Fix the systems, not the people

Gari Yala 2 is the national survey of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employees' workplace experiences, designed and led by Indigenous researchers. Professor Nareen Young, who leads it, joins Bree to talk about what was heard: why "cultural load" is the wrong name for unpaid work, why one in two full-time Indigenous employees effectively do an extra year of it across a career, and why six of the ten truths from the first report haven't shifted since 2020. Her fix for organisations is blunt. Stop relying on the business case and start applying the Racial Discrimination Act.

Australia has never had a system for measuring race or ethnicity at work the way it measures gender. In this episode, Professors Dimitria Groutsis and Jane O'Leary, who've researched ethno-racial diversity data for 15 years, unpack why: a history of sanitised language, discomfort with the word "race" itself, and no legally mandated approach to force the issue. They explain their new framework for measuring diversity properly, why grouping people into broad categories can flatten real identity, and what actually changes when organisations get this right.

Bree goes solo this episode, unpacking what LGBTIQA+ inclusion actually needs to look like in Australian workplaces right now, and why this is exactly the wrong moment for organisations to go quiet. Drawing on a year of focus groups across universities, government and not-for-profits, they get into what employees are really asking for: not another Pride morning tea, but (surprisingly) coffee catch-ups, visible leadership, and data collection people can actually trust.