What Gari Yala 2 heard from Indigenous employees

Episode #27
Written By Bree Gorman
DEI Will Not Die Podcast with Bree Gorman, Episode 27: What Gari Yala 2 heard from Indigenous employees, with Prof Nareen Young. Nareen has short blonde-tipped dark hair, clear-framed glasses and red lipstick, and is smiling in a teal striped top.

About this Episode

Gari Yala means "speak the truth" in Wiradjuri. In 2020, the first Gari Yala report gave Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employees a confidential space to say what they usually only say among mob. Gari Yala 2 asks again, and it's designed, carried out and analysed by Indigenous researchers.

Professor Nareen Young, Director of the UTS Centre for Indigenous People and Work, joins Bree to unpack what was heard. They start with language: why "cultural load" has been replaced with unpaid workplace demands, and why that shift matters. It isn't a burden of culture. It's labour, and one in two full-time Indigenous employees are effectively doing an extra year of it across their career.

Six of the ten truths from the first report haven't shifted. Nareen explains where she'd focus first, and why she thinks the human resources industry, not boards or CEOs, is responsible for fifty years of failing to apply the Racial Discrimination Act at work. The business case had its moment. Now organisations need to do their job.

They also talk about identified roles as special measures, what decades of affirmative action for women in the union movement show us, and why the backlash against these roles says more about racism at work than about the roles themselves.

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What You'll Learn

  • Why "cultural load" has been replaced with unpaid workplace demands, and what the new language asks of organisations

  • What Gari Yala 2 found about the extra year of unpaid work many Indigenous employees carry across their careers

  • Why six of the ten truths from the first report haven't shifted, and where Nareen would focus first

  • Why Nareen says pushback on racism-specific complaints processes comes from HR, not boards and CEOs

  • Why the business case for DEI has had its time, and what applying the Racial Discrimination Act at work would change

  • Why identified roles are important

Resources Mentioned

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  • Bree: Hello, welcome back to DEI Will Not Die. I'm coming to you as usual from Wadawurrung Country and would like to pay my respects to Elders past and present, and a call out to any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who are watching today. It's quite timely, because today we're here to talk about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people's experiences in Australian workplaces, informed by an absolutely brilliant report that is part two. It's so great when you get to see reports that build on previous work and tell us where things are moving and where they aren't. So I'm really excited for this conversation. Nareen, I'll hand over to you. Could you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about the report we're talking about today?

    Nareen: I can. Thanks, Bree, and thanks for having me, and congratulations on your excellent work, which I watch with avid interest. My name's Professor Nareen Young, pronouns she/her. I'm a descendant of the Fowler family, Aboriginal people who were displaced from what we now know as the inner city of Sydney, so coastal Aboriginal people. I acknowledge both their ownership of the land that I'm on and all of the lands that you're on, and everyone listening's land, Country and waterways, and acknowledge Elders past and present and my ancestors and everyone's ancestors who walk with us.

    In terms of Gari Yala 2, we did the first Gari Yala in 2020. It was the very first survey of Indigenous people's workplace experiences that existed. And, this should be emphasised, the first survey of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people's workplace experience that was designed by us, using Indigenous research methodology applied to the employment setting. It was formulated by Indigenous people, designed by Indigenous people, carried out by Indigenous people, of Indigenous people, and then the report, analysis and recommendations were done by us, and by the brilliant then Dr Jane O'Leary, now Professor Jane O'Leary, who was then doing the job at the Diversity Council that she'd done for twenty years. I was the CEO when we created that function at DCA, before it went awry. Jane is the preeminent employment and industry-based diversity researcher in the country. Last year she came over to our Centre for Indigenous People and Work in a temporary appointment as research director, to establish that function with us, and then she'll hand that over to mob. So we've now done two.

    Bree: And just as a note for listeners, I interviewed Jane and Dimitria Groutsis, and that episode will be out by the time you listen to this one. So feel free to go back and listen to that as well, on diversity metrics. It's a great episode. Thank you for that introduction. I think the main point is that this is work led by and informed by Indigenous people, which is not what we see in the way that we should.

    Can we start on language for a moment? At the start of the report there are some great insights into the language we use in this space, in workplaces, and I think there's a lot of learning there for DEI practitioners. I've heard the term cultural load come up very frequently. I want to talk about what the report found about that, but first, as a clarifier: cultural load, not so great. Could you explain why that's not a great term for us to be using?

    Nareen: Sure. When we did the first Gari Yala report we used it. It had been coined by Dr Mark Ragg, who we've worked with in the past and adore, in 2012. He's a non-Indigenous scholar and consultant who's done a lot of work around Indigenous people. It was the only term we knew of then, and since then it's become completely popularised and everyone uses it.

