We are on the cusp of a brilliant future, only if we choose to embrace it
Speaking a couple of days after the 2022 Federal Election, renowned Australian journalist, Stan Grant, noted that although the election of the Albanese government had been a moment of national ‘catharsis’, it was more difficult to discern in the result a commitment to a clear, positive direction for the nation. In that sense, the future shape of Australia remained an ‘open question’.
This was not to deny that the Australian electorate seemed to express, through their vote, a few clear preferences: an end to the debilitating ‘climate wars’, higher standards of integrity in federal politics and more generally, a preference for a more diverse and inclusive form of representation in our national parliament and government.
There is every reason to believe that these expectations will be met. Indeed, one might be encouraged to hope for something more. For example, it was remarkable that the first utterance of Prime Minister Albanese, on claiming victory, was to promise a referendum to enshrine in the Constitution an Indigenous ‘Voice to Parliament’ as called for in the Uluru Statement From The Heart. The surprise in this was that this issue had barely been mentioned during the election campaign – yet had clearly loomed large in the mind of the new PM.
So, what else might we aim to achieve as a democratic nation endowed with the most fortuitous circumstances of any nation on earth? Yes, despite the current ‘doom and gloom’, we are on the cusp of a truly brilliant future – if only we choose to embrace it.
We have everything any society could need: vast natural resources, abundant clean energy and an unrivalled repository of wisdom held in trust by the world’s oldest continuous culture supplemented by a richly diverse people drawn from every corner of the planet. However, whether this future can be grasped depends not on our natural resources, our financial capital, or our technical nous. The ultimate determinant lies in our character.
Three forces can shatter our path to prosperity. First, enemies from without who seek to exploit our grievances and divide our nation into warring factions. Second, a collective fear of the unknown and a lack of trust in those who would lead us there. Third, a lingering, persistent doubt about the legitimacy of a society that violently dispossessed the first peoples of our continent.
Each of these threats can be neutralised – if only we have the collective will and the courage to do so. With this in mind, I have outlined below a set of core, national objectives that I think would secure the endorsement of a vast majority of Australians. It is the realisation of these objectives that will unlock the brilliant future that is available to all Australians.
In five years, we can fashion a society that is at ease with itself and its place in the world. We can have sown the seeds out of which will grow a universal sense of belonging – a gift bestowed by First Nations people who have only ever asked for respect, truth and justice. That sense of unfettered connection, informed by an Indigenous understanding of country that has grown over time immemorial, will be the glue that binds us into one people of many parts. Once established and reinforced, nothing will dissolve that bond.
In five years, we can grow the confidence to embrace radical change – confident that no individual or group will be asked to bear a disproportionate burden while others take an unfair share of the gains. Our commitment to a broadly egalitarian society will move from myth to reality. While we may not all rise to equal heights, no one will be left to fall into the depths of neglect or obscurity. This will allow us to be brave, to take risks and to harvest the rewards of doing so.
In five years, we can be better led. Confidence can be restored in our governments – that they will truly honour their democratic obligation to act solely in the public interest – whether in their use of public resources or in the policies and practices they adopt.
In five years, the aged, the sick and infirm should be cared for by a workforce who are properly valued and rewarded for their support of the most vulnerable.
In five years, all Australians should have a genuine opportunity to make a home for themselves in affordable, secure accommodation.
In five years, everyone should feel more safe and secure in their homes, their workplaces, their cities and towns.
In five years, a confident Australia can build and reinforce enduring alliances with nations who share our desire to live in a just and orderly world free from the heavy yoke of authoritarian governments.
All of this is possible. For the most part our physical and technical infrastructure is world class. Our ethical infrastructure could be better. We need to invest in this area – confident that in doing so we will unlock both social and economic benefits of staggering proportions. As Deloitte Access Economics has estimated, a mere 10% increase in the level of ethics in Australia would lead to an increase in GDP of $45B (yes, billion) every year – not through some kind of ‘magical effect’ but as a direct consequence of the increased trust that better ethics would create.
Do this and we can embrace the brilliant future that beckons us.
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BY Simon Longstaff
Simon Longstaff began his working life on Groote Eylandt in the Northern Territory of Australia. He is proud of his kinship ties to the Anindilyakwa people. After a period studying law in Sydney and teaching in Tasmania, he pursued postgraduate studies as a Member of Magdalene College, Cambridge. In 1991, Simon commenced his work as the first Executive Director of The Ethics Centre. In 2013, he was made an officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for “distinguished service to the community through the promotion of ethical standards in governance and business, to improving corporate responsibility, and to philosophy.” Simon is an Adjunct Professor of the Australian Graduate School of Management at UNSW, a Fellow of CPA Australia, the Royal Society of NSW and the Australian Risk Policy Institute.
It’s time to talk about life and debt
It’s no secret that things are getting more expensive.
Over the last few months Google searches for “the cost of living” have increased by 10 fold, and it’s no surprise. The price of vegetables has increased by almost 30%, some used cars are up over 45%, petrol is at the highest rate in history, and a string of interest rate rises have hit for the first time in more than a decade. Millions of Australians are feeling the financial stress of keeping a roof over their head, keeping the lights on and putting food on the table. So what’s going on?
The answer is… it’s complicated. We have found ourselves in the perfect storm of frequent extreme weather events, the effects of climate change on crop production, pandemic-affected supply chains, and a war in Ukraine. And as a result of all of these factors which are very much out of our control, we are experiencing rocketing inflation and a cup of coffee will now set you back over $5. So how can young people, whose wages have been stagnating for years weather this storm and better understand their finances?
Let’s talk about debt
For as long as we have ascribed value to little disks of metal, we’ve been conditioned to believe that accumulating debt is a bad thing, and that we should aspire to have money squirrelled away for a rainy day. After all, the majority of us are paying off some form of debt whether it be a mortgage, a business loan, or a student debt – so owing money certainly shouldn’t be taboo.
Which is why our latest podcast, Life and Debt says it’s time we stopped demonising debt and started thinking of it as a part of life.
Created by the Young Ambassadors from our Banking and Finance Oath (The BFO) initiative, this four– part podcast series takes a deep dive into debt, what role it has in our lives and how we can make better decisions about it. According to Young Ambassador, Cameron Howlett we need to rethink our relationships with being in the red. “We wanted to encourage people to think, discuss and engage with the topic because if you’re uncomfortable with debt, you’ll never really have a healthy relationship with it.”
Howlett hopes the podcast will encourage a more nuanced discussion about debt, “we all have some good experiences and bad, but what we have found consistently was that we were all a bit nervous about debt.” The series, which features financial advisors, journalists, finfluencers, psychologists and historians hopes to debunk the shame and stigma around debt especially for younger listeners. Cameron continues, “we want to get people from that step of being too terrified of debt or credit to be able to think whether or not it’s right for them”, so how can we be a little more discerning when it comes to different types of debt?
“If you’re uncomfortable with debt, you’ll never really have a healthy relationship with it.”
The good the bad and the ugly debt
During the pandemic, we all did our share of online shopping. Buy now, pay later services made it easy for us to get that instant gratification hit that comes with receiving parcels in the mail, without the ensuing depression that results from looking at one’s negative bank balance. These services posted huge profits during the pandemic, and because they’re so easy to set up and use, people are now using apps like AfterPay and ZipPay to purchase everything from a new outfit for the weekend, to groceries, and childcare. Unlike credit cards and banks, Buy now, pay later companies don’t ask any questions about whether their customers can actually afford to make the repayments, and as a result a lot of young people are racking up thousands of dollars in debt using these financial services.
