Daily Archives: November 28, 2021

In December of 1944, on the Philippine island of Leyte, the soldiers of F Company of the 128th Infantry Regiment, 32nd Division, dug in. Stationed just outside the town of Limon, they were attempting to take a strategic ridge overlooking the town. In the face of fierce Japanese resistance, it was all they could do to hold their position. A first lieutenant who was also a Lutheran pastor addressed the company and gave words of encouragement by means of a brief sermon. God guides the US Armys bullets toward the Japanese, the lieutenant assured his fellow soldiers, while protecting us from theirs. Books in Review

These words failed to lift the spirits of at least one young soldier in F Company; instead, they infuriated him. Years later, he described this incident as one of the experiences that best explained why he eventually abandoned his faith. Whatever Gods will actually was, he decided, it would have to accord with the most basic ideas of justice that we havethereby ruling out the lieutenants assertion that God had selective concerns for one side in a clearly godless war. What else could the will of an all-just God be? By that same token, what else could justice be? If absolutely nothing else, any true God would have to be fair.

Katrina Forresters In the Shadow of Justice provides a detailed account of the intellectual development of this young soldier, John Rawls, who eventually became the celebrated philosopher. The question of fairness would remain with Rawls for the rest of his life. In 1971, his 600-page magnum opus, A Theory of Justice, debuted to critical acclaim and cemented his position as one of the most famous political philosophers in the English-speaking world by insisting that justice was fairnessthat the kind of objective standards for human society and individual action capable of replacing God required an ability to view the world from a distance and assess what allocations of duties and wealth were fair. In the book, Rawls argued that basic liberties and the equality of citizens were essential to this idea of fairness. Societies could deviate from an equal distribution of benefits and burdens only in cases governed by the difference principlewhich includes a requirement that inequalities should provide the most benefits to the least advantaged. Otherwise, a just society would have to be governed by the fair distribution of responsibility, work, hardship, and the wealth produced by a communitya distribution whose fairness, he insisted, could be determined from behind a veil of ignorance that prevented a hypothetical person from knowing exactly where he or she would end up in the social hierarchy.

With its doctrine of fairness, A Theory of Justice transformed political philosophy. The English historian Peter Laslett had described the field as dead in 1956; with Rawlss book that changed almost overnight. Now philosophers were arguing about the nature of Rawlsian principles and their implicationsand for that matter were once again interested in matters of political and economic justice. Rawlss terms became lingua franca: Many considered how his arguments, focused mostly on domestic or national issues of justice, might be applied to questions of international justice as well. Others sought to extend his theorys set of political principles, while still others probed the limits of Rawlss epistemology and the narrowness of his focus on individuals. A decade after A Theory of Justice appeared, Forrester notes, 2,512 books and articles had been published engaging with its central claims.

Rawlss liberal theory of justice as fairness has continued to define the shape and trajectory of political philosophy and liberalism writ large to this day. In this sense, In the Shadow of Justice is aptly named. But as Forrester shows, the limits of Rawlss theory and the political philosophy that it helped birth remain with us as well. By redirecting us from both history and sociology and premising justice on abstract game theory, Rawlss book and its liberal vision of justice ended up promoting a political philosophy that was ill-equipped for the era of sustained academic and popular attention to historical injustice.

Rawls was born in 1921 in Baltimore, the second of five sons in an affluent Episcopalian family. He had a privileged and mostly happy childhood; the kinds of calamities and hardships suffered by many during the Depression were sharply attenuated by his familys wealth and status in the city. After attending private schools, Rawls quickly rose through some of the most prestigious universities in the world: He received his doctorate from Princeton and studied at Oxford, after which he taught at MIT and Harvard.

Yet Forrester reminds us that not everything was as rosy as it might seem on the surface. Two of Rawlss siblings died in childhood from diseases they had contracted from him; such tragedies likely influenced his later interest in questions of fairness and luck and how both formed the basis of a just political system. His native Baltimore was a deeply segregated city and had cultivated social norms and mores to match. (Rawls later recounted his mothers fury when she learned that he had struck up a friendship with a Black boy and had even visited his house.) But Rawls knew from an early age that the luck of being born into an affluent white family entirely explained the difference between his opportunities and those of his Black friend. As well, Rawlss graduate studies at Princeton were interrupted by the trauma and violence of his three years in the infantry in the Pacific theater during World War II, and his experiences with luck during the war likewise shaped his view of justice. At one point, he was passed over for a mission because he had the right blood type to donate to a wounded soldier; the man who went in his place was killed in an ambush. This was only one of the countless examples of bad luck and unfairness found in any warbut in particular in the wars that had become commonplace in the first half of the 20th century. When Rawls returned to Princeton, his wartime trauma and disillusionment led him to abandon his interest in theology and to turn instead to political philosophy in his search for a system that would ground political decision-making in an objective morality rather than in God or fealty to the state. Current Issue

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Rawlss highly abstract and intricate philosophical system was not a flight from the real worlds effects on him, Forrester argues, but rather a direct response to the harrowing experiences, personal and political, that had shaped much of the first three decades of his life. Rawls was trying to find something to stand in place of the God that had abandoned him and his enemies alike on the battlefield as well as the two siblings who had died when he was growing upbut it also had to be something that did not involve simply trusting in the state. Neither the God he had lost faith in nor the military he had served in could be fair, Rawls contendedbut perhaps, if we relied on the kinds of rules that could emerge from rational decision-making processes, society could be.

Forresters book next turns to the real-world politics of the 1950s and 60s, which made Rawlss pursuit of a tidy, fairness-preserving system of justice so difficult. The postwar years were an era of social upheaval, defined by the struggles against Jim Crow at home and the Vietnam War abroad, and to develop his system in these uncertain years, Rawls began to publish a series of essays reckoning with the times that would eventually become A Theory of Justice.

Rawls advanced his view of justice as fairness in these years, but with certain qualifications. A fair and just society, he argued, would be one with a basic structure of democracy: The societys major institutions would endow everyone with a fundamental set of political liberties and divide the benefits and burdens of social cooperation in a broadly egalitarian way. Social inequalities could be tolerated only if they met two conditions: They needed to be attached to offices open to all under the conditions of fair and equal opportunity, and they needed to work to the greatest benefit of the societys least advantaged members.

Rawlss view of justice as fairness would apply in a society free of racial segregation. But since he was convinced that Jim Crow was so clearly unjust, he addressed it only indirectly: The philosophical questions he regarded as worth asking were exclusively implementation ones about how to dismantle it. At the same time, for Rawls, the questions concerning Vietnam and the draft in particular were harder to engage. In one sense, being conscripted into the military was a matter of luck, as some young men received draft cards and others did not. But college men, predominantly from privileged class and racial backgrounds, were able to escape military service when other men could not: 2-S deferments exempted some university students from conscription. If distributive justice was at the center of Rawlss overall theory of justice, then he had to reckon with how the deferments that many of his students received gave them an unfair advantage at the expense of othersand this meant not only pondering his political arguments in the abstract but also in terms of the institution where he actually worked. To remedy this situation, Rawls helped organize Harvards faculty to oppose the deferments.

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The civil disobedience tactics that various youth movements used to challenge the war posed another problem for Rawlss theory of justice. His own and his contemporaries commitment to liberalism and its attendant values, such as stability and the rule of law, needed to reckon with the fact that civil disobedience was a response to an unjust war that the countrys citizens had every right to protest and oppose. Could breaking the law be justified, Rawls wondered, if the law itself was conceptualized as a fair agreementthe outcome of