It’s me again.

On 31 January 2023, I sent you an email following my opinion piece in Lawyers Weekly, “It’s time for respect”, on 9 January 2023. I’m still waiting for a personal response from the Prime Minister of Australia – so I’m circling back.

Thirty-six women have been murdered this year alone. It was 32 women murdered on Sunday when I attended one of the rallies Sarah Williams coordinated. Sarah is a young law student and a survivor of gendered violence.

Instead of you responding to my email, what I’d like is to meet with you to discuss how we can improve safety outcomes for women by focusing on primary prevention: power imbalances along gendered lines. We don’t get to secondary prevention (i.e., behaviour change / Respect@Work training) if we don’t address the root cause. Please respond to this meeting request by 5pm on 9 May 2024, ahead of Sarah’s National Strike.

I’d love to talk to you about why the Albanese Labor government and Australian state and territory governments should prioritise legislative regulatory amendments to occupational health and safety laws, including intersectional gender equity targets as an important safety control to prevent gendered violence. Diverse teams and workplaces are safer teams and workplaces, and this has flow-on effects at home, too.

In simple terms, a lack of intersectional gender balance in leadership supports a culture of dominance and control, which increases the risk of gendered violence such as sexual harassment and assault. The same is true for minority groups, explaining why some groups (e.g., ATSI workers, young workers, culturally and linguistically diverse workers, and people from LGBTIQA+ communities) experience higher rates of violence.

At her rally, Sarah had an interaction that upset her. There was a dispute about whether the Prime Minister had been asked to speak at the rally. She said there was no response to her email about how to end violence against women in Australia.

VIEW ALL

If you read a bit further along, I do have a personal request for you to speak. It’s a public request, so there won’t be a dispute about it.

I get it; it’s not always possible to respond to every request, and things take time. But this is a national emergency. Sarah is now upset because she hasn’t been included in the conversation. I get it. It’s hard to include everyone in every conversation. But perhaps she should be included in this one, given she’s the founder of What Were You Wearing and is bringing people across Australia together to have this conversation. I’d like to be included, too.

From a workplace perspective – consultation is an important part of delivering safety outcomes. I also know this from my time in the union movement. It’s also in the Guidelines for Complying With The New Positive Duty under the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth) – which expressly states that workers should be consulted on issues concerning gender equality, diversity and inclusion and that workplaces should pay attention to the voices of those who have lived experience of gender inequality and intersecting inequalities – that’s part of Standard 2 – Culture.

Prime Minister, can we also please meet before Sarah’s National Strike on 20 May 2024 to discuss why women’s safety begins in the workplace? Please respond to this request by 5pm on 9 May 2024 so I know whether the meeting is something you’re open to ahead of the National Strike.

There were a lot of men at the rallies Sarah organised, and as a survivor of strangulation and suffocation (both known precursors to murder), it was personally meaningful for me to see so many men in attendance. Not all men commit acts of violence. In fact, many men have personally and professionally supported me to safety, which is why I am now in the position to ask to speak with you. There are a lot of good men out there, I know.

Will you be one of them? I believe that we can all be better each day.

I’d like to help draft these laws and provide my input alongside peak employer bodies and unions, which may mean including me in future meetings. I’d be pleased to send you a blueprint of what this could look like ahead of the meeting. I’m already working on something similar here in Victoria, and I’m inspired by the leadership of women like Joanna Abraham, who is the first woman of colour to be the president of Victorian Women Lawyers.

I’d love to tell you about my lived experience of gendered violence, what intersectionality looks like for women like me, and why it should matter to everyone, including the Prime Minister of Australia. Perhaps I could do this at Parliament House, in a private meeting with you, where we can discuss what happened to me, and others, alongside tangible outcomes for safer workplaces, homes, and communities for women.

I want to be part of the solution for a safer Australia. Because women like me shouldn’t be left behind. I would like a seat at the Prime Minister’s table, preferably next to him, with my friends, colleagues, business, and union leaders, in the context of this NATIONAL EMERGENCY, alongside other state and territory leaders.

I want you to hear what I have experienced. I also want your public commitment to support me and women like me for our bravery in speaking up – the same way you did for Brittany. Because we do experience backlash – a lot of it. This time though, I’d like to still be there, helping you draft the policy and legislative framework for what change could look like. A survivor seat at the table.