So what exactly is good debt and bad debt, and how can we differentiate between the two?
According to Iqra Bhatia, a Young Ambassador from the Banking and Finance Oath initiative, “attitudes towards debt are changing, young people need to educate themselves more on debt and be aware of the resources available”. Instead we need to shift our thinking, “Afterpay is not that different from credit cards – it’s essentially the credit card of our generation.”
“Attitudes towards debt are changing, young people need to educate themselves more on debt and be aware of the resources available.”
It’s not all doom and gloom
It’s clear we need to start understanding money from a younger age. While lessons in financial management traditionally consisted of a few pointers offered by parents at the dinner table, we are now starting to see financial literacy programs introduced in the high school curriculum. But more work needs to be done.
Debt is something that, at different points throughout all our lives we will all encounter and take on, whether it be small, like agreeing to buy the next round at the pub, or a little more daunting like taking on a HECS debt at university or taking out a mortgage to buy an apartment.
Debt can be emotional, it can feel like you’re signing away a little piece of your freedom, but it can also be empowering and necessary. And debt is changing, we’re grappling with the buy now, pay later industry now, and what form debt will take over the next few years. Which is why it’s important to stay educated and in touch with our values so we can make decisions for our bank balances and our futures.
Life and Debt is available to listen to on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
This podcast is a project from the Young Ambassadors in The Ethics Centre’s Banking and Finance Oath initiative. Our work is made possible by donations including the generous support of Ecstra Foundation – helping to build the financial wellbeing of Australians.
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BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
Housing affordability crisis: The elephant in the room stomping young Australians
Affordably housing its peoples is a hallmark of a developed society. Yet, Australia’s housing system has been failing young people, argues Intifar Chowdhury.
Squeezed by rising rents and aggressive increase in property prices, young Australians are increasingly being locked out of the housing market, and thus are being denied the stability and financial security that was taken for granted by previous generations.
The housing affordability crisis deepens as inflation, cost of living and housing prices rise at a faster rate than wages. Similarly, Australia’s rental crisis worsens with natural disasters such as flooding and increased competition as the country reopens to international students.
The backdrop to the COVID-19 pandemic will also exacerbate this growing economic inequality across generations. In fact, those in their late 20s and early 30s have now known two crises: the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008-2009 and the COVID-19 crisis of 2020-2021. This puts them at unique risk and financial disadvantage compared to other members of society.
The reality on the ground is that, compared to their parents and grandparents, today’s young people are not only poor homeowners but also poor renters. The reality is an intergenerational theft.
While some have argued that housing should be at the front and centre of the upcoming federal election, housing affordability has not taken on a sufficient degree of importance in the policy narratives of the two major parties.
In fact, I’d agree that young Australians have been betrayed by both parties. Although the youth need a proper national plan for housing affordability and supply, their situation is sometimes met with rather condescending comments from the political leadership.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s comment – that “if you can’t afford rent, buy a house” is both comical and disturbing at first reading. As the PM flaunted in the first 2022 leader’s debate, first home buyer loan schemes allowed 160, 000 Australians to gain access to the property ladder last year. And his recent proposal to allow young people to tap into their superannuation has a similar ambition.
But what he neglects is how housing affordability concerns 67 per cent of Australians, many of whom are young people with low wealth and heavily taxed incomes. And government subsidies for a relative minority put upward pressure on prices for the many, presenting a trade-off of where it is more difficult to save a deposit for a home. Therefore, such comments are disturbing reflections of how far removed Australian political leaders are from the reality on the ground.
Housing affordability: a sticky problem?
Housing unaffordability has been identified as a pressing problem for more than decade now, so why then does it remain unresolved? The simple answer to this is that the politics around the problem prevents a permanent solution.
The housing affordability crisis persists because of two political reasons. First, more voters have an incentive to maintain the status quo compared to those who could benefit from a more equitable housing system. Although the growth in property prices entrenches economic inequality, it is a positive for incumbent homeowners who want to capitalise on their investment.
Further, impenetrable, cumbersome and ambiguous policies spook those with property. They fall into the status quo bias. For example, Labor’s 2019 election slogan to tone down investment incentives and introduce the housing tax upset property and construction industries and offended a large constituency of property owners. These radical proposals cost Labor the election.
Existing housing policies also fail to address the root cause of the problem. Most efforts to deal with unaffordability aim to cool housing demand rather than increasing supply. Pete Wargent, co-founder of BuyersBuyers, believes this approach would “make a marginal difference to affordability over time”.
Although investment incentives like CGT discounts and negative gearing are touted as the key drivers, recent review of six economic papers revealed that the combination of both contributed only a small 1 per cent to 4 per cent increase in dwelling prices. Whereas zoning restrictions, which limit the supply of land on which to build homes, contribute to almost half the rise of average detached house prices in major metropolitans, like Sydney and Melbourne. Centre for Independent Studies’ chief economist and a former RBA official, Peter Tulip, suggests increasing supply and lifting zoning restrictions can have huge benefits.
Yet, these are difficult to attain. The politics of improving housing affordability is determined by whether there are more voters who are property owners than not.
That is, whether there are more beneficiaries of unaffordability who will vote in their self-interest and support policies and parties that will keep prices high and rising, even if that compromises the future security of young people.
According to the Australian Electoral Commission, in 2022, there are 4.2 million voters aged over 65 compared to 3.1 million voters under 29. That is a difference of 1.1 million between lightly taxed, asset-rich older Australians, and younger wage earners. This intergenerational inequality is therefore a function of the classic headlock between the older haves and the younger have-nots.
Simple fix: increase supply?
Housing unaffordability is a complex structural issue that can’t be viewed through a simplistic lens.
Despite a plethora of issues influencing the housing market, the imbalance in supply and demand is at the crux of the matter. Rather unsurprisingly, the Property Council of Australia, recommends major parties to address supply shortages to improve affordability.
But adequate supply of housing doesn’t just mean constructing a certain number of dwellings on greenfield sites. It needs to be well-located and well-serviced with job, social and community infrastructures.
At both federal and state level, more commitment is requited to increase urgent need for more social housing. With a historically low level of social housing, (i.e. a non market rental housing sector), this would be more affordable and secure for low-income earners. Both major parties, however, fall short on public housing investment this election.
Supply of affordable housing can be increased by institutional investments, but investors show relatively little interest in affordable housing largely due to perceptions of risk and comparatively low returns. This is where government incentives and the introduction of some form of financial instrument (similar to the discontinued National Rental Affordability Scheme) could work.
However, evidence from Europe and Britain, suggest that government intervention may decline as affordability worsens. There is a major challenge to rolling out reforms: homeowners want to protect their properties from being undermined by growing housing supply, resulting in less support for government intervention. This feeds into inequality.
Another option is rent control. But opponents suggest that more limitations in the rental property make owning far less appealing. This again points to the headlocks between homeowners and renters; as the classic adage from former PM John Howard goes: no one is complaining in the streets about their house value going up.
Under the current structure, young people are common losers of the housing system. A change in government won’t be a silver bullet for housing affordability in Australia. What is needed is a structural change which is hard to attain given competing interests, imbalanced power and wealth dynamics among stakeholders.
Explore the role that ownership plays in our lives. Join Executive Director of The Ethics Centre Dr Simon Longstaff AO for The Ethics of Ownership on the 17th of August 6:30pm AEST. Tickets on sale now.
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BY Intifar Chowdhury
Intifar is an Associate Lecturer at the ANU School of Politics and International Relations. Her doctoral research tackles the important question of whether young people are turning away from democracy. Her political commentary on the engagement of young people in politics and issues affecting youth voters has been published in The Conversation, ABC, The Guardian, The Canberra Times and ANU's Policy Forum.
