Services Australia’s “DEI” onslaught

Staff probed on sexuality and gender identity politics

Photo by No Revisions on Unsplash

With so many things vying for my horrified attention these days, last month’s federal budget was never going to make my top ten. But I glancingly noted one item for reasons that will become clear. 

Services Australia, the super-agency encompassing Centrelink, Medicare and Child Support, is getting $1.8 billion over three years to recruit more than 7000 new workers. As for the existing staff, the Government had earlier announced it was shifting more of them from backroom to frontline positions so more people can answer the bloody phones. Hallelujah for that. 

A few months back, while driving home from the school run, I had tuned in to the ABC to hear an interview with Government Services Minister, Bill Shorten. I made a diary note at the time because the conversation struck me as interesting. 

For one thing, Shorten congratulated his boss on his upcoming nuptials — the news about Albo’s engagement having just broken — with all the joyousness of someone undergoing root canal. Who can blame him? The much-hyped revelation that Australia’s prime minister proposed to his girlfriend on Valentine’s Day, a fact conspicuously packaged for bogan consumption in marginal seats, almost roused this suburban mum to jihad against heteronormativity itself. 

Thankfully, most of the interview with Shorten concerned the backlog of more than 1 million unprocessed new health and welfare claims; many Australians are waiting months to access crucial benefits such as the aged pension. 

Shorten talked about his recruitment drive for Services Australia; explained he was repairing the previous government’s budget cuts. Some of the delay, he said, was the result of turning off some of Centrelink’s automation processes — under the previous government these processes had led to Robodebt, an epic travesty that’s evidence, if ever we needed it, of the professional elites’ unrestrained contempt for the underclass. Shorten also said he was boosting measures to keep staff safe at work, as frequent encounters with “aggro” customers weren’t helping productivity and morale. 

“We need more humans in human services,” he characteristically zinged. 

The great privilege of writing this Substack is the freedom of telling you exactly what I think. So gratuitous and un-journalist-y as this may be, I’m going to tell you I reckon Shorten is a class act. 

During his quarter of a century in the upper ranks of the union movement and the parliamentary Labor party Shorten has shown a determination to tackle systemic problems where many of his colleagues default to complacency.

Listening to Shorten being interviewed delivers to the political junkie a rare kind of satisfaction, if not euphoria: for here is a politician who largely eschews spin and bullshit to level with the public about the challenges he faces, how he’s trying to meet them and what success might realistically look like in a way that doesn’t leave me feeling he’s cannily managing expectations.

He also — yes, I’m getting nearer to the point — holds the title for the most courageous act of defiance against gender identity politics by any Australian Labor politician, a miserably low bar to be sure. The gong goes to Shorten for re-instating the word “mother” on hospital forms, reversing a bureaucratic experiment with “birthing parent,” a dehumanising word that regards women as divisible from the exclusively female activity of giving birth and everything flowing from same. Shorten’s remarks at the time even left room for the possibility that the women pushing back against gender identity ideology weren’t necessarily a sub-species of neo-Nazi. 

All of which is a very lengthy preamble to the unfolding tragedy apparent on my radar. For between an excellent minister’s fine ambitions and the reality of his vast woke-infested bureaucracy falls the shadow. 

As in a game of broken telephone, no sooner had the good minister heralded a new era of “humans” and “safety” within Services Australia than a battalion of human services and workplace culture consultants moved in with a “diversity” and “inclusion” agenda likely to stifle and exclude. 

Early this year, Service Australia’s newly appointed and highly credentialed CEO David Hazlehurst in a missive to staff reported on his recent five-day trip with Shorten to the US and Canada to “help inform our path to being a world class delivery agency.” The meetings he recounted sounded on the money and outward facing, meaning geared towards delivering better services for welfare recipients, “clients” if we must. 

Among the meetings, however, was a session with Canada’s “Minister of Diversity, Inclusion and Persons with Disabilities.” In ordinary times, say back in the glory days of the Blair government in the UK, “diversity” and “inclusion”, entailed giving a hand-up to, well, welfare recipients, people without even a mobile phone to call their own. 

But in identity-politics obsessed Canada “diversity” and “inclusion” also conjures workplaces populated with preferred pronouns wherein every interaction is booby-trapped to explode at the most micro of micro-aggressions.

Days later, back in Australia, in at least one division of the bureaucratic behemoth, there came a managerial call-out for staff interested in donating one or two hours a fortnight to join a “first ever” working group to foster a “positive workplace culture” to “enhance workplace diversity, inclusivity, health and safety.” I wonder: could these two hours a fortnight be better used to clear more Centrelink claims? 

Days after that staff were invited to complete a survey for “Pride in Diversity,” a program to support “initiatives that promote a greater inclusion of people of diverse sexuality and/or gender.” 

Pride in Diversity, launched in 2010, is a program run by ACON, roughly Australia’s equivalent of the UK’s Stonewall: called the AIDS Council of New South Wales in its earlier iteration, it was once a respected not-for-profit lobbying for the welfare of gays and lesbians. And while It still carries out important work in this area, ACON, like its UK counterpart, is these days mostly focused on trans rights, a commendable cause were it limited to protecting trans people from genuine harassment and discrimination. 

Alas, the cause has morphed into a highly contested project of erasing the significance of biological sex and replacing it with self-declared “gender identity.” 

Meaning: if a man declares he’s a woman he’s entitled to be treated as a woman at all times and for all purposes, an entitlement that’s enshrined in law in Victoria and several other Australian jurisdictions with NSW likely next. The latter is a disappointing prospect as the state is usually more grounded in its social policy regime and reality-based groups have run a formidable campaign pointing out that gender self-ID regimes can disenfranchise women and girls. 