I’d love to explain how ensuring intersectional gender equity targets can close the gender pay gap and improve safety outcomes at work and at home, dismantling the system of power and control that keeps women trapped in abuse due to financial dependence. Women that could have been me in Brisbane.

I’d also love to address how addressing recruitment, retention, and promotion of women is an important safety control that will reduce harmful behaviour risks for all workers. We already have similar measures in Victoria; for example, the Victorian government’s Building Equality Policy and requirement for Gender Equality Action Plans in construction.

A reply to my email is no longer necessary if you’ve missed it. It’s OK – I know you’ve been busy. But let’s not miss this window of time.

I now want action and an important and life-changing opportunity to speak with the Prime Minister of Australia about how we can work together to make this country safer for women like me. You worked with Brittany, and listened to her; please hear, work with, and listen to me.

In the same way that workplace leaders and officers consult with their workers and discuss their experiences of safety risks, as well as work together to implement appropriate controls, I think that perhaps the Prime Minister of Australia could do the same. Consider me a part of your Better Outcomes for Women’s Safety Committee – sounds a bit like Build a Better Future or Change the Rules – this change will build a better future for Australia by changing the rules, which I think Sally McManus, my former boss, might be on board with. Can you get on board, too?

Most Australian states and territories have laws in place specifically regulating psychological safety in the workplace. But these laws do not go far enough because they do not provide businesses with any clarity on what they need to do to avoid being prosecuted. That is contained in guidelines and codes of practice.

But given the urgency, I don’t think the women of Australia can be protected by mere guidelines or codes of practice; do you?

Because if businesses and public administration are going to be prosecuted for breaching their safety duties due to failure to manage harmful behaviour hazards, perhaps they need clear regulations to understand the control factors that need to be implemented to prevent harmful behaviour at work – we already have this for high-risk industries like construction, mining, manufacturing, and warehousing.

So, if there’s a risk of serious harm or death (which there is for harmful behaviour hazards) – the industry needs clarity on what’s required to comply with their legal obligations (including the state and federal government), particularly following Jessica Wilby’s suicide due to harmful behaviour risks, following which Court Services Victoria was fined approximately $400,000

We need legislative change.

And here’s why.

Why intersectional equity targets reduce gendered violence risks and save lives

As a survivor turned senior workplace lawyer, I am uniquely qualified to write to you about this issue.

My experience with gendered violence led me to pursue a career in law and fuelled my creation of a national psychosocial risk management framework empowering workplaces to tackle gendered violence by focusing on primary prevention.

That is, addressing power imbalances along gendered lines.

We know that from a safety and Respect@Work perspective, power imbalances at work drive women’s experiences of gendered violence and make us less likely to report. This is true from both a workplace perspective and a team perspective.

When there are hardly any women in leadership, the workplace and the team are less safe. The same is true for people from minority groups, which is why, in my case in Queensland, as a young woman of a culturally diverse background, I was in a high-risk category to experience gendered violence.

The Safe Work Australia Managing Psychosocial Hazards at Work Code of Practice 2022 expressly states: “As power imbalances and inequality increase the risk of gendered and sexual harassment, [it’s important to] consider implementing policies and strategies to address gender inequality, lack of diversity and power imbalances at the workplace”.

Addressing men’s violence and reducing the number of women murdered in Australia requires us to focus on primary prevention, and that is, addressing power imbalances at work.

Workplaces are the engine room in the fight to end men’s violence. We don’t get to secondary prevention (behavioural change programs and Respect@Work training) until we first address the things that are killing us: structural inequality.

The Australian Human Rights Commission’s Guidelines for Complying With The New Positive Duty under the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth) expressly recognises that “gender inequality, power imbalances, entitlement and exclusion, as well as a lack of accountability provide the underlying conditions for sexual harassment, sex-based harassment and other forms of sex discrimination to thrive”.

The way to improve outcomes for women is to legislate for intersectional gender equity targets for all leadership roles as an important safety control. The Workplace Gender Equality Agency recognises that “setting gender targets, and establishing a plan to meet them, is an effective way to improve gender equality at work because it focuses on continuous improvement, increasing and embedding accountability and measuring performance”.

As you know, the Australian Labor Party already has these targets in place for gender equity, and it has somewhat improved representation of women; so, this shouldn’t be too hard to do, particularly given our peak anti-discrimination bodies and safety bodies already recognise it’s important. The problem with these targets is that they are not intersectional, which is why women and people of colour (like Wesa Chau) are locked out of the Senate or relegated to unwinnable seats.