Let the sunshine in: The pitfalls of radical transparency
“Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” So wrote United States Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, in his 1914 book critical of the concentration of power in banks and financial institutions, Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It.
Over a century later, sunlight is experiencing a resurgence in popularity as a disinfectant through the concept of radical transparency. This movement towards greater transparency is increasingly being adopted by a wide range of businesses from the technology, legal and environmental sectors as well as the banking and finance sector that motivated Brandeis’ book.
The movement has received a surge of attention in recent years due to policies promoted by pioneers like Ray Dalio, the founder of asset management firm Bridgewater Associates. Dalio sought to improve decision making by encouraging all employees to express their opinions freely about all aspects of the business, creating what he calls an “idea meritocracy”, where the best ideas rise to the surface.
Other pioneers include the US media streaming company, Netflix, and Finnish software consultancy, Reaktor, both of which have implemented wide ranging radical transparency policies covering everything from wage transparency to radical candour in internal communications to releasing employee emails to the public.
And the idea is growing in its appeal. The 2018 Future of Work Study, commissioned by online communications platform Slack, found that “80% of workers want to know more about how decisions are made in their organization and 87% want their future company to be transparent”.
However, there’s no single definition or implementation of radical transparency and it is employed in different ways in different contexts, and each has its own ethical implications.
The virtue of openness
In its broadest sense, transparency simply means openness, especially when it comes to revealing and sharing information. What makes it “radical” is when information that was previously closely guarded is systematically opened up to a wider audience, whether that’s within the organisation or without.
The primary ethical virtues of radical transparency are that it improves accountability and prevents corruption, in the sense of the improper use of power.
A culture of radical transparency not only makes it harder to conceal wrongdoing or compromising information, it also encourages a greater sense of honesty in dealings with others because of the anticipation that all information about those dealings will be revealed.
Radical transparency can also help counteract some of the power dynamics that influence decision making within organisations, whereby individuals might be reluctant to challenge the ideas and opinions of their leaders. A culture of radical transparency can improve decision making, as is claimed by Bridgewater, but also encourage people to speak up if they see something they believe is inappropriate.
Another form is wage transparency, which can promote fairness by giving employees more bargaining power in negotiations, placing them on a more even informational playing field with the employers. This is especially beneficial for those who are less inclined towards aggressive negotiation and can help counteract biases based on gender, racialisation and disability.
In an environment where trust in institutions, government and business is increasingly strained, radical transparency directed towards the public can serve to rebuild some of that trust. More organisations are laying bare information such as their employee diversity data, the results of internal or independent reviews – such as conducted by The Ethics Centre on behalf of the Australian Olympic Committee in 2017 – or details of their supply chains and environmental record.
Virtues and vices
Openness is a virtue. However, as Aristotle pointed out, any virtue taken to extreme can become a vice, and pushing transparency into “radical” territory steers it towards several ethical pitfalls and trade-offs that can easily be overlooked.
For a start, transparency sits in natural tension with privacy. Privacy is not just about restricting access to information but it can be thought of as the right of each individual to exercise some control over their personal information. This means they should have some power to choose whether or not to reveal their personal information. Some examples of radical transparency, such as wage transparency or the sharing of internal emails, can violate that right to privacy.
Privacy also enables us to protect ourselves from those who might use our personal information in bad faith to exclude, discriminate or persecute us. Radical transparency risks bleeding over into the personal space, such as if health, sexuality or religious attitudes are revealed that have no bearing on someone’s professional performance but which could expose them to unjust persecution.
One of the goals of radical transparency is to promote trust, but ironically it can also work to undermine it.
There are many kinds of special trusted relationships that are dependent on privacy, such as the relationship between patient and doctor or priest and parishioner. Should these conversations be made open, many people would end up concealing information for fear that it would be made public.
While no-one is suggesting radical transparency in the doctor’s surgery quite yet, it underscores that transparency in inappropriate contexts can actually cause people to suppress information rather than share it. There is already evidence that some workers in radically transparent workplaces change their behaviour to conceal information from their peers and act in a performative way that will be seen in a favourable light by others even if it’s not productive.
Trust in others is something that is learnt and must be cultivated through experience and practice. Should radical transparency seek to make trust redundant by making all information public, there is a risk that the virtue of trust will atrophy. This represents a real ethical risk should those individuals return to a less transparent environment where the virtue of trust is required once again.
Respectfully disagree
Radical transparency also requires an organisation to establish appropriate norms and culture in order to execute it in a safe and non-toxic way. In many instances, we modulate how we speak, how honest we are and what information we share on the basis of the relationships we have and the respect we owe to the other parties. In many contexts, deference, sensitivity or an ethic of care – or just the norms of good manners – trump candour, such as when we are speaking to a senior or vulnerable individual.
If we have implicit norms that promote deference to senior management, for example, or that encourage us to be sensitive towards a colleague who has just lost their job, these can come into conflict with the norms of radical transparency. There are accounts of employees feeling tremendous awkwardness when they’re thrust into radically transparent meetings where they’re expected to criticise managers or give reasons why a colleague should be fired.
It can take considerable time and effort to change the norms of discourse within the workplace to enable something like Dalio’s “meritocracy of ideas” in a way that is not overly confronting, where people feel like disagreement is tantamount to a personal attack.
These norms require that people feel respected, secure and safe to speak, which can also be threatened if radical transparency is executed poorly.
If implemented in a targeted and systemic way, radical transparency can deliver considerable ethical benefits in terms of elevating trust, improving decision making and encouraging constructive disagreement. But the most radical and hasty implementations carry serious ethical risks. Arguably, the point of the radical transparency movement is not to continually drive towards ever greater levels of transparency in every domain but to make openness an ethical norm that is, itself, no longer radical.
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BY Dr Tim Dean
Dr Tim Dean is Philosopher in Residence at The Ethics Centre and author of How We Became Human: And Why We Need to Change.
A foot in the door: The ethics of internships
It’s just to get my foot in the door, I tell myself for the fifth time today as I offer my brain, my degrees and time to someone for free.
It’s a phrase that I’ve always found to be so incredibly visceral. I picture a door just about to slam shut in my face, that I have to hastily shove my foot in before it swings to a heavy close. Or a door that is slightly ajar, an unknown little me comes knocking and I have to slip my foot in and pry the thing open – to beg for an opportunity.
A foot in the door to do tasks which by now should be compensated. Because somehow in my years of trying to find a suitable job, no-one deems my skills to be transferable.
None of these scenarios really paint a picture for a healthy work foundation.
One would think that multiple arts degrees and years of casual jobs following instructions, would qualify me for an “entry level position”.
But it doesn’t. It leaves me cold emailing organisations, asking if they can send their off cuts to me so that I can get exposure. So that I can build a portfolio. So that I can earn a living and build my career.
But in my thinly veiled bitterness I digress. I chose the arts. I chose the creative field where getting your foot in the door is seen as a ‘privilege’. Having worked actual entry level jobs such as gallery host, our role was held up on a pedestal, yet we were not. We were made to simultaneously feel so lucky to have this job and yet so small and very replaceable. Why? Well, because it looks so good on the CV.
But in reality, it hasn’t really done anything to help my long-term career. And while I’ve had some wonderful bosses who have helped mentor me to learn and grow, this no longer seems like valid proof that I can, in fact, progress my career. It also doesn’t help that the pandemic cut arts positions in half.
The issue that lies here is often the refusal in hiring processes to acknowledge transferable skills. Which leaves you wondering, where do you gain these industry specific skills if no one will hire you for entry level jobs? Internships, of course.
