Identity At Work

Victoria’s new Gender Equality Commissioner is just the start of workplace totalitarianism. Small businesses will suffer most. By Nick Cater.

The program for the creation of useless but scary jobs took another leap forward last week with the ­establishment of the Victorian Public Sector Gender Equality Commissioner.

It is a further boost to the red-tape sector, which has experienced exceptional growth since the Andrews government was elected in 2014. The Victorian ­government now has about 80 commissioners, at a rough count, sitting atop dozens of superfluous bureaucratic fiefdoms.

At best their tasks are non-­essential, such as the Road Safety Camera Commissioner. At worst, they are dangerously illiberal. They are sworn enemies of markets and intrude on personal freedom. The Labour Hire Licensing Commissioner and the Victorian Human Rights Commissioner spring to mind.

Not all commissions are unwarranted. Few would call for the abolition of the post of Police Commissioner, for example, however poorly that role has sometimes been performed.

Most, however, do little except create countless jobs to cope with the regulatory burden for which they are responsible.

The Gender Equality Bill steamed through the Victorian parliament last Thursday, creating the new position with scant scrutiny and only token opposition. The pointless part of the gender commissioner’s job will be to harvest reports from public sector institutions on their progress towards the great nirvana of ­gender parity.

It is pointless because we already know what those reports will say, if honestly compiled. They will say that there has never been a better time to be a woman in the Victorian public sector.

In June 2017, 67 per cent of Victorian public sector workers were women. Women have achieved close to parity at executive level with 48.9 per cent.

Yet the new Gender Equality Commissioner is bound by law to badger public service bodies, demanding to see their gender equity development programs, staff details, pay scales, superannuation savings variations, programs to create a female-friendly environment, quotas, flexible hours for working parents, progress in rooting out casual gender discrimination, bullying, gender-specific language, and all the stuff that offers secure employment to graduates in postcolonial intersectional studies from the University of Southern Woop Woop.

We might be wrong. Perhaps there is some residual injustice ­towards those blessed or afflicted with two X chromosomes that only a statutory commissioner can spot.

If so, the job might have usefully been assigned to the Victorian Public Service Commission, which lists “the promotion of a ­diverse and inclusive culture” at No 3 spot on its strategic plans.

One would imagine the commission has the resources, its budget having risen by more than $5m to $19.6m in the past financial year. It should be able to secure quality staff now that average remuneration of its executives increased from $136,000 in 2018 to $164,000 last year.

Expanding the public service is rarely the explicit aim of this kind of legislation. It is justified by higher things, on self-virtuous principles that need to be upheld and imagined wrongs that must be righted in their solemn duty to maintain the progressive tradition that dates back to the birth of time, or about 1967.

That was when Aretha Franklin released Respect, “a No 1 hit” record, noted Natalie Hutchins, the Andrews government’s former minister for the prevention of family violence.

“Dolly Parton had a No 1 hit called 9 to 5, where she called for service and devotion to be recognised in the workplace with a big, fat promotion,” Hutchins told the Legislative Council earlier this month. “Taylor Swift, in one of her No 1 songs, said, ‘Would I get there quicker if I was a man?’.”

The intellectual underpinnings of the Gender Equality Bill having been established, another quasi-autonomous government organisation, or quango, was born. It is good news for some, but not those in the private sector, those who bear the cost of the red-tape economy but receive none of the benefits, since those accrue to those who administer the schemes.

The scary part of the new commission is its mandate to spread its tentacles into the private sector. It will do so by means of regulations on government procurement, set not by parliament but by ministerial whim.

Any company, large or small, that wants to do business with the government will have to subject ­itself to the same check-box nightmare now experienced by the ­public sector.

The same form-filling, the same half-baked gender equity programs, to address the same non-problem. The fact that more women choose to work in ­childcare than, say, demolition is immaterial.

The propensity of women to make different career choices than men is now called “occupational segregation” by social justice campaigners, for whom the fight to impose new layers of compliance on private businesses is akin to the struggle for civil rights in the US.

The result of this legislation is to further weight the procurement process in favour of big business, and make it even harder for small businesses that don’t have the resources to devote more time and energy to bureaucracy.

They will not be the only ones anxious that this is the thin edge of the wedge. What other disadvantaged groups may they later have to report on in the era of identity politics and interlocking circles of oppression?

The legislation allows regulation of the whole intersectional lot of them at the stroke of the minister’s pen.

It recognises in section 8 (c) that “gender inequality may be compounded by other forms of disadvantage or discrimination … on the basis of Aboriginality, age, disability, ethnicity, gender identity, race, religion, sexual orientation and other attributes”.

Three of those attributes at least are things that is none of an employer’s business, questions so removed from the ability to perform ascribed duties that it would be disrespectful to ask them in a job interview.

Victoria’s first female premier, Joan Kirner, was regarded as radical in her time. Yet even she would have been uncomfortable with this legislation.

“Women should be judged by their contribution,” she said, “not somebody’s view of what they should be about.”