George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

Stop playing with it? That is what the Senate does, Senator Hanson-Young—it moves amendments to improve legislation where in the opinion of non-government senators that legislation could be improved in the committee stage. The fact is that we support this bill, but there are three particular aspects of it which form the subject of our amendments and which we think are injudicious and bad legislative practice and will in fact have the unintended consequence of making discrimination worse, not better. For that and only that reason, we are moving these amendments.

We believe that discriminating against people because of their gender, because of their age or because they have family responsibilities is wrong. There has never been any controversy about our commitment to that position. But our criticism of this proposed section and the reason we moved the four related amendments to delete it from the bill is that it is not a competent or effective way of dealing with discrimination. You do not competently attack the vice of discrimination in this society by treating as discrimination conduct which is not discrimination. To say that any decision of an employer which may have different effects or bearing upon people who have the responsibility of parents and people who do not have that responsibility is discrimination is foolish in the extreme.

We know from the ordinary experience of our lives that people who lead single lives and do not have family responsibilities lead different lives to those led by people who do have family responsibilities—in particular, responsibilities in relation to the care and nurture of children. We also know from the ordinary experience of our lives that what happens in the workplace will impinge upon people in those two different categories differently. That is just common sense. To identify the vice of discrimination in the fact that the experience or practice of the workplace might impinge differently upon people with family responsibilities and people without family responsibilities—which is inevitable in some circumstances—is to miss the point; it is to chase a shadow. e want to see those who would discriminate against people because of family responsibilities prohibited from doing so. You do not achieve that objective of social policy by in fact attacking something different which is so widespread and commonplace—that is, the fact that people who are single and people who have the responsibility of children lead different lives and have a different relationship with the workplace and that workplace practices might affect them differently.

It saddens me that you attack the motives of the opposition, who, as I have said all along, have championed antidiscrimination. We seek to improve this legislation by drawing it back to its core value and its core legislative objective, which is to make it against the law of this country to discriminate against people, not to make it against the law of this country to run a workplace in which you have single people and parents and therefore, inevitably in the ordinary course of human life, the reality that decisions will affect people in each of those two categories differently and then to say that is the vice of discrimination.