Internship or Indenture?
Internships are fascinating mostly because of their prevalence, lack of regulation and lack of overall purpose. A report for the Fair Work Ombudsman by Adelaide Law School in 2013 states that “In Australia, as elsewhere, the term ‘internship’ is without fixed content. It has a broad and uncertain meaning covering everything from unpaid or paid entry level jobs to volunteer work in the not-for-profit sector”. This covers such a breadth of options that no wonder those starting out in their careers can fall into the trap of being exploited.
Internships are rife, particularly in the arts and on a global scale. Note when referring to the arts I include any creative industry, because they all bleed into each other – skills intersect and majority of skills learned are transferrable. There would be no issue with internships… if they were paid, but they rarely are.
In the UK, Sutton Trust is a non-for-profit organisation that fights for youth social mobility. Their work spans research on the prevalence and the social impact that internships have on recent graduates or those looking to change their career. Their 2018 report found that that 86% of arts internships are unpaid. The issue with unpaid internships is that life isn’t free.
Putting numbers on this, to live in London for a month whilst doing an unpaid internship costs £1,019 (about AUD$1800). And to make matters worse, due to the lack of legal clarity surrounding internships, there are concerns that some employers are exploiting this grey area. A harrowing ethical dilemma – getting an extra pair of hands without even attempting to understand their own responsibilities towards interns.
Due to the lack of legal clarity surrounding internships, there are concerns that some employers are exploiting this grey area.
It’s interesting to note that internships are always perceived as a stepping-stone. The Australian National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) has a fact sheet on internships and what to expect, stating that they can be either paid or unpaid but the ‘crux of the situation is that it is an educational exchange’. NAVA go further to highlight the Fair Work Ombudsman’s criteria of an internship as a ‘meaningful learning experience, training or skill development’. This sounds completely reasonable, except when there is a precarious edge that tips easily into exploitation.
Researcher at the University of Montreal, Mirjam Gollmitzer recently detailed the precarious entryways into journalism. Often internships are seen as a socialisation into an industry or workplace, but Gollmitzer states that whilst that is ideal, research shows the opposite.
Through interviews with interns within the journalism industry, she finds interns who are ‘starved of mentorship and training’ and often left to their own devices. She highlights a powerful observation arguing that ‘the tacit assumption is that workers, not employers, are tasked with making the internship a success’.
How do we determine the success or value of an internship? To be seen as a meaningful learning experience, interns require mentorship, an environment to gain confidence and an understanding of how an industry works. Instead, Gollmitzer finds interns are often merely an extra pair of hands doing menial tasks, “with their experiences marred by haphazard interactions with time-strapped colleagues and arbitrary decisions by supervisors.”
The onus should be with employers to ensure interns are offered a valuable and structured experience where they can come out having truly learnt something and be given a genuine leg up in their career.
Instead many interns are left with a bitter taste in their mouth. They’re overworked, under paid (or not at all) and don’t walk away with skills or tangible experience they can take into an entry level job, which seems barely adequate. Which leads to the questions… when did jobs stop being a place of meaningful learning experiences and skill development? And how did we palm this off onto unpaid internships?
How did you get your start?
The above two questions are integral in understanding the shift that has occurred in the workplace. When listening to boomers talk about their start in the industry, often we hear those anecdotes about how they started in the photocopy room and someone noticed their intelligence and they were given a chance. Or how they were internally trained and given qualifications within the organisation.
The fact of the matter is that entering the workforce has been increasingly difficult for young people. The latest statistics from the HILDA Survey by The Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic & Social Research shows that only about 40% of graduates find full-time work in the first year out of full-time education. Their median hourly earnings are about two-thirds of median earnings of all workers, which is abysmal since our cost of living is ever on the rise. But this is certainly part of the discussion surrounding internships. With more and more people unable to find full-time work, we turn to casual work, to subsidise rent and to simply make a living, despite these casual jobs often not actually having relevance to one’s degree or career aspirations.
Casual work is the backbone of all unpaid internships. We all know someone who has worked in a pub whilst doing an unpaid internship in their desired creative field. But this leaves young people with burnout, and a distaste for a particular industry. Imagine that – already having doubts about something you studied just because from the get go you’re told you’re lucky to be working for free.
Nothing in life is free, therefore internships shouldn’t be. Making internships unpaid ‘learning’ experiences often leaves out entire demographics of people who simple cannot afford to work for free. It perpetuates the elite nature of industry, and the idea of the grind straight off the diving block. It’s cruel and unnecessary. Particularly because it wasn’t quite as brutal in different generations. For the first time ever, gen Z are running the risk of earning LESS than their parents, something that has never happened in the course of history.
How do we fix this? While I’m not well versed in economics or capitalism, I do know that people need to be paid for their work. Don’t take on an employee if you don’t have the bandwidth to mentor or financially compensate them. We need to start treating entry level jobs as a first stepping stone into an industry and leave the exploitation of young workers in the past, where it belongs.
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BY Althea Kuzman
Althea Kuzman is an emerging curator and arts writer. She holds a Master of Curating and a BA in Communications and International Studies.
Game, set and match: 5 principles for leading and living the game of life
Ash Barty’s shock retirement from tennis while seemingly at the peak of her powers left the sporting world reeling.
But from all accounts it was no surprise to those close to her. From what we’ve learnt about her throughout her career, and especially through her retirement announcement, the lack of surprise from those close to her is a testament to Barty’s principles of leadership.
In times of uncertainty and unpredictability we often look to our folk heroes to provide guidance and inspiration. However, all too often we default to sportspeople as the exemplars for lessons in how to live, cherry picking attributes of heroism and resilience on the field of play only to find our heroes’ winning lustre tarnished when the invariable accounts of various misdeeds or behaviours kept private between teammates invariably surface.
Exemplary people play a key role in the branch of ethics known as virtue ethics. Its head coach, Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, gave exemplars a starting guernsey in his philosophical line up because they are people who can practically demonstrate to others how to live a life well. For Aristotle, ethics is not simply a matter of internalising a rule; but is about doing the right thing at the right time, in the right way and for the right reason. Moral exemplars help show us the way.
Both on and off the court, Ash Barty is a moral exemplar in the full sense of Aristotle’s term. In her humility, good will and clear-eyed purpose that she demonstrated in her retirement announcement, we can see five fundamental principles for how to lead in our work, and how to live a life inspired by someone worth emulating.
1. Relationships are an ends, not merely a means
Throughout her career Barty was consistently clear how highly she valued relationships; not because they helped her achieve sporting success, but because they were important in and for themselves. They were a foundation for her to live a flourishing life, on and off the court.
Her opening exchange in her interview announcing her retirement with good friend Casey Dellacqua, spoke volumes for the power of relationships and friendships in particular. The refreshingly genuine and heartfelt connection that began the exchange with her good friend, who thanked Barty for ‘trusting me again’ to break the news was as refreshing as it was surprising. Less surprising when we remember that Barty, in a sport notorious for its individualism, referred continuously throughout her career and especially in winning, to the central role of her team, family, friends and community played in it – just as she did in her retirement announcement.
As all great leaders do, Barty skilfully and genuinely removed herself from the centre wherever possible – no mean feat in an individualistic sport like tennis. Relationships for Barty, as they are for the best leaders, are of intrinsic value in themselves. They are not a means to achieve an outcome, they are an end in themselves.
And no doubt just as they helped Barty get the best out of herself, she, in turn, enabled the best in the team around her.
