Rob discusses the creation, effects and shortcomings of Australia's Modern Slavery Act 2018 and potential next steps.
You’d think slavery wouldn’t have survived the last 200 years of political movements fighting to abolish it. Yet it has proven a difficult problem to eradicate. The International Labour Organisation estimates that 27.6 million people live in situations of slavery today, with the Asia-Pacific region being home to over 15 million of them.[1]
Slavery occurs all across the world and in a wide range of industries, with the most common being services, manufacturing, construction, agriculture, and domestic work.[1] Children form an estimated 12% of victims, but many more cases of child slavery may remain unaccounted for.[1] It’s also important to note that forced labour, the most common type of slavery, is often a transient condition: victims can be enslaved from anywhere between a matter of weeks, or for a lifetime, or at multiple points in their lives. This means that far more people experience slavery than the figure of 27.6 million worldwide suggests. Forced marriage is another type of slavery.
Right now, only 35 countries across the world have banned underage marriage, and only 50 countries have criminalised forced marriage.[2] Consequently, it is bitterly unsurprising that the Walk Free Foundation estimates that an additional 22 million people– two-thirds being women and girls – currently live in marriages they had no say in making.
Slavery thrives because of underprivilege. Poverty and illiteracy make people more vulnerable to enslavement because they hinder their abilities to move away from exploiters, to find better work or even to understand their rights and realise that they are being enslaved in the first place.
Take the examples of “Ms N.” and “Ms S.”, two Indian women found enslaved in Australia in 2015. Ms N. came to Melbourne in 2007 under the pretext of working as a domestic servant. She had left school when she was six and spoke no English, and when she arrived in Australia, her employers took her passport. She had no visa and no documentation: she didn’t legally exist. So when she was paid $4 a day, she had no idea who to protest to, or if she would be deported if she raised the alarm. Finally, after eight years, authorities found her after she was hospitalised for untreated diabetes. She weighed 40 kilograms. Ms N.’s “employers” were gaoled and forced to pay her $485,411.[3]
Similarly, Ms S. was brought to Australia by the Indian High Commissioner, Navdeep Suri Singh, to work as his domestic servant while posted in Canberra. She was paid less than $10 a day, to a bank account under Suri’s name, and she was not allowed outside the house except to walk his dog. Not knowing who to call or what to do, Ms S. ran away. She slept rough until she was found by the Salvation Army and referred to the Fair Work Ombudsman.[3] Eventually, Suri was forced to pay Ms S. $189,704 in compensation.[3] While the perpetrators were caught and justice delivered, these two examples show that even if slavery is illegal, many people cannot escape because they lack the language skills and cultural capital required to save themselves.
Making change
This unacceptable reality led to a new wave of anti-slavery activism in the early 2000s. Across the wealthiest nations of the world – the nations that silently benefit from slavery – people started to agitate for governments to be more proactive in enforcing anti-slavery laws. One of these people is Cindy Bohan, with whom I spoke a few months ago. Cindy works at ACRATH, Australian Catholic Religious Against Trafficking in Humans.
ACRATH is a mixed professional-volunteer group dedicated to ending slavery. They do this in four major ways. First, they speak to government representatives, church groups and schools to raise awareness of the prevalence of slavery in today’s world; second, they research and co-ordinate programmes to identify and eliminate slavery in supply chains; third, they collaborate with international counter-trafficking organisations and finally, they encourage us all to think about what it means that slavery still exists today – not to evoke guilt, but rather, to empower us to look outwards, engage with social issues and develop a stronger sense of justice.
ACRATH were not the only group advocating for change; they were part of a much larger movement. Along with groups like Walk Free, Anti-Slavery Australia, the Red Cross, Project Respect and a variety of church groups, unions and forced marriage support networks, Australia’s anti-slavery movement swelled to a critical mass and, through lobbying, successfully pushed government to act. Six years ago, the Morrison Government did so, passing the Modern Slavery Act 2018. This Act legally forces that ‘some entities to report on the risks of modern slavery in their operations and supply chains and [their] actions to address those risks’.[4] The Act thus established a new standard of mandatory reporting, whereby all companies earning over $100 million in annual revenue now must investigate and report, in detail, whether or not they exploit slave labour in their supply chains.
To facilitate this, Parliament established a Modern Slavery Register, a publicly accessible database to which companies must submit a report every year.[5] These reports must outline the slavery risks that a company might employ in its supply chains, not just in Australia, but worldwide. Companies also need to report not just about the operations run under their direction, but also of those done by its subsidiaries. Finally, they must also outline what measures the company is taking to reduce the risks that they might be using slave labour.[5] Slave labour is often well-hidden, and companies may not even be aware they’re using it. But ignorance is not an excuse, and this final obligation ensures that companies cannot turn a blind eye.
Shortcomings and revision
The Act is, however, not without its flaws. An independent review, commissioned by Parliament and led by Professor John McMillan AO was published in May 2023. It highlighted many shortcomings of the Act, most significantly that it’s not really working. ‘There are occasional scattered instances of modern slavery incidents and victims being identified,’ it said, ‘but no strong storyline that the drivers of modern slavery are being turned around’.[6] ‘Modern slavery reporting’, it continued, ‘is not being taken seriously enough. Independent studies and government evaluation have found a high level of apparent noncompliance, sometimes with basic requirements’.[6]
You can see this kind of problem if you have a look at some of the reports on the Register: there’s so much corporate marketing waffle. While most reports I sampled did live up to a reasonable standard of reporting, a lot - especially from the big multinationals - looked more like glossy Instagram fodder than substantive reports. They’re saturated with lovely infographics, smart-sounding babble about “commitments to people and planet” and boasts about annual revenue, all without much concrete reporting on what they’re actually doing about slavery.
