Latest Australian Measures on Modern Slavery: Good Grief, Charlie Brown
The Australian Government has announced a few new measures aiming to improve Australian performance on modern slavery. Sadly, it amounts to dreadfully misguided and wasteful spending. Here is my 2 cents worth:
1. Grants for community-level awareness. Good grief, Charlie Brown. Time and again over several decades awareness-raising on this subject is proved definitively to only raise the awareness of those already aware. Gazilions have been spent globally on this the last 20+ years with the most minimal movement of the needle. A guaranteed waste of scarce taxpayer money.
2. Government contract clauses. It is always a good idea to include public procurement as a tool in the toolkit. But this only works if those managing the tenders have the time, means, and expertise to assess and make judgements on tenderer claims. If not, it invites social washing. Tenderers know they really just have to say they are cognisant (copy/paste from annual reports and CSR statements) to get the tick in the box; no real data required. Because they know evaluation of their claims is difficult, unverifiable, and inexpert. This action does not amount to a hill of beans as to meaningful, measurable change. We will know the impact of this measure only in a few years when we see (if the outcomes are made public, which is itself highly unlikely - bold prediction the list will not be made public) how many companies have failed or been excluded from contracts on this point. "Commercial Harm" will be the ex use for not piblishknh. But, trick question: if there is no commercial harm from not complying, is this whole approach even valid? My further bold prediction is zero in the next three years. Let's see! Hope to be wrong.
3. Making a video on the risk of modern slavery in the cleaning industry for the cleaning industry. Wow. Just wow. See (1) above. Raising awareness in an industry that already well knows they have a modern slavery problem is not genius-level spending. Anyone in the cleaning industry not already aware is a knucklehead and not going to care anyway.
Do better, Australia, much much better. At the risk of being called hyper-critical, this is the most dull, pedestrian, ill-informed, and outmoded thinking. You do know that a prerequisite for inciting change is to be serious, right?
#ModernSlavery #AwarenessRaising #PublicProcurement
