Luke Gosling (Solomon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Modern Slavery Amendment (Australian Anti-Slavery Commissioner) Bill 2023. Modern slavery is a major violation of human rights. It is a serious crime, afflicting innocents all across our globe. It's a pox on our shared humanity, but we shouldn't see it as a new phenomenon. Behind the word 'modern' lies an ancient evil. The new is but a mutation, a strain of an older disease, and we may never know the total number of its silent sufferers—those victims of that original sin, as it has been called, of the brutal, at least 11,000-year-old peculiar institution that flourished across all regions of the earth over a millennia.

Mass slavery was invented by the ancients to fuel the rise of what they call, without irony, civilisation. Egypt, Babylonia, Israel, Persia, Greece, Rome, the Arab caliphates, India, China, and the pre-Columbian Americas all practiced it. Millions were bound by chains around their necks and ankles, yoked like oxen to till rice and wheat fields, their mouths parched, shirts drenched, fainting in the excruciating heat, whipped like horses to keep going and heaped in open graves like strays when their bodies crumbled. Up to 100,000 Athenians may have been enslaved, which was about one-in-four inhabitants, and 1.5 million people in what is now Italy by the first century BC—another quarter of that population. Estimates for the 19th century transatlantic slave trade alone range between 12.5 million and 20 million people taken from Africa, tricked and forced onto boats. It was a practice that existed in the Pacific Islands, with 62,000 people being blackbirded, or kidnapped, from their families to work on Australian farms in that dark chapter of our history. The grim global tally, if one were possible, might easily run into the tens of millions of souls. Many faces and so many stories—most lost for all time.

I dwell on old-fashioned slavery to make this point. While all people of good faith may join together in their shared revulsion of the ancient practice of slavery and celebrate the triumph of abolitionism over the treatment of one's fellow humans as beasts of burden, even 235 years after the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in France, 163 years after the Emancipation Manifesto in Russia, 161 years after the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States, 113 years after a Qing court edict abolished slavery in China, and 76 years since the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights—even after so many triumphs lighting the Promethean torch of our shared humanity—it is still too soon for a victory parade. Millions remain enslaved and imprisoned in a vale of tears, still alive—some barely—in what the Bible calls the pit or the abyss. It's a place reserved for dead souls in what I refuse to call modern conditions. Let us rather call them antiquated, barbaric conditions.

Around the world, 49.6 million people are still held captive, according to the latest global estimates of modern slavery, at least four times the victims of the transatlantic slave trade. Slavery never really ended. The peculiar institution, as it's known, is still open for business—thriving, even. 'But is this really slavery?' some of you might ask. After all, it does not look like that slavery of old, the immense stones dragged by thousands of Jewish slaves to build the colosseum, or the White Sea canal built by forced labour from a soviet gulag at a cost of 50,000 lives. I agree that modern slavery is far more insidious than that. It's well hidden—pervasive even—seeded into our supply chains. But modern slavery is still slavery. If we can't accept that then all of us are part of the problem. We obviously do accept that.

But who are our modern slaves? They are the 22 million people, a population just a little bit less than Australia's, living in forced marriages, two out of every five a mere child. They are the 27.6 million people working in sweatshops and forced labour camps, even in our very own region, owned like chattels and now the quasi-property of a state or armed group, just as slaves were once owned by a single person. They are the forced labourers, including children in Central Asia still forced to pick cotton like in the antebellum south. They are the 6.3 million often trafficked into commercial sexual exploitation, mainly women, with many of the worst-ranking countries being in Asia, the capital of modern slavery. Horridly, in 36 per cent of cases in our region there are children too. If that's not slavery, then what is it?

Their exploiters act with the same disgusting impunity as the slave masters of old. Even in our information saturated age they strive to keep modern slaves as isolated, invisible and disempowered as they once were—out of sight, out of mind. Well, we have a message for those predators: wherever you may be, we are intent on ending your business model. Whatever is required, however long it takes, there will be no hiding from the collective searchlights of governments and civil society actors working to end this scourge. There has been incredible work by organisations like Walk Free, Anti-Slavery International, End Slavery Now, as well as the Santa Marta group—a coalition of civil society, law enforcement, business and faith communities that I'm proud to have been working with on this issue. There are also institutions, like Australia's Anti-Slavery Commissioner established by this bill, which I will return to shortly.