2. Leave it all out there – but don’t lose yourself in the process
On the surface Barty lived the cliched sporting principle ‘leave it all out on the field.’ From her epic Wimbledon title win after coming back early from a serious hip injury to reach the final and then holding off Karolina Pliskovain in a four-set thriller through to her epic Australian Open win – which is now all the more astonishing now we know she was running on empty – she demonstrated the drive to give it her all.
However, the adage to ‘leave it all out there’ alone lacks a second balancing criterion, which any leader who has faced the invariable burnout that comes from shouldering the often self-imposed burden of trying to meet a heroic leadership ideal knows too well from harsh experience: ‘Don’t lose yourself in the process.’
Good leaders will extend as much compassion and care to themselves as they bestow upon others. Our legacy model of leadership is the heroic individual figure (typically male) who sacrifices all for the cause, including themselves. As we’ve now discovered, Barty had learnt the importance of the other side of the equation earlier in her career than most leaders. Despite having “given absolutely everything” to tennis, Barty had the emotional intelligence, belying her young age, to recognise the impact and effect on her physical and emotional well-being of what she strove so hard to achieve.
That this is not the first time she has walked away from the sport is testament to the fact that she has been acutely aware of the balance required in managing the physical and emotional limits of achieving success in the broader context of what she values in life and what and how to prioritise them.
3. Don’t mistake achievement for purpose
Barty’s many achievements on the court did not define her purpose. That she was ambitious and aimed high to achieve her goals is not in doubt; winning Wimbledon, her ‘one true dream,’ added along the way to her three-time grand slam championships. But individual successes were never achievements for their own sake. From her own account this was a realisation that occurred in her ‘perspective shift’ in this the ‘second phase of her career.’ Tennis and her achievements in the sport did not define her, just as professions, roles and achievements do no not define the best leaders. Barty was always a person first, player second. Almost to a person, those who had played against her referred to her qualities as friend as much as a player.
4. Make a virtue of a necessity
All too frequently we read of the latest controversy embroiling our sporting heroes. With most sport super charged by money and fuelled by the relentless chase for the fame and status that success brings, the rules of the game, let alone the spirit of the game, are often left behind in the clay (or grass) as players scramble to be the first to reach the top of the pile.
Exemplary individuals are exemplary by definition. While small in stature, Barty stood head and shoulders out from many of her tennis compatriots, male and female alike, through the virtues she displayed on and off the court.
For Aristotle, virtues provide the foundation for good actions. A virtue is a disposition or character trait to act, think and feel in certain ways. Bad actions display the opposite and are informed by vices. We are shaped by our actions just as much as we are shaped by the situations, we are in. Unfortunately those in professional sport, like those in other hyper-competitive industries, are often too easily shaped by the industry they are.
Barty, was exemplary in this world. While she had the virtues of courage and resilience – in overcoming injury and career set backs – they are the least interesting of her attributes. They are prerequisites for success in any endeavour.
Instead, she was exemplary because she chose to develop exceptional virtues that themselves required courage because they flew in the face of all known measures of success in the sport she excelled at. She chose humility over hubris, she chose self-effacement over self aggrandisement, and in a brutally competitive environment she chose wherever possible to play more as friend than foe. And ultimately, in announcing her ‘early’ retirement from the sport which gave her ‘all my dreams plus more,’ she chose those virtues more aligned to her purpose as, in her words, ‘Ash Barty the person, not as Ash Barty the athlete.’
5. How you live in the present will be your legacy for the future
The thousands of young kids, particularly girls, who looked on with admiration at those virtues on display and are now inspired to try and emulate her on and off the court may in the end be a more lasting legacy than any of her Grand Slam victories.
In living ethically one of the biggest challenges is to understand what motivates people to act in the best way. The narratives and stories we tell ourselves and each other, as Linda Zagzebski scholar of moral exemplarism argues, are powerful ways to inspire moral education and improvement because they engage human motives better than abstract ideas, rules or reasons.
Children, and adults alike, are motivated by emulation. Exemplars, like Barty, provoke admiration in us all and inspire us to strive to embody those same attributes. All leaders, whether on the tennis court, sporting field, shop floor or boardroom, have the capacity to inspire others to emulate the best aspects of themselves in demonstrating how to navigate the complexities we all face in life through the wisdom in their actions. In every, single moment.
Barty, like all great leaders, is exemplary in demonstrating practically, on and off the court, how to live a life that expresses purpose, that embodies the best values and virtues to realise that purpose, and the courage to hold true to them, especially when they fly in the face of other’s expectations and conventional wisdom.
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BY John Neil
As Director of Education and Innovation at The Ethics Centre, John collaborates closely with a talented team of specialists and subject matter experts to shape the tools, frameworks, and programs that drive our work forward. He brings a rich and varied background as a consultant, lecturer, and researcher, with expertise spanning ethics, cultural studies, sustainability, and innovation. This multidisciplinary perspective allows him to introduce fresh, thought-provoking approaches that energise and inspire our initiatives. John has partnered with some of Australia’s largest organisations across diverse industries, to place ethics at the heart of organisational life. His work focuses on education, cultural alignment, and leadership development to foster meaningful and lasting impact.
The business who cried ‘woke’: The ethics of corporate moral grandstanding
Consumer responses are crucial to holding businesses accountable for their social and environmental responsibilities.
As of this year, over half of the highest polluting companies in Australia have committed to net-zero emissions targets. Meanwhile, in the Twitter-verse, dating apps and chocolate bars proclaim an end to police brutality, sexism, and the Uighur genocide.
Out of nowhere, big business has seemingly grown a social consciousness – and an impressive marketing budget to match. From fast fashion to mining, you’d be hard-pressed to find a company that doesn’t claim to be doing the right thing by their employees and the environment.
Moral grandstanding: When businesses fail to put their money where their mouth is
Unfortunately, a lot of this moral messaging is nothing more than opportunistic marketing, designed to profit from a societal shift towards conscious consumption. As recent reporting by Greenpeace highlights, of those Australian companies that claim to be going green, only a small fraction are actually taking effective steps by switching to cleaner energy sources.
Likewise, many brands divert attention from dubious business operations by aligning themselves with the popular side of trending moral discourse, tweeting out support for social justice movements while simultaneously being accused of the very issues they rally against. As in the following advertisement, which seemingly suggests that the solution to America’s police brutality problem is drinking Pepsi, even at best case, such messaging can come across as offensively tone-deaf.
This phenomenon is what philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke describe as ‘moral grandstanding’ – the insincere use of principled arguments to self-promote or seek status. Similarly, the terms ‘virtue signalling’, ‘performative activism’, ‘green-washing’ and ‘woke capitalism’ describe how moral concerns can be deployed as a front for self-serving behaviour.
Ultimately, all these phrases describe the same thing, which is the failure of businesses to practice what they preach.
This hypocrisy is a problem because it prevents meaningful change from occurring while simultaneously misleading consumers into believing that we are well on the way to a better world when actually, progress flounders.
Doing something is better than doing nothing, except when it isn’t
Consequentialism asserts that actions are good if they cause more benefit than harm. Using this line of reasoning, many argue that insincerity is a small price to pay for having big business commit to less harmful commercial practices, which diminishes moral grandstanding to a largely trivial concern.
Yet, when we contemplate the opportunity cost of accepting such half-baked behaviour from those who have the most power to affect change, this argument quickly becomes self-defeating. Consider what would happen if businesses diverted the money and resources spent on advertising their moral character towards researching and enacting reforms that put substance behind these self-proclaimed progressive values.
As consumers, we cannot accept anything less than this because to do so would cause our planet and people to needlessly suffer – a harm that far outweighs any benefit gained from morally grandstanding promises to “do better”.