This comes to a major point of criticism the McMillan Report made: that the law doesn’t enforce a standard of due diligence in reporting. There are no rules regarding what companies must do before they can say they’ve investigated and reported about modern slavery risks.[6] While one section of the Act sets out a few basic standards on what a report should contain, there are no means to enforce compliance, making these standards more like non-binding guidelines. Hence, companies can get away with turning their reports – which should detail findings from thorough audits of their production lines – into marketing opportunities. Because of this lack of enforcement, lawyers Cilla Robinson, Nicole Flax and Jacinta MacGinley estimated that, in 2022, 77% of companies failed to address all mandatory reporting criteria.
Establishing a nationwide standard of due diligence on reporting, as the review recommends, would counter this problem by setting a clear standard for reports to meet. In addition, introducing penalties for companies who are found to be abusing slave labour or failing to report adequately would also help. The McMillan Report’s also recommended that the mandatory reporting threshold should be lowered to include companies earning over $50 million a year and for the government to provide companies with clearer guidance on how to identify and mitigate slavery risks.[7] Many companies do sincerely wish to end slavery in their supply chains, but as it is so easily hidden, government should assist them where necessary.
Yet, regardless of its flaws, this register forms a monumental first step in addressing modern slavery. In a climate where corporate transparency is so rare, it’s no small task to force companies to front up and declare how much they’re doing to eliminate slavery. The most important part of a first step is that it provides grounds for a second.
Reform
Since taking office two years ago, the Albanese government has moved to reform the Act in multiple ways. First, it allocated $8 million in its 2024 budget for the establishment of an Anti-Slavery Commissioner, who will be tasked with verifying that reports submitted to the Register are truthful and substantial, while also promoting action against, and awareness of, modern slavery. The Commissioner will also be tasked with organising assistance and support for victims.[8] Last August, the Attorney General’s Department also conducted a Targeted Review of Modern Slavery Offences, which also noted the need for a compensation scheme for victims of modern slavery.
Besides the establishment of the Commissioner, none of the other findings of the McMillan Report have been put into action. The Attorney-General’s website features a long list of recommendations for reform, but, as of July 2024, the Act remains unchanged from the original.
For Cindy and ACRATH, this just means more work to be done. And this brings me to the point of this article: that you can make a difference. From the comfort of our homes, slavery, so evil yet also so abundant, can seem inescapable and unstoppable. It makes you feel like a hypocrite, still caring about justice, ethics and the world and yet still using products which you suspect may have been made by slaves. But we can’t just throw out our phones and start knitting our own clothes, because once a technology has been introduced we are bound to use it too, lest we be left behind by the ever-accelerating world of hypermodern hyperproductivity. But the example of ACRATH shows us that there is another way: forcing systemic change. We live under governments, governments which have all the power to end slavery, and which we all have the power to influence. As individuals, we might not be able to change the world, but as a collective, we can make governments - our governments - do that for us.
References:
1: International Labour Organisation, Walk Free and International Organisation for Migration. Global Estimates of Modern Slavery, Forced Labour and Forced Marriage. Geneva, September 2022. https://www.ilo.org/publications/major-publications/global-estimates-modern-slavery-forced-labour-and-forced-marriage.
2: Walk Free. “Global Slavery Index”. 2023. Accessed 22 July 2024. https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/map/#mode=data.
3: Clayton Utz. “Slavery Exists in Australia”. 2022. Accessed 22 July 2024. https://www.claytonutz.com/case-studies/pro-bono/slavery-exists-in-australia.
4: Modern Slavery Act 2018 (Cth). Australian Government, Federal Register of Legislation. Accessed 22 July 2024. https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2018A00153/asmade/text.
5: Nicholson R, Turnbull E, Banyasz D and McNaughton Z. “Recommendations for reform of Australia’s Modern Slavery Act”. 6 June 2023. Accessed 22 July 2024. https://www.allens.com.au/insights-news/insights/2023/06/recommendations-for-reform-australia-modern-slavery-act/.
6: McMillan J. Report of the Statutory Review of the Modern Slavery Act 2018 (Cth). 2023. Accessed 23 July 2024. https://www.ag.gov.au/sites/default/files/2023-05/Report%20-%20Statutory%20Review%20of%20the%20Modern%20Slavery%20Act%202018.PDF.
7: Marshall S, Bhakoo V, Kach A, McGaughey F, Boersma M, Dinshaw F, Nolan J, Sinclair A and Pryde S. Australia’s Modern Slavery Act: Is It Fit for Purpose? 2023. Accessed 23 July 2024. https://media.business-humanrights.org/media/documents/Australias_Modern_Slavery_Act.pdf.
8: Robinson C and Armstrong-Miller A. “Poor report card on modern slavery compliance acknowledged with $8m to implement Anti-Slavery Commissioner”. Clayton Utz. 12 May 2023. Accessed 23 July 2024. https://www.claytonutz.com/insights/2023/may/poor-report-card-on-modern-slavery-compliance-acknowledged-with-8m-to-implement-anti-slavery-commissioner.
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