    After the first Gari Yala was released, a lot of mob raised with us, and were raising around the place, that it is not a load of our culture. It is not a burden of our culture. There's nothing load-ish about our culture. It's a burden and a load imposed by the colony. So some people had started to use colonial load. For quite some time we used cultural slash colonial load, to accommodate both the fact that cultural load had become embedded and people largely understand what it means, and the recognition that, importantly, it is not the fault of our culture that we have this load.

    As we worked towards identifying what that might be and how to ameliorate it for mob in workplaces, Josh Gilbert, the Associate Director of the Centre for Indigenous People and Work, came up with unpaid workplace demands. They are so many and varied that we thought that was the most appropriate term to use, and that's what we're going with.

    Bree: I think this is a fantastic move, because it names so clearly that this is unpaid work. And if it's unpaid work, then we need to work out whether we're paying for it, or whether we're recognising and incorporating this work into people's jobs in other ways. I really think this is a language change that could make a practical difference.

    Nareen: That's exactly right.

    Bree: It doesn't let leaders off the hook, right? The report showed that one in two Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are doing a full extra year of unpaid work across a career, and one in five are doing seven. I think that was right. That's absolutely extraordinary.

    [Correction: Gari Yala 2 found that 1 in 5 Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander employees worked six or more hours per week unpaid. Over a 50-year career, 1 in 2 full-time Indigenous employees effectively do an extra year of unpaid work.]

    Nareen: Well, no, it's not, from our perspective. It is the nature of the colony, which isn't any contemporary person's fault, that there is such a profound lack of understanding and knowledge about Indigenous people and how we live. Obviously I can't speak for Torres Strait Islander people, but for Aboriginal people it's constant and never-ending, both in and out of the workplace. But at the workplace, it becomes work. So it's no surprise to us, like most of the findings.

    It was one of the reasons we did the first Gari Yala in the first place. It's what we talk about in the privacy of our own community, including about work. We wanted to articulate some of those private conversations and convey them, so that workplaces understand what the difficulties are for us and what's preventing us from thriving at work. If I had a cent for every time I've been asked who the Traditional Owners are here, I'd be a very wealthy woman. We are, as so many people say, Black Google and Black Siri. And that's work. It's labour. So that was one of the things we wanted to articulate. In some ways we knew what the outcomes of the first Gari Yala survey would be, but we also thought it was important that those things entered the national employment conversation.

    Bree: If you were talking to organisations right now, which I guess you are in many ways, what are some of the first things they really need to be doing to address this?

    Nareen: I'd go with the recommendations of the Gari Yala reports, the ten truths, which anyone can look up anytime. The very first one is Unearthing the Truth, which I think is the most important. As we all know as D&I and Indigenous employment practitioners, and this is why employers do HR surveys, the thing about workplaces is that there are things no one feels empowered to say out loud or in the public domain. What Gari Yala enables, and all of the surveys we've implemented in various industries, workplaces and businesses across the employment and labour markets, is exactly that: getting blackfellas to talk about workplace experiences in a black environment, in a confidential and anonymous way, so that we can convey it to employers. Sometimes they're shocked. Often they're very distressed about what they hear, and rightly: my God, how does this happen? And we provide recommendations to try to change the workplace culture and the workplace policies that are problematic and aren't doing what they set out to do. So that would be the first recommendation of the Gari Yala ten truths.

    Bree: Those ten truths will be linked in the show notes. They're so well written, because it's so clear what the areas of focus could be, so I'd really encourage people to look at them. In the current report, six of those ten truths didn't show any change since the last one.

    Nareen: Nothing, yeah.

    Bree: If you had to pick one that you'd really love to see movement on, that listeners could contribute to, where would you put your focus?

    Nareen: I'm a practitioner of many years, so I understand how workplaces operate. I'd go with number one, as we just discussed. But also the one, and I can't remember what number it is, about implementing workplace policies, so that you have training and a complaints procedure that refers specifically to Indigenous people, and that those things are communicated adequately in the workplace. Because our very strong view is that an abject failure of the past fifty years of workplace policy and practice is the implementation of the provisions of the Racial Discrimination Act. That goes very specifically to that recommendation. While we think the Act is currently inadequate, largely because of the lack of application in workplaces, we have been calling, with the Race Discrimination Commissioner and the ACTU, for a positive duty to prevent racism to be inserted into the Act for quite a while. But even the application of the current provisions of the Act would help.

    Bree: This is an interesting point that's been coming up in quite a few conversations recently. There was such a movement in the DEI space, and I know you would have seen this, towards the business case. There's a great business case for doing this work, and that's the way we're going to move leaders. And honestly, I think that hasn't worked.

    Nareen: No, it hasn't, really.