Standard 2 of the Respect@Work Standards recognises that we need to pay attention to gender and diversity balance in recruitment and promotion. This must be seen as a safety issue because we’re more likely to act if it’s seen as important for safety reasons. We have had the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth) in place for almost 40 years, but women continue to be under-represented in leadership roles, and the outcomes are worse for people of colour.

Women On Boards’ report, Truth Be Told, Cultural Diversity on Australian Boards, shows that only 12.8 per cent of board members are non-Anglo Celtic, despite more than 50 per cent of Australia’s population being either born overseas or being first-generation Australians.

To me, this does not equitably reflect the multicultural workforces these boards represent.

Shifting the national conversation to focus on addressing workplace power imbalances: primary prevention

Last year, I was in Canberra to present at the Kindness in Law Forum at Old Parliament House, coordinated by Perpetua Kish, alongside others like Sheetal Deo, who also speaks a lot about this issue.

Like any proud lawyer, I paid a visit to our Australian Federal Parliament.

Mr Albanese, there was not a single portrait of a woman of colour on the wall of prime ministers, and only one female Prime Minister’s portrait on the wall, Julia Gillard AC, who, only years earlier, warned that women should expect daily rape threats in public life. If Julia could not be safe, Brittany could not be safe. What hope did I have in Brisbane?

The context of this is not lost on me – the structural barriers to speaking up in 2017, as a young woman of colour living in Queensland, exacerbated the impacts of the violence I experienced. Only a year earlier, in 2016, I was a federal campaign coordinator for the Australian Council of Trade Unions in Longman, campaigning for access to domestic violence leave as part of the Build a Better Future Campaign, delivering a significant victory in Longman.

Domestic violence leave is now included in the National Employment Standards. Yet, 12 months after campaigning for this legislative change, I found myself needing to access it myself. Paid domestic violence leave is an important achievement of the Albanese Labor government, but much more needs to be done.

Prime Minister, what our country needs is intersectional gender equity targets in leadership roles being legislated as a safety control at the federal and state levels to improve safety outcomes for women at work and at home.

Speaking out was difficult for me. It cost me my home, my friends, my community, and my job. The fallout felt worse than the violence itself. But the cost of silence is death.

My work improving outcomes has already been recognised with several listings and awards, including Australasian Lawyers’ Best Young Lawyers in Australia Under 35 (2024), winner of the Lawyers Weekly 30 Under 30 Award for Workplace Health & Safety (2023), and winner of the Lawyers Weekly Rising Star of the Year Award at the Women in Law Awards (2022).

I now want to make workplaces safer for 100,000-plus workers, and I want to work with you to achieve this, which I’m uniquely placed to do, given my union and private sector experience, speaking with workers and with businesses. I also speak from my lived experience.

Safer workplaces, safer homes: Psychological safety at work reduces gendered violence risks and saves lives

Workplaces hold the key to primary prevention.

We now have a good reason to act – the law requires it.

Managing psychosocial hazards is a core safety compliance obligation across Australia. Because of this, workplaces play an important role in dismantling the power imbalances that breed violence. Safety codes of practice also expressly identify that power imbalances along gendered lines and low worker diversity (e.g., where the workforce is dominated by one gender, age group, race or culture) increase the likelihood of workers being exposed to harmful behaviour.

Clearly, leaving things to chance is not changing outcomes.

The Victorian Supreme Court of Appeal decision in Austin Health v Tsikos [2023] VSCA 82 now expressly recognises, at law, the role that unconscious bias plays in determining pay outcomes for women. Unintentional or unconscious bias is a form of direct discrimination. In the Tsikos case, key factors that suggested that Christina Tsikos had been discriminated against because of her sex included structural inequality and unconscious bias impacting her pay outcomes.

The Tsikos case recognises that experiences of backlash often deter women from negotiating as hard as men and that even if they do negotiate, they are less likely to win the same outcomes as men because they are generally rated as less competent and less desirable as bosses, co-workers, and subordinates. Unconscious bias has obvious impacts on unbalanced power dynamics at work, undermining psychological safety.