About ACON itself there is much to say, thanks to the dogged research of private citizen Kit Kowalski, creator of website, ACON Exposed. 

Australia’s largest “LGBTQI+” charity, ACON receives more than $17 million a year in government funding and on top of that services corporate Australia with training and consultancy on workplace “inclusion.” 

ACON’s Pride in Diversity scheme, one of several in the “Pride” franchise — “Pride in Sport” is another — has roughly 300 members and collects from each an annual $6K fee. The Pride in Diversity survey, of which I spoke earlier, purports to gauge whether gay and trans staff feel comfortable and seen in the workplace as well as support for new initiatives such as gender-neutral bathrooms. 

Pride in Diversity also runs the Australian Workplace Equality Index, which ranks organisations and institutions, including large swathes of the bureaucracy, for their LGBTQ inclusion. Disgracefully, the ABC is one such participant, exposing the public broadcaster to perceptions of bias in its reporting on trans issues. ACON also offers training and consulting to help organisations boost their scores. 

Top honours in this year’s Index went, among others, to the Australian Taxation Office and the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS).

Services Australia, as it happens, is already a standout performer on the Index, having attained “gold tier employer” status. It boasts of offering staff paid gender affirmation leave, encouraging them to wear business clothes that most accurately reflect their “gender” and using facilities “they feel comfortable using.”

Alas, workplace inclusion seems an unreachable destination. It’s hard enough for an organisation to reach the end of the 67-question submission for the Index, which, on ACON’s own admission, “sets out a range of expectations .. is.. extremely comprehensive and evidence based. Therefore it does take some time to complete.”

And then there are internal and customer-facing IT systems to re-jig to incorporate references to preferred pronouns and non-binary identities. 

And many little things too. In 2022, ACON dressed down the Department of Health and Aged Care for suggesting it should earn points for “executive advocacy and visibility” simply because an assistant secretary wore a Star Wars LGBT T-shirt during a COVID briefing. On the other hand, the Department was rewarded for placing sanitary bins in the male toilets — for remember, not all menstruators are women.

Compliance, in other words, takes a heap of money, time and personnel.

“One has to question the priorities of an organisation like Services Australia,” says Kowalski, of ACON Exposed, “whose own research indicates that the number of LGBTI+ staff sits well below other cohorts such as mature workers, women, staff with disabilities, indigenous employees..” 

Indeed, Services Australia confirmed only 10 percent of staff fill in the “voluntary” Pride in Diversity survey.

Of the survey, there is also a bit to say, at least from my perspective. As someone who identifies as unemployable this glimpse into how the securely employed other-half lives is endlessly fascinating.

The survey invited Services Australia staff to divulge — well, a lot. “Which of the following would best describe your sexual orientation?” To which there are eight possible answers, with “heterosexual” and “homosexual” comprising only two, alongside others such as “pansexual,” “asexual”, “queer.” (Don’t know what “queer” means? Where the hell do you come from, the underclass?) In case the drafters haven’t covered the field people can nominate “a different term.” 

I had once assumed that “sexual diversity inclusion” meant not caring about who a co-worker chooses to bring to the office Christmas party. 

But it seems the current measure of a truly inclusive workplace is one that probes workers (voluntarily, of course) for full disclosure about their sex lives down to the spare parts that might come into play. 

Were frontline staff inspired to ask such questions of “clients” they would likely run afoul of privacy regulations. 

“Which of the following would best describe your gender identity?” goes another question — possible answers: male, female, non-binary, a different term, prefer not to respond — the sleight of hand being the assertion that “gender identity” exists as an undisputed attribute of humanity.

Ditto, “What are your pronouns?” “What was your sex recorded at birth?” There are elaborate questions, Maoist in tone, on allyship; do you identify as an ally? An active or a passive ally? Consider the reasons you are not an active ally. 

Ominously, one is asked to indicate their agreement with the statement: “I believe there are more than two genders.” Sure, the non-paranoid may feel perfectly comfortable flagging strong disagreement, unconcerned Big Brother may be watching and unworried that making such sentiments has: a) cost some very good people their jobs, and b) brought a crack police squad to their door. (Services Australia says it encourages “open communication” about the survey.)

If the person being surveyed outs themselves as a vanilla normie — hetero and not “gender diverse”— the questions stop. The sexually and gender diverse get more questions but regular folks can’t access this sealed section. I’ve taken a peak: staff are asked if they’re “out” to co-workers, if they’ve been “misgendered” recently, and whether the organisation has appropriate LGBTQ-etc role models in leadership positions. 

Here we might fear the most poisonous of the DEI ideological trio — “equity” — waiting in the wings. The DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) policy, to remind you, is how Harvard University had ended up with a black female president with a record of scholarship remarkable only for its thinness — just 11 peer-reviewed academic articles — and that’s even without the incidence of her plagiarism.

Some of Australia’s institutions are all over US imports such as “equity”, Enlightenment values be damned. 

In the state of Queensland, the government and one university have signalled they are dumping merit-based hiring to stamp out “unconscious bias.” Candidates will be judged on their gender — I use that word deliberately— and the colour of their skin rather than primarily on their credentials for the job. “Diversity” and “cultural awareness” are now key measures in selecting judges for the bench, according to the latest version of the Australasian Institute of Judicial Administration handbook, which guides courts and governments in tapping judicial talent. 

To be clear: the judiciary, the senior ranks of academia and the public service all need to better resemble the population, but the only way to bring this about is through merit-based appointments. Unless, of course, you believe the white males disproportionately represented in the upper ranks of the professions are only there because they’re the best thing going. 

As for the under-the-pump Services Australia staff forced to navigate the politics of “all gender” toilets and the like, I suspect aggro ice-addicts may be the least of their problems.