moving it. The Greens first raised this issue in the report of the Senate inquiry into this bill. The cost provision is important because this bill now gives people a number of very important rights—rights that we support—and we welcome the passage of this bill. But to have those rights, including the right to be in a workplace free from discrimination and harassment, you must be able to enforce them.

Now, the barriers in the way of people enforcing the rights that they have under this bill will often be financial. There are two things that need to be done to remove that barrier. One is to say that you are not going to be exposed to having to pay your employer's costs if you bring a case in good faith and you lose. But the second, in those instances where you bring a case and you're successful, is to have the capacity to have some of the costs recovered. What is very, very clear from the evidence that was submitted to the Senate inquiry during the course of this bill is that in many instances it is only the capacity for someone to recover some of those costs and not to have to bear them out of their own pocket—it's their own costs I'm talking about—that means that people can seek justice and can seek that the law be enforced.

The provision that is being put forward is one that says: if you come and bring an action, you will know that, unless you're acting in bad faith or vexatiously, you are not going to be out of pocket and that if you succeed because you've demonstrated that the employer has broken the law—perhaps by providing an unsafe workplace or perhaps by allowing discrimination to happen against you—then you're going to get your costs, or at least a substantial part of them, met. The organisations who have come and given evidence and have signed the open letter today have all made the point very, very clearly that this will often be the only way we will be able to enforce the law.

I listened carefully to the Attorney-General's contribution during the summing up debate and I was pleased to hear—if I understood it correctly—that this is something that the government will be giving further consideration to. Because this is an important bill, and one that we welcome, and as the Greens flagged in our Senate report, this must be resolved, moved to amend, in the Senate when the bill comes before the Senate—the rights that are granted to people to be in a workplace free from sexual harassment and discrimination have to be rights that can be enforced. This cost provision is modelled on whistleblower legislation, where similar provisions apply. In many instances it's going to be women who are blowing the whistle on sexual harassment in their workplace, and they have the right not only to be protected from adverse cost orders but to know that if it's demonstrated that the employer has done the wrong thing then their costs are going to be met, all or in part.

I thank the Attorney-General for saying during the summing up debate that this is something which is going to be considered as this bill works its way through the Senate. A change to this provision, whether it's along the lines of that proposed by the member for Kooyong or along the lines of what the Greens have proposed in the Senate or along other lines, will actually expand access to justice and ensure that the new rights that are gratefully received in this bill will be able to be enforced.

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