Ms KING (9:59 AM) —I rise to speak on the Age Discrimination Bill 2003. The bill seeks to eliminate as far as possible discrimination against persons on the grounds of age in the areas of work; education; access to premises; the provision of goods, services, facilities and accommodation; the disposal of land; the administration of Commonwealth laws and programs; and requests for information. The government has now, after quite some months, brought the bill onto the parliamentary agenda.

There does seem to be some bitter irony to this bill. It is occurring now that there is a push to retain older people in the work force, but many of these people are the same people who not so long ago were subject to large-scale retrenchments within both the public and private sectors. Many found themselves being retrenched before they wanted to leave work, and many faced dismal prospects for regaining work.

A proposal for the Age Discrimination Bill has been on the table since 1992. The then Keating government established an age discrimination task force to examine age discrimination and identify options for action, including more comprehensive legislation. This was supported in 1999 by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission being charged with developing a discussion paper on age discrimination. That paper, called Age matters, reported that age is a major barrier to the employment of mature and older workers.

The government has now, somewhat belatedly, recognised age discrimination as a legitimate issue. This bill is somewhat of a departure from the government's usual attitude to issues of discrimination and human rights legislation. The government's attitude towards the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission has, in the most recent past, seen the government seek to downgrade its powers, fail to appoint commissioners and cut its budget. It seems for the government that, now the issue of age discrimination has some political currency, some issues of discrimination are actually worth legislating against. It is a pity that discrimination on the basis of racial vilification and discrimination against women breastfeeding—and, perhaps, a little more compassion for asylum seekers—have not warranted the same government concern.

The concept of age discrimination is not new. State and territory law has for some time included discrimination based on age as being unlawful through antidiscrimination and equal opportunity laws. But there is some inconsistency between state and territory laws, and a person's right for protection from age discrimination can be highly dependent upon where they live and who they actually work for.

The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission has had the power since 1990 to inquire into and attempt to conciliate complaints alleging age discrimination in employment and occupation. However, unlike complaints made under the Racial Discrimination Act, Sex Discrimination Act and Disability Discrimination Act, complaints of age discrimination do not give rise to any enforceable legal right or remedy. The only remedy available to the commission is to report to the Attorney-General for tabling in parliament. The commission has done so on a number of occasions in relation to age discrimination, particularly in relation to compulsory retrenchment.

The issue of age discrimination is an important one. It is not news to anyone that Australia is an ageing society. Declining fertility rates, decreasing death rates and decreasing levels of immigration are all contributing factors. One of the things that annoys me most about the debate on the ageing population in Australia—and the Treasurer's Intergenerational Report fell into this category as well—is that we rarely focus on or discuss the positive aspects of ageing within our society. We constantly refer to the tax burden and the possibility that the proportion of workers contributing to the revenue base will be outweighed by the proportion no longer paying tax and relying on government services.

We rarely talk about the need for a dramatic shift in our perceptions of ageing and the contributions made by an ageing population, both through continuation in the paid work force and through voluntary work and community participation. Many older workers are returning to the work force after periods of retirement and are establishing small businesses and employing people themselves. Many older people are involved in training and mentoring young people into work, and many older people are establishing community organisations that are actively involved in policy development, service provision, fundraising and a range of other activities at the local, state and national levels. Continued active participation, through either work or unpaid voluntary labour, continues older people's connection to the community and, whilst I have not studied the empirical evidence, I think it keeps older people healthier and alive for a much longer period.

The environment of work has changed dramatically over the past decade. Government policy has deliberately concentrated on the individual and their relationship with their employer, rather than on the notion of a collective of workers. This has produced an environment in which individuals, regardless of their bargaining power, have had to be far more self-reliant in finding work, negotiating their working conditions and relying on their own savings in retirement. This has unavoidable consequences. One of these—the ability of workers to negotiate when barriers such as age discrimination occur—is largely dependent upon socioeconomic status, literacy and understanding of and capacity to understand what remedies are available.