Workplaces are the allies we need to end gendered violence and stop women from being murdered

When women have equal opportunities to succeed at work, everyone wins. Greater access to leadership positions and flexible work empower women to achieve economic equality as well as afford us the opportunity to contribute our valuable skills and knowledge at a decision-making level. When women are locked out of leadership roles, and flexibility isn’t supported, they become financially dependent and trapped in abusive situations.

The gender pay gap isn’t just about equal pay for equal work. It’s about the significant difference between what chief executives (often men) earn and what administrators (often women) earn. When we close the gender pay gap by promoting more women into leadership roles, we unlock the full potential of our workforce. This has safety implications at home.

Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety (ANROWS) January 2022 Report found that there is strong evidence of the link between economic insecurity and intimate partner violence. Women with higher levels of financial stress are much more likely to experience physical and sexual violence or emotionally abusive, harassing and controlling behaviours.

Economic disparity in relationships is also associated with a higher likelihood of intimate partner violence.

Of course, it is also harder for women to leave abusive relationships if they don’t earn enough to leave, if leaving means they can’t take care of their children, if their businesses are not funded, or if, because they’ve experienced inequality their whole lives, they don’t have enough money to retire on later in life.

By fostering gender equality at work, women have the resources they need to make crucial decisions on their safety – and their children’s safety – paving the way for a future where women can thrive, leading to stronger families, safer communities, and a more prosperous Australia. It’s also about funding women-led businesses because structural inequality gets us there, too!

Let’s discuss what we can do to improve safety outcomes for women

Workplaces have always had the power to be proactive champions for safety. Now is the time to harness that power.

Mr Prime Minister, I ask that the agenda for our meeting includes legislative amendments requiring intersectional gender equity targets for all leadership roles, while addressing recruitment, retention, and promotion of women because it’s an important action as primary prevention and an important safety control to prevent women being murdered.

I invite Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus to attend, considering his call for all men to step up.

Please also feel free to invite peak employer bodies and unions along, too. They all have a part to play.

I have some friends and colleagues I would like to bring along with me as well. We represent the industry and the very intersectional groups I am writing to you about.

You see, a lot of my work in this space, and a lot of my thoughts, suggestions and ideas, could have been helpful for me in Brisbane. So either at or before the National Strike on 20 May 2024, like you did with Brittany, I’d like you to stand alongside me, say you think I am brave for writing this letter, publicly support me for speaking up, and, in the spirit of Standard 1 of the Respect@Work Standards – Leadership - say, in your own words, something along the lines of:

“The Albanese Labor government is committed to stopping women being murdered in Australia. We are committed to primary prevention, which is why we will be making regulatory amendments to occupational health and safety laws, including intersectional gender equity targets as an important safety control to prevent gendered violence. These reforms will be survivor-led and trauma-informed, shaped by employer bodies and unions working together”.

Happy to help you write this speech – or a version of it, alongside input from survivors, business, and union leaders. A lot of the workplace leaders I work with already do the things I’m asking for in this letter, which is what has inspired me to make this request. It’s also why I’d like to bring them along to the meeting.

To quote a chief people officer I know, “Whilst we’re discussing gendered violence, we should also discuss bullying. It never starts with people being bashed. It starts slowly and then builds into something worse.” So, I’d like to bring others I know into the conversation, too.

Every woman deserves to be taken seriously, including me. I hope that – unlike my initial email to you – this invitation is one you will not feel comfortable ignoring.

Legislative change is important – let’s get it done, together – may it be survivor-led and trauma-informed, with the Prime Minister of Australia, Anthony Albanese, leading from the front, like you did with Brittany.

Thank you in advance, Prime Minister. I look forward to meeting with you. You can reach me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., noting that you already have my personal email address. I look forward to hearing from you, preferably before 5pm on 9 May 2024, if possible, so I know whether the meeting is something you’re open to ahead of the National Strike.

Kind regards

Sapphire Parsons

Note: I would also like to publicly thank Lawyers Weekly’s editor, Jerome Doraisamy, and senior journalist, Naomi Neilson, who have played an important role in amplifying marginalised voices like mine. Thank you also to Sarah-Elke Kraal for your help with the letter.

Sapphire Parsons is a senior workplace lawyer. In 2023, she was the winner of the Lawyers Weekly 30 Under 30 Award for Workplace Health & Safety, and in 2022, she was the winner of the Rising Star of the Year Award at the 2022 Women in Law Awards.