Minister for Women Katy Gallagher will introduce a Bill to Parliament today to establish the Independent Parliamentary Standards Committee (IPSC), in aiming to improve workplace behaviour and culture at Parliament House.
The IPSC will be an independent workplace investigation and sanctions framework that will enforce behaviour codes for Parliamentarians, MOPS staff and other people who work in Commonwealth parliamentary workplaces.
“The way it would work is that we have a body called the parliamentary workplace support service,” said Gallagher, adding that this is where anyone who works in a parliamentary workplace could make a complaint.
Then the IPSC would be able to review and investigate that complaint, she says, “if it’s about a member of parliament, and it’s a serious complaint that would warrant sanctions of that order… like suspension or a fine or losing [their] spot on a committee”.
The privileges committee would be the ones reviewing the appropriate sanctions, which Gallagher says is the “right place” for the reports.
“These committees are often members of very senior members of respected political parties. They deal with difficult matters all the time, and they haven’t traditionally operated in a partisan way at all,” she said.
“So we believe the privileges committee is the right place for such a senior body to consider a report from the IPSC, and then they will have to make a decision on that and report to the parliament.”
Set the Standard
The IPSC delivers on Recommendation 22 of Set the Standard, the Australian Human Rights Commission’s report into Commonwealth parliamentary workplaces.
“The 2021 Set the Standard report laid bare the serious issues of bullying, sexual harassment and sexual assault at Parliamentary workplaces,” said Gallagher.
“Since coming to Government and in conjunction with the Parliamentary Leadership Taskforce we’ve been working hard to put the systems in place so that people can raise workplace complaints, and when complaints are substantiated, that both staff and parliamentarians are held to account for their behaviour.”
Will the legislation pass?
Gallagher says she hopes to pass the legislation in September and have it operational in October.
She doesn’t “anticipate too much trouble” to do so, saying the Labor government has “worked very closely with the opposition, as we have with other members of parliament.”
“We’ve addressed concerns where they have arisen, and we’ve been, you know, obviously the shaping of the legislation has been informed by those consultations, but they need to take it through their processes.”
When asked by reporters about the IPSC legislation this morning, the Liberal party’s deputy leader Sussan Ley said she was yet to see it and wants “to look at it closely”.
“I know that my party room will do the same thing. So we will examine it, and we will see what our response is at that time.”
The Greens’ spokesperson for women, Larissa Waters, has welcomed the introduction of the IPSC legislation, saying it had been “a long time coming” to stop Parliament House from being a “national shame”.
Both houses of parliament have now endorsed codes of conduct for behaviour, but without an independent body to investigate breaches, those codes have been unenforceable.
I am pleased there will now finally be a process to hold MPs accountable for bad behaviour, who have been unsanctionable for far too long.
This workplace needs to set the standard rather than be a national shame. We hope that having the codes of conduct enforceable through the IPSC will discourage misconduct, and keep staff and everyone in parliamentary workplaces safe.