    Bree: So now there's a lot of talk about how we've got legislation, and organisations just aren't compliant with it. That's what you're describing: the compliance piece, making organisations consider that again and consider the risks. I'm interested in that finding around a complaints procedure that's specific to racism, because you get a lot of pushback from organisations saying, we've got bullying and harassment policies and complaints and grievance policies, and that covers it. Could you explain to listeners why that doesn't cut it?

    Nareen: Well, I don't know that we get pushback from organisations. If I talk to boards and CEOs, they get it. Who we get the pushback from is the human resources and people industry, and they are responsible for this debacle. So we clearly have a lot of work to do to convince them that they simply need to do their job.

    I understand exactly what you're saying about the move from EEO to diversity practice. Sadly, I have to cop to having been a leader of that when I was leading DCA, because it made sense at the time, in the development of the narrative. It was a time when the place wasn't as overtly and publicly racist as it currently is. I'm old enough to remember when people weren't necessarily as racist in public. But I think the failure of the human resources industry to ensure that the provisions of the Act are applied in workplaces has actually helped public racism become a thing. If it had been conveyed from the start, fifty years ago, since the introduction of the Racial Discrimination Act, that [it's not acceptable] to be racist or sexist or ableist, or later homophobic and transphobic, if those things had been conveyed in Australia's workplaces, maybe we wouldn't be in the disastrous situation we're in more generally. So I think it is up to the people industry. When I'm talking about risk, and talking about EVPs, to boards and players in the governance sector and others, I say this is a massive risk for you, and you need to get the human resources function in your organisation to do its job.

    Bree: That's such useful practical advice, right? Let's do the job. Let's make sure we're at the minimum compliant with the legislation, and move upwards from there.

    Nareen: It's really not hard.

    Bree: There was so much in the report, and I'm not doing it justice with my questions, so please, everybody, go and read it. But it did address identified roles, and how they were helpful and also how sometimes they were tokenistic. Did you want to talk a little bit about that?

    Nareen: I think there's a lack of understanding, even in the D&I practitioner community, about the nature and imperative of identified roles. One reason is, of course, special measures, and all of us understand special measures and their antecedents in affirmative action, and why they're important. They're there because we as Indigenous people were actively excluded from the labour and employment markets for a long time, and special measures are in place to redress that. If you look at the stats, we're certainly not in a position to abandon them yet.

    We know, as D&I practitioners, the absolute hysteria that was generated, and still is, and the backlash around special measures and affirmative action for women. But we have them in this country, pursuant to the reporting provisions of the Workplace Gender Equality Act, and they have worked. One of the places I look is the labour movement, where as a young trade union official I was the recipient of some of those measures. I sat in female affirmative action positions, incorrectly framed then, and hopefully we've moved on from that to include gender diverse people. I sat in two of those positions, on the executives of both the ACTU and Unions NSW. And I look around the Parliament and at the trade union movement, and the representation of women and gender diverse people in the Labor Party and the union movement is staggering in comparison to other places. So it's very clear that thirty to forty years of special measures for women across those movements has been absolutely successful. We look at Westpac, where their targets have been achieved. We look at organisations that have had special measures and affirmative action for women in place, and it's really looking like it's working. So why wouldn't we implement those measures for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people? We should.

    Secondly, there's service delivery. In any marketing sense, having mob, blackfellas, serving blackfellas just makes complete sense. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to work that one out.

    And thirdly, there's input into Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander programs, policies, procedures, marketing, employment practice, all of those things. It couldn't be more sensible than to have Indigenous people making those determinations and decisions. Again, it doesn't take a genius to work that one out. So the backlash against identified roles is just not very smart on any count, and to me it's a marker of the increase in racist behaviour and the verbalisation of racist thoughts at work.

    Bree: I've really appreciated seeing the report through that context of now. You've talked a couple of times about how the business case made sense a while ago, and it doesn't make sense now. We've always got to be changing our practice to adapt to the times and keep refreshing ourselves, and I think that's what this report gives: so much information about what is current. It's a really practical thing people can get hold of, sit with, and reflect on the stats that came out of it. There were certainly some moments in there for me. And then to have that match so clearly with next steps and actions people can take. So thank you so much for coming on and sharing that with us.

    Nareen: Thank you, Bree.

    Bree: As I said, I'll put a link to the report in the show notes, along with anything else you'd like listeners to read. And listeners, please follow Nareen on LinkedIn. I learn lots from your posts, so I'd encourage everybody to do that. Any final points you wanted to add before we wrap up?

    Nareen: Well, back to you, Bree. I think the work you do is amazing, and it's a pleasure to see what you're doing on LinkedIn. Thanks for having me, and for your support of our centre's work and its self-determined and self-determining nature. Any time.

    Bree: Awesome. I'll take you up on that. Thanks, everyone, for listening, and catch you on the next episode.

Bree Gorman
Next

Measuring Race and Ethnicity at Work: What Australia Gets Wrong