My office has dedicated some of its own resources to identifying the gender disparity in human trafficking in modern slavery in Australia.

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 17:24 to 17:36

As I mentioned, my office has dedicated some of its own resources to identifying the gender disparity in human trafficking and modern slavery in Australia and the Indo-Pacific. I salute the work of a previous ANU intern, Tess Brummelhuis. I also thank colleagues across this parliament who have shown leadership on modern slavery and human trafficking, including Senator Linda Reynolds. Though it would take a truly bipartisan and global partnership to achieve it, we will achieve Sustainable Development Goal 8.7:

Take immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its forms.

We can only achieve this difficult objective—cutting as it does across hundreds of national borders and jurisdictions—if we were to treat and view the plight of modern slaves with the same urgency and indignation that we would classical slavery, as I outlined earlier, because it is slavery. The original sin remains the same blot on our whole species that it always was. The motto of our government is 'we will leave no one behind', and we are a government that will always look after the disadvantaged and the vulnerable.

Human slavery is far above party and politics. It's higher even than our national interest as Australians. Eradicating it is surely a global interest of all countries. A Russian writer proposed that we should give up our ticket to a harmonious life on account of the unatoned tears of a single tortured child praying to God for deliverance, and I propose that we take the same attitude to ending this evil and that we not rest until every person is accounted for as safe.

Australia is not free of modern slavery. It's a practice that can affect any country, and we shouldn't think of modern slavery as something that happens out there beyond our borders in a fallen world outside our coast. It's nefarious effects reverberate across Australian society.

In 2019 the Australian Institute of Criminology found there were between 1,300 and 1,900 victims of human trafficking and slavery in Australia between 2016 and 2017. AIC's research also indicated that for every victim detected in Australia there were approximately four undetected victims. Australian businesses are also exposed to modern slavery risks. Some goods and services in Australia are likely tainted by it, and this bill delivers a key component of the government's tackling modern slavery election commitment. The bill also supports our May 2023 budget announcement that $8 million over four years will be allocated to establish the Australian Anti-Slavery Commissioner. This bill amends the Modern Slavery Act 2018 to confer core functions on the commissioners. It supports victims-survivors of modern slavery, it promotes compliance with the Modern Slavery Act and it supports businesses to address risks of modern slavery practices in their supply chains.

The Modern Slavery Act increased transparency in supply chains and elevated awareness amongst the Australian business community of the risks of modern slavery. But the government recognises that more can be done, because modern slavery crimes continue to increase both here and abroad. The bill delivers a long awaited reform by adding an independent pillar to Australia's framework to combat modern slavery. Civil society, business and academia have long advocated for an independent commissioner who could raise awareness of modern slavery in Australia. The 2017 report of the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, Hidden in plain sight, and of the Joint Committee on Law Enforcement inquiry, An inquiry into human trafficking, slavery and slavery-like practices, both made recommendations for Australian modern slavery laws that would establish an independent commissioner. In May 2023 the statutory review of the Modern Slavery Act, led by Professor John McMillan AO, also examined the potential role of an independent commissioner. The extensive consultations and submissions to that review highlight continued strong public support for the establishment of an independent specialist commissioner. By strengthening Australia's response to modern slavery, this bill demonstrates our firm commitment to upholding the absolute right to freedom from slavery and freedom from forced labour.

The bill also requires the commissioner to consider Australia's international commitments when performing their functions to ensure that implications for Australia's human rights and trade obligations are respected. The bill establishes the commissioner as an independent statutory office holder. Through the commissioner, the bill provides an independent mechanism for survivors, for business and for civil society to engage on issues and strategies to address modern slavery in our nation. Their independence will facilitate the commissioner's engagement with stakeholders and inform advocacy for improved policy and practice to address modern slavery. The commissioner will be financially accountable to the parliament and will develop a strategic plan describing their priorities, to be published on their website. The commissioner will report on the outcomes of their activities in their annual reports that will be tabled in parliament. The bill also requires the commissioner to uphold Australia's public governance and privacy laws when performing their functions to protect individuals and Australia's interests, which of course is important.

The government will respond to the review of the Modern Slavery Act in 2024, this year, after careful analysis of the recommendations. Further functions may be considered for the commissioner as necessary following the government response to the review. In closing I wish every success to the future commissioner, whoever that may be, and I call on all parliamentarians to join hands in cleansing the earth of slavery and drying the tears of the victims once and for all.

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