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Harassment is endemic in Australian workplaces, alongside limited community understanding of either its gravity or its pervasiveness. Sexual and sex-based harassment are frequently (mis)understood as simply inappropriate behaviour rather than as part of a wider structural discrimination against women, thereby undermining its seriousness. In this submission to Australian Senate Education and Employment Committees, we focus on the proposed amendments to the Sex Discrimination Act. We argue that they are not enough to recognise and address harassment as a form of systemic discrimination against women, nor to realise the broader promise of women’s rights and substantive equality as set out in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women [CEDAW]. We argue that the scope of SDA should not be limited by “practicability” considerations or restricted to only certain areas or public life. We also recommend that proposed amendments under the Bill should explicitly recognise that the creation of a ‘sexually hostile’ environment at work or in other areas of public life, through sexually explicit material and pornography for example, is a form of harassment, and part of wider structural discrimination against women. Systemic and structural social harms, such as harassment and other forms of discrimination against women, require systemic and structural changes. They should not be addressed via piecemeal legislative amendments limited to certain areas of public life, such as workplaces. Our submission emphasises the importance of a holistic approach in addressing harassment as a systemic problem, as part of wider structural discrimination against women.

The activism of girls and young women faces many challenges and structural barriers across the globe and in Australia. Our central concern is the necessity of ensuring and safeguarding the conditions under which girls and young women can speak freely and openly, so that what they say is heard locally and globally. In this context, the prevalence and normalisation of sexualised, objectifying, and humiliating images of girls and young women, as well as technology-facilitated violence and pornographic content in the digital environment, limit the activism of girls and young women. Many aspects of these structural barriers, which we argue form systemic discrimination against women, affect both young and older women, and circumscribe the ways in which they are heard or not heard. We draw attention to three major issues in the undermining of activism by girls and young women: sexist objectification and hyper-sexualisation; technology-facilitated sexual violence [TFSV]; and objectification, harassment and TFSV as forms of structural discrimination. We conclude by recommending the formulation of a binding international human rights law for private actors to remedy the violations of freedom of expression and assembly of women in the digital space, and call on states to expand national anti-discrimination laws to address harassment and abuse within the framework of systemic discrimination.

In this submission, we discuss how women in the public sphere, including women journalists, human rights defenders, politicians, and activists, face many challenges in exercising their freedom of expression across the globe. Both online and offline, the prevalence and normalisation of sexualised, objectifying, and humiliating images of women and girls, as well as technology-facilitated violence against women and pornographic content in the digital environment, limit and challenge the right to freedom of expression and opinion of women in the public sphere in multiple ways. We invite the Special Rapporteur to call on digital platforms and governments to work together to develop approaches to tackle technology-facilitated violence against women. These approaches can be grounded in both criminal and human rights law; and the latter should involve a development of a binding international human rights law for private actors to remedy the violations of freedom of expression of women in the digital environment. However, importantly, these legal approaches should also build on a wider effort to de-normalize objectification and sexualisation of women and girls, including in mainstream advertising and the multi-billion pornography industry. Only then can women in the public sphere enjoy their freedom of expression, opinion, and dignity both online and offline, without discrimination.

This article focuses on the question of the salience of the issue of abortion in Australian elections; that is, whether it is an issue on which electors cast their vote, and whether it plays a role in changes in voting patterns. The issue of public attitudes to such primary women's rights and feminist issues as abortion has been important in Australia for many years, but there is no body of research literature here on the electoral salience of those attitudes to abortion. In contrast, a body of US literature indicates that attitudes to abortion there are of significance in predicting voters' choices at state and federal levels and that this significance has increased over time. My argument is that there are no significant patterns of voting or even of party identification that are dependent on parliamentary candidates' views on abortion in Australia, and that this has been the case for at least 30 years. My argument is made through exploring opinion polls and academic surveys; examining three ane...

Many academic and popular writers have argued that ‘compulsory voting’ is an illusion in Australia because it is not compulsory to fill out the ballot-paper. This is the orthodox assumption. I argue that this view is mistaken, and that the duty to vote clearly includes the marking of the paper. Whether and how the requirement is able to be enforced is a completely different question from whether it is indeed a requirement.

This chapter concerns the regulation of intimate relationships by the nation-state in an age of globalization. The term intimate association involves a wide range of goods and principles, not only material but also of a spiritual, religious, symbolic and psychic character. The impact of globalization on the nation-state offers the promise of new spaces in which the identity and relationships of women in particular can be explored and defined in more open, egalitarian and autonomous ways than in the pre-globalization era. In part, these spaces are found in the increasing pluralism of western societies created through immigration and other forms of movement across borders. It would of course be a mistake to see this pluralism as an entirely novel phenomenon, even in a country like Australia, so often characterized as ‘white’ prior to the 1970s. Even before white conquest and settlement of Australia, movements of persons especially for trade to and in the north of the continent meant that its population was by no means homogeneous in racial, legal, linguistic or religious terms.1 There has never been a time of ‘one law, one language, one people’ in Australia. However, there is a difference in that modern societies value heterogeneity in more positive terms, and even as an aspiration, than have older societies.