However, age is a pretty strong equaliser. Regardless of the fact that some of us try to hold it back, we all get older. Legislating against age discrimination is a good way of protecting many of us against what currently happens. The Senate Employment, Education and Training References Committee, as quoted in the HREOC Age matters discussion paper, stated in 1995:

It is these sorts of perceptions that hold people back from getting work as they age. However, it does not just hold them back from getting work. It also means that they can be discriminated against in the workplace if they are already employed. This legislation attempts to address that.

ABS statistics show that almost two-thirds of unemployed job seekers aged over 55 report that the most difficult problem they face in finding work is being considered too old by employers. The same experience is also reported by more than one-third of unemployed job seekers aged 45 to 54 years. Many older job seekers have simply given up looking for work in the belief that employers will consider them too old for the job. Many do not appear in unemployment statistics.

Currently, my electorate of Ballarat consists of a population of over 100,000, with 34.7 per cent of those over the age of 45. Within this age group, and particularly within the over-55 age group, there is an unacceptable rate of unemployment. At the other end of the scale, local figures show that the unemployment rate of young people aged 15 to 19 years is around 23 per cent—and they are local figures, not ABS figures. This has devastating impacts, both on the individual and on the community. In many cases, retrenchment has caused the high number of mature age unemployed in my electorate.

The Ballarat community in particular has suffered with the closure of the railway workshops. Many of our manufacturing jobs were lost due to international competition and tariff lowering. We have problems, in particular, with the textile, clothing and footwear industries, which employ around 400 people in my electorate. The Thai free trade agreement is going to have a significant impact on those workers, particularly if the government chooses to reduce tariffs for TCF industries. That will have a major impact, particularly on mature age employment in my district.

Many mature age workers are unable to find work after being retrenched. Often they need retraining in other areas. That ultimately results in competing with younger applicants for jobs. Failure and rejection in job seeking has devastating implications. For mature age people, it is often their first experience of being unemployed and seeking work after 25 to 30 years of employment. It can impact in particular on an individual's psychological wellbeing, family and overall general health. This in turn has overall effects on the community and can also place a large financial burden on revenue.

The reasons for unemployment amongst 15- to 19-year-olds is more complex: job availability, difficulty linking young people to traineeships and apprenticeships, truancy and early school withdrawal, inadequate support for education programs in the early years, assistance for parents, generational unemployment—the list goes on. This legislation can in some ways help prevent discrimination on the basis of age and hopefully remove one possible barrier to mature age workers seeking work and young people gaining employment.

However, it is always difficult to legislate in an area which essentially requires a change in attitude. There are a number of inadequacies in this bill and Labor has moved amendments that seek to address some of those inadequacies. The first is the issue of relatives and associates. The possibility of a provision covering discrimination on the basis of the age of a person's relative or associate was raised in the government's information paper but has not been included in this bill.

It is not difficult to see where this sort of discrimination may arise. An older worker who cares for an aged relative may experience discrimination by an employer because of a concern or an apprehension that the employee may be off work for a long period of time. Another example might be a hotel discriminating against parents with young children by refusing to allow them to stay as guests because of an apprehension that the children will be unruly. I think there are currently examples of discrimination against relatives and associates which could be included in the provisions of this bill if the government so chooses.

The second problem in the bill is that discrimination on the basis of age must be the dominant reason for the complaint. This is much tougher than the approach by the states and territories to age discrimination. There are many forms of discrimination in the workplace; to argue over what reason is dominant in each case could prove to be a costly and time-consuming exercise—making it difficult for complaints to succeed and inviting further litigation. In addition, this criterion was removed from the Racial Discrimination Act on the basis of it being impracticable to apply.

The third problem with the bill is harassment. As with the relative and associate provision, the government has not included age based harassment in the bill, although the issue was raised in the original information paper. Age based harassment is an issue that is difficult to legislate against but, in my view, it is a significant community problem. We see it all the time. We see young people complaining about being moved on from shopping centres and other areas—on the basis of their age, as opposed to any behaviour that they are engaged in. I have heard that this has happened in my local community on some occasions. I have a delightful story: I remember standing at a set of traffic lights, and an older woman crossing the road was being harassed by some younger people, who were tooting their horns and pushing her to hurry up and cross the road. She handled it beautifully by turning around to them and saying, `Do you think I am travelling this slowly because I choose to?' I think that is a great way to handle harassment, but sometimes harassment goes much further. Age based harassment really does need to be included in this bill.