Additionally, from a deontological perspective, it can be argued that the intention behind moral actions is what truly determines their worth. Since morally grandstanding companies aren’t motivated by a principled duty, but rather, by a profit outcome, they can hardly be considered good (in a Kantian sense, anyway).
How to spot a moral grandstander
In the past half-decade, energy giant AGL has heavily advertised their pledge to decarbonise while simultaneously remaining Australia’s largest greenhouse emitter. Meanwhile, companies such as Woolworths, Coles and Telstra have quietly gotten on with transitioning to almost 100 per cent renewable energy.
Greenpeace campaign takes aim at AGL. Image by Monster Children Creative
Evidently, some businesses are being genuine with their environmental and social commitments. The problem with moral grandstanders is that they take the spotlight away from such efforts. As consumers, we can have a meaningful impact on our world by choosing to spend our money with the former, but the question remains of how to distinguish between the two:
- Consumers can start by asking themselves about the nature of the company which is making the moral appeal –are harmful business practices embedded in the industry they operate in? Does the business themselves have a poor social or environmental track record? If the answer to either of these questions is ‘yes’, then their claims should be viewed suspiciously.
- Be on the lookout for weasel words – buzz-wordy claims which are deliberately vague. Saying something is “green” or “eco-friendly” isn’t a qualifiable statement. Also, note that the validity of some credentials relating to fair trade and carbon emissions are being increasingly challenged.
- As with any investment, if you’re going to put your money into a business based on their moral claims, fact-checking is always a good idea. This can be done through a quick internet search or a skim through related news results.
Remember that in many countries (including Australia), consumer rights laws exist to ensure companies cannot get away with making false claims about their products. Holding businesses to account for their moral grandstanding is therefore not just an ethical imperative – but a legal one also.
Kendall Jenner advertisement and images courtesy of Pespi
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BY Isabella Vacaflores
Isabella is currently working as a research assistant at the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership. She has previously held research positions at Grattan Institute, Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet and the School of Politics and International Relations at the Australian National University. She has won multiple awards and scholarships, including recently being named the 2023 Australia New Zealand Boston Consulting Group Women’s Scholar, for her efforts to improve gender, racial and socio-economic equality in politics and education.
Ethics Explainer: Power
“If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem. It’s not a question of attitude; it’s a question of power.” – Stokely Carmichael
A central concern of justice is who has power and how they should be allowed to use it. A central concern of the rest of us is how people with power in fact do use it. Both questions have animated ethicists and activists for hundreds of years, and their insights may help us as we try to create a just society.
A classic formulation is given by the eminent sociologist Max Weber, for whom power is “the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance”. Michel Foucault, one of the century’s most prominent theorists of power, seems to echo this view: “if we speak of the structures or the mechanisms of power, it is only insofar as we suppose that certain persons exercise power over others”.
A rival view holds that instead of being a relation, power is a resource: like water, food, or money, power is a resource that a particular person or institution can accrue and it can therefore be justly or unjustly distributed. This view has been especially popular among feminist theorists who have used economic models of resource distribution to talk about gendered inequalities in social resources, including and especially power.
Susan Moller Okin is one prominent voice in this tradition:
“When we look seriously at the distribution of such critical social goods as power, self-esteem, opportunities for self-development … we find socially constructed inequalities between them, right down the list”.
What’s the difference between these two views? Why care? One answer is that our efforts to make power more just in society will depend on what kind of thing it is: if it’s a resource, such that problems of unfair power are problems of unequal distribution, we might be able to improve things by removing some power from some people – that way, they would no longer have more than others. This strategy would be less likely to work if power was a relation.
In addition to working out what power is, there are important moral questions about when it can be ethically used. This is a pressing question: As long as we live in societies, under democratic governments, or in states that use police forces and militaries to secure our goals, there will be at least one form of power to which everyone is subject: the power of the state.
The state is one of the only legitimate bearers of the power to use violence. If anyone else uses a weapon or a threat of imprisonment to secure their goals, we think they’re behaving illegitimately, but when the state does these things, we think it is – or can be – legitimate.
Since Plato, democracies have agreed that we need to allow and centralise some coercive power if we are to enforce our laws. Given the state’s unique power to use violence, it’s especially important that that power be just and fair. However, it’s challenging to spell what fair power is inside a democracy or how to design a system that will trend towards exemplifying it.
As Douglas Adams once wrote:
“The major problem with governing people – one of the major problems, for there are many – is that no-one capable of getting themselves elected should on any account be allowed to do the job”.
One recurring question for ‘fairness’ in political power is whether the people governed by the relevant political authority have a to obey that authority. When a state has the power to set laws and enforce them, for instance, does this issue a correlate duty for citizens to obey those laws? The state has duties to its people because it has so much power; but do people have reciprocal duties to their state, also rooted in its power?
Transposing this question into our personal lives, it’s sometimes thought that each of us has a kind of moral power to extract behaviour from others. If you don’t keep your promise, I can blame or sanction you into doing what you said you would. In other words, I can exercise my moral power to make claims of you. Does this sort of power work in the same way as political power? Is it possible for me to abuse my moral power over you; using it in ways that are unjust or unfair – and might you have a duty to obey that moral power?
Finally, we can ask valuable questions about what it is to be powerless. It’s certainly a site of complaint: many of us protest or object when we feel powerless. But how should we best understand it? Is powerlessness about actually being interfered with by others, or simply being susceptible to it, or vulnerable to it? For prominent philosopher Philip Pettit (AC), it’s the latter – to be “unfree” is to be vulnerable or susceptible to the other people’s whims, irrespective of whether they actually use their power against us.
If we want a more ethically ordered society, it’s important to understand how power works – and what goes wrong when it doesn’t.
Join us for the Ethics of Power on Thurs 14 March, 2024 at 6:30pm. Tickets available here.
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BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
Survivors are talking, but what’s changing?
At the Australia-wide March4Justice rallies in 2021, Brittany Higgins (a former Liberal Party staffer) and Grace Tame (Australian of the Year 2021) delivered speeches in Canberra and Hobart, respectively. Higgins was raped inside Parliament House. Tame is a survivor of child sex abuse. Both called for changes in Australian culture and our institutions to prevent “abuse culture” and to ensure the safety of those most vulnerable to sexual assault.
On Wednesday 9 February 2022, both women gave respective addresses at the National Press Club (NPC) in Canberra. Both criticised that too little had changed since they spoke at these rallies. (Though, the day prior to the addresses, Prime Minister Scott Morrison finally apologised to the survivors of sexual harassment and assault endured by employees in federal parliament.)
In her NPC address, Higgins explained her rationale for making her sexual assault public:
“I made my decision to speak out because the alternative was to be part of the culture of silence inside Parliament House. I spoke out because I wanted the next generation of staffers to work in a better place.”
She then lamented:
“I’m worried what too many people beyond the government and the media took out of the events of last year was that we need to be better at talking about the problem…. I’m not interested in words anymore. I want to see action.”
To clarify, the words Higgins is not interested in anymore are “weasel-words” – she is not advocating against free speech, nor rejecting the need for conversations on the prevalence of sexual abuse.
Tame and Higgins both believe we need institutional changes to address this issue. And if we are to take anything away from the NPC addresses – and we should – it is this: institutional change must be tackled actively – though not all institutions are formal; we must challenge abuse of power – though not all power is formally bestowed; and those who are in formal positions with considerable power must act effectively.
To that end, Tame explicitly identified three necessary steps that must be taken to progress social and institutional change.
- Take sexual violence seriously – this means taking proactive measures to prevent it.