The Age Discrimination Bill 2003 contains no cap for damages that can be awarded under this legislation, leaving it open for generously remunerated executives to file age discrimination suits for thousands, perhaps even millions, of dollars. That is certainly not the intent of this legislation but it is a possibility under it. The bill also fails to mention any protection against discrimination for the volunteer or unpaid worker. Older Australians represent the majority of people in voluntary work at the moment, and we are desperately trying to encourage younger people into that area as well. In Australia, we have an ageing population and it is increasingly difficult to attract people into voluntary work because of their being engaged in paid work and having less time. Certainly discrimination on the basis of age in voluntary and unpaid work should be included in this bill. Already we are seeing problems with aged volunteer workers not being able to participate in their communities due to organisations being unable to secure public liability insurance. Sometimes the reason given is the number of older people working as volunteers within those community organisations and the possible injuries that they may sustain in undertaking voluntary activity. So I think it is important that we look at what the barriers are to participation in voluntary activity and also what protections there should be for older people who are participating in those activities.

Labor have amendments to this bill. I, like others, support the content and the principles of this bill, because age discrimination is happening within the work force and it is proving to be a barrier for many older workers—as well as many younger people—trying to get work. Our amendments go directly to the issues around relatives and associates and also look at the dominant reasons for discrimination. Also, broadening the bill that we have before us to apply to situations of harassment would be an important enhancement.

So far, the debate in relation to age discrimination seems to have been somewhat overly focused on retirement age corporate executives—mostly men. If we are going to have a decent debate about what to do about ageing in our society, we need to make sure that we do not discriminate and we need to ensure that people are able to participate in the work force and retire when they choose to retire. That time should be when they have been able to get their savings in order and plan for their retirement, rather than them being forced out of the work force, as we have seen in many cases—particularly in my electorate as manufacturing industries have closed.

I think that we need to not just focus the debate on mostly male corporate executives. Certainly, some of the media reports and even some of the Prime Minister's own statements have been overly focused on this group. Women in particular, as they get older, face strong barriers to not only staying in the work force but also regaining employment. It is very important that we understand that there is a whole range of mature age unemployed people—the very people that we are now saying should be staying in work longer—who experienced massive retrenchments through both the eighties and the nineties under both governments' policies.

I also think that the government must lead by example. It claims that these bills will urge businesses to employ older workers. You could ask what has happened about that principle, as the government retrenched 4,000 Public Service employees over the age of 55 when it first came to office. I was working in the Public Service then, and we lost such an enormous amount of experience and wisdom that I think it took quite a long time for the Public Service to recover.

This is particularly so in relation to outsourcing, where you had people with a great deal of experience in understanding the content of issues. Suddenly, we were left with people in the Public Service who did not understand the content trying to manage very complex outsourcing contracts. I think many of the problems that we have seen with outsourcing were as a result of the loss of extremely experienced older workers from the Public Service in 1996—4,000 of them. I was working in the health and ageing department. We lost people with a large degree of experience within the health area. There was a great loss during that period. So the government really does need to lead by example in its own policies.

It is important that older people already participating in the work force be covered by legislation that protects them from being retrenched or unfairly treated, but the really tough issue for policy makers is assisting mature age unemployed people and young people into jobs. These bills certainly are one way that you can try to remove some of the barriers that are in place to older people getting into the work force and give them some rights and remedies if they believe they have been discriminated against. But, clearly, it is only one way in which we need to be working to assist mature age people and young people into work.

In Ballarat there is a group of people who have set up a mature age support group for women, and more recently a mature age support group for men has been established. I think that these sorts of initiatives do a great deal in assisting mature age unemployed people to work together to try to find solutions, to lobby quite strongly their own local, state and federal politicians, and also to participate in the policy debate around these issues. So I would like to see those sorts of initiatives supported by some federal and state funding as well.

I do support the bills before the House today. Age discrimination is an issue that we have talked about for a long time. Many older workers in particular have experienced it, but to date it is not something that we have been able to grapple with in a legislative sense. So, again, whilst I support the bills before the House today, I also think that there are some major problems with the relatives and associates test and the issue of harassment. Looking at the capping of payments is something that should also be explored.