- Provide adequate funding to actually implement the proactive measures we need.
- Create consistent legislative reforms. For example, sexual assault of a child should not be named “maintaining a relationship with a person under the age of 17,” which was the law Tame’s rapist contravened. All such forms of child sexual abuse should be named for what they are. Abuse.
And, according to Higgins’ response during NPC question time, a greater gender balance in Government would help immensely.
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Tame and Higgins have told Australia exactly what we need to do – so why isn’t Australia making adequate progress? Higgins clearly believes that the LNP Government, and Prime Minister Scott Morrison in particular, could be doing more to prevent such heinous acts. She explains:
“I wanted him to use his power as Prime Minister. I wanted him to wield the weight of his office and drive change in the Party and our Parliament, and out into the country”.
In spite of Morrison’s apology, and even in light of the 28 recommendations for change in parliament workplaces following an independent review headed by the Sex Discrimination Commissioner (AKA the Jenkins’ review), Higgins perceives too little action, reminding us:
“Last year wasn’t a march for acknowledgement and it wasn’t a march for coverage. It wasn’t a march for language. It was a march for justice, and that justice demands real change.”
It is time to hold power to account.
On the matter of power, note its informal use. During her NPC address, Tame revealed that she had received “a threatening phone call from a senior member of a government funded organisation” ‘asking’ her not to say anything negative about the Prime Minister because “you are influential”. But Tame did not have the power in this exchange – the caller did.
Then there is the press, another crucial institution with an immensely powerful role to play in shaping the attitudes of the populace.
But what media seem not to care about, says Tame, is how trauma is often reinforced through powerful institutions like the press.
Since being named Australian of the year in 2021, Tame reports being: “re-victimised, commodified, objectified, sensationalised, delegitimised, gaslit, and thrown under the bus by the mainstream media.”
Strikingly, in spite of Tame’s reprimanding of the press for their re-traumatising actions, the anonymous phone call to Tame became the centre of the mainstream media’s focus of the NPC addresses – with Higgins’ contribution essentially written out of the narrative. Suddenly it was necessary and urgent to find the identity of this mystery caller and for the Prime Minister to assert intent to discover which agency was responsible (and, in so doing, delicately removing himself from the realm of complicity in this abuse of power).
Then, on 14 February, the Daily Mail ran a photo of a teenage Tame seated with what appears to be a ‘bong’ (a device for smoking marijuana). One can only presume that the decision to publicise this photo, which implicates Tame in undertaking illegal behaviour, would have the effect of tarnishing her public image. Media are supposed to report neutrally, not run smear campaigns.
On 19 February, Tame responded publicly via Twitter to all media who published “that” photo, stating:
“At every point — on the national stage, I might add — I’ve been completely transparent about all the demons I’ve battled in the aftermath of child sexual abuse; drug addiction, self-harm, anorexia and PTSD, among others. You just clearly haven’t been listening.”
She then goes on to chastise the media:
“By point-mocking a symptom of a bigger picture, you’ve reinforced the imbalance of an already skewed culture. You’ve chosen to punish the product of an evil, not the evil itself. This is precisely why survivors don’t report. Congratulations.”
Inertia and smear campaigns are just two of the ways institutions can perpetuate abuse culture, also known as ‘rape culture’.
Philosopher Claudia Card has argued that ‘rape’ (here, meaning any and all sexual assault) is a terrorist institution. Sexual violence – a social practice – is gendered. We live in a world of “social norms that create and define a distribution of power among and between members of the sexes”. This is a type of social identity power – a power that is informally maintained through our actions and our assumptions about the way the world necessarily is. Women fear what men can do to them. Terror of this kind is manipulative. And terror is a shortcut to power.
Rape is also an institution (in an informal sense) insofar as it is “a form of social activity structured by rules that define roles and positions, powers and opportunities.” Cisgender men are usually the perpetrators of sexual assault, and women and children (including male children) are usually the targets of that assault. “For the most part,” says Card, “the rules become ‘second nature’, like the rules of grammar, and those guided need not be aware of the rules as learned norms”.
While I want to emphasise that not all – nor even most – cisgender men commit sexual assaults, that cisgender men can be victims of sexual assault, and typical targets (women and children) can be perpetrators, the constancy of this type of activity – in 2018–19, the majority of sexual assault offenders recorded by police were male (97%) – leads to the impression that sexual assault (tacitly: of women and children) is inevitable.
Since there is a social practice – an open secret – of women and children being sexually abused, women become socialised to fear sexual abuse. Women live in a state of apprehension, always on alert for signals of danger. Cisgender men (who have not experienced assault) do not have to live this way.
Thus, if ‘rape’ really is an informal terrorist institution in Australia, it would follow that one of the reasons Australia is yet to meet Tame’s first requirement – to take sexual violence seriously and to take proactive measures to prevent it – is because we have not yet disregarded the assumption that sexual abuse is inevitable. People may be working on changing such tacit assumptions, but on a mass scale we are yet to shift the dial.
This leads us to Tame’s second ask: adequate funding. Help the people who are doing the re-educating, who are running shelters, who need to access specialist legal services, who are training medical professionals in sexual assault cases, increasing access to psychologists, and improving the child welfare system. The list goes on. And, in Higgins’ view, if there were more women in Parliament, this issue would be taken more seriously – even though “quotas” is a “dirty word” to the Liberal Party, she revealed in question time.
Finally, we reach Tame’s third driver of change, to which her foundation has been working: creating consistent legislative reforms wherein, for instance, there is no reference to a sexual “relationship” between an adult and a child. However, one foundation can only achieve so much – we need a more proactive approach.
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Higgins and Tame both identified the barriers to overcoming trauma, while making suggestions on overcoming the abuse culture that has been absorbed into some of our most powerful institutions. Thus, institutions are not off the hook. They have their role to play in dispelling both rape culture and challenging the presumed inevitability of sexual abuse.
Given this, why did the media sensationalise Tame’s anonymous caller, why was Tame smeared, and why was Higgins cast out of the media spotlight? Why is the Government dragging its feet on reform? Why do people keep spreading “that” photo on social media?
One problem, it seems, is this: while Higgins and Tame were indeed given a platform from which to speak, what they said was not really ‘heard’ (that is, properly understood) by the media, by politicians, and even by the public. When one is not heard properly, one is effectively silent. Silence is exactly what Higgins was trying to escape. And yet, it seems that what is said too often makes little difference.
Being ‘effectively silenced’ does not necessarily mean that someone literally cannot speak, or that they have no platform. It means that when they speak, they are misunderstood (often wilfully). The message that should be taken from their words is not the message that media, politicians, and even the general public actually hear.
The media have acted as though that one singular instance of intimidation was the most important issue raised that day. But the point Tame was making is that there is no need to name the person nor agency because this sort of silencing tactic happens all the time to people trying to change the status quo. One must ask, are the media and LNP, even the public, purposefully missing the forest for the trees?
To fail to heed the wisdom of these women, as spokespeople for survivors, is an absolute ethical failing. They are gifting us with their situated knowledge and experience-based insights that would lead to successful reform, as well as the many insights that have been shared with them by other survivors who have sought them as confidantes. Tame literally lists what needs to happen: one, two, three. But it is clear that the press and the Parliament have not yet learnt how to actually listen to the intended overarching messages of these women – and, until they (and we ourselves) do, nothing will change.
We must pay attention and be proactive in destroying the terrorist institution of abuse culture.
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BY Louise Richardson-Self
Louise Richardson-Self is a Lecturer in Philosophy and Gender Studies at the University of Tasmania and an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Awardee (2019). Her current research focuses are the problem online hate speech, and the tension between LGBT+ non-discrimination and religious freedom. She is the author of Justifying Same-Sex Marriage: A Philosophical Investigation (2015) and her second book, Hate Speech Against Women Online: Concepts and Countermeasures is due for publication in 2021.
How a Shadow Values Review can improve your organisation
Michelle Bloom, Director of Consulting and Leadership at The Ethics Centre, discusses the results of Shadow Values Reviews she has conducted for Australian organisations, which reveal and unlock the hidden values that really guide an organisation’s culture.
Shadow Values and principles are an expression of the unstated operating culture of an organisation. Operating beneath the surface, they lie beneath the expressed values and associated behaviours of an organisation. Many organisations, for example state “collaboration” as one of their values which is an effective and positive way to ensure you get the best thinking and diverse perspectives. However, what The Ethics Centre’s Consulting and Leadership team have found is, the value of collaboration is operationalised as “co-operation”, leading to less diversity of thinking and curiosity to explore perspectives. Shadow Values can be even an organisation’s culture as they remain unspoken and out of awareness.
We spoke with Michelle Bloom of the Ethics Centre’s Consulting and Leadership team about the results of Shadow Values Assessments she has done for Australian organisations.
How does a Shadow Values Assessment differ from a traditional staff engagement or culture review?
Most large and medium sized organisations do engagement and culture reviews. Having completed many, with different organisations, we’ve found they’re useful up to a point, usually determined by people’s feeling of psychological safety – the point to which they feel safe to express their actual experience.
We’ve all experienced going through the motions with surveys and being less than forthcoming with our opinions when being asked for feedback, whether that’s because of apathy, fear of reprisal or any number of reasons.
What we’ve done is developed a range of methodologies and approaches to get below the surface of how people feel when they talk about work and build a climate of safety for employees to express their opinions freely without fear of retribution.
This is important because once the skeletons are out of the cupboard, the Shadow Values are all known – they’re understood, people feel a sense of relief and optimism that things can change and change for the better. It’s a different paradigm – this approach is more social science and anthropological, more qualitative than other, more standard culture pulses and staff surveys. It’s more about listening to how people express their experiences, which means they’re inherently more comfortable in having a conversation that’s focused on what matters to them and about how the organisation lives their values and where they don’t.
The approach explores people’s lived experience of the values, and the language people use to describe their perceptions gives you a different depth that you don’t find in other culture reviews. Our culture review provides rich insights into the shadow aspects of the culture which is particularly important is times of rapid change and uncertainty. It is not using benchmarks, often validated in a BAU environment, which give a partial view and less relevant in a VUCA context.
What sort of Shadow Values are exposed by these assessments?
We often find similarities in the Shadow Values raised across different organisations, for instance employees recounting their ability to raise issues, manage up, or quoting expressions such as, “keep your head down” and “don’t rock the boat”. These are very common manifestations of maintaining harmony, avoiding conflict, and just getting your job done.
Our insights provide an understanding of how the different Shadow Values constellate to form patterns of behaviour that support the implementation of strategy (or not). This allows you to see a systemic view of the organisational culture: how to shift, amplify and or re-enforce behaviours in service of living your values, implementing your strategy, and achieving your purpose as an organisation.
People join, stay, perform, or leave organisations based on their experience of the culture and what the organisation says it stands for. If there is a disconnect between the espoused values and purpose and the employees experience of them, it can lead to disengagement, resentment, poor performance and a cynicism impacting both the employee and customer experience.
These systemic insights are a bespoke part of the assessment and what we recommend to one organisation wouldn’t necessarily be the same as what we’d recommend to another. It’s about understanding the social system within the organisation, and each organisation will be quite different based on their shadow values.
How have you seen Shadow Values Assessments make an impact upon clients’ organisations?
Our clients have told us that Shadow Values Reviews have helped them to understand the drivers of behaviour and performance and guided them to intervene at a systemic level to shift these patterns and ways of working. The reviews also help them to understand the shadow values that are not formally codified but are having a very positive impact such as “entrepreneurialism” in one organisation.
Engagement surveys, 360 reviews and culture pulses deliver a very different set of quantitative data to the qualitative information about culture that comes from a Shadow Values Review. A recent client undertook both a traditional staff engagement and a Shadow Values survey to get insight into how to deliver on their strategy.
Another recent client had issues of psychological safety and allegations of harassment despite having policies and procedures in place to protect employees. As we have seen, all too much recently, that what is in the policy may not reflect how people actually behave. When organisations fail to address these Shadow Values, it can be a slippery slope, leading to unthinking practice, ethical failure, and moral injury. When we ignore, and unintentionally collude through fear, by not calling out and reporting behaviour we know are unacceptable.
What we were able to do was create safety for people to be able to discuss these very sensitive issues and share their experiences confidentially, and report back on themes and patterns of behaviour. People put a lot of trust in us and we have the credibility as we are independent and not for profit, which is a key differentiator of The Ethics Centre from other consulting firms.
We made a number of recommendations that the organisation implemented, and as a result the executive feels strongly that they’re able to deal with the issues sensitively and ethically, manage the systemic risk, implement structural changes and build capability to align their ways of working with their purpose, values and principles.
Have you uncovered and rectified any other examples of detrimental Shadow Values?
In another organisation, we identified significant Shadow Values that created internal systems of patronage, where positional power and influence led to unofficial relationships of quid pro quo. It incentivised fostering relationships with people who had positional power, leading to toxic politics and nepotism. It was inherently destabilising, undermining trust and ran contrary to the more formal systems of reward/recognition programs, performance management and remuneration.
As part of our Shadow Values culture review, we make a number of recommendations to support the organisation to transform their culture aligned to their values. Recently we did a follow-up review with an organisation who had implemented all of our recommendations and the feedback was that employees described it as a “new organisation” and a massive shift in their perceptions and experience of the culture. The performance of the organisation also reflects this shift having delivered on its strategy despite the challenging operating environment over the last 2 years and the quality of the relationships with its stakeholders has been key to delivering on this.
The quantitative measures had improved out of the park – some had improved by 300%. The reasons for that were multiple, but they included a focus on ethical leadership recognising and shifting the Shadow Values, and making formal changes to the organisation’s structure and reporting lines.”
What is the end purpose of a Shadow Values Review, as opposed to traditional engagement and culture surveys?
With a Shadow Values Assessment we’re really measuring an organisation against their espoused values – what they say they stand for and what they actually do. In the time of stress and greater complexity that we now find ourselves, recognising shadow values is becoming even more essential to managing, governing and leveraging culture, for greater employee wellbeing and performance.
If an organisation needs to become more agile or customer-centric, understanding its Shadow Values ensures that it really understands how it actually works and will be able to make informed, evidence-based decisions on what they want to do about their culture to change it. Just saying we value something is not enough. Understanding how to be more “agile or customer centric” is key. Simple, traditional approaches and solutions often fail to deliver as they don’t consider the complex social system of the organisation and the eco system in which it operates, that really determines what is valued and what is rewarded, despite what is espoused.
Some riskier elements of organisational culture have emerged recently, in the way values and behaviours are operationalised, often unintentionally but with disastrous impacts on customers, employees and organisational reputation – think Royal Commissions and recent corporate failures. What a Shadow Values Review delivers is a deep insight into your organisational culture, the values and behaviours that drive it, and a roadmap to help navigate in these complex and rapidly changing times.
The Ethics Centre is a thought leader in assessing organisational cultural health and building leadership capability to make good ethical decisions. To arrange a confidential conversation contact the team at consulting@ethics.org.au. Or visit our consulting page to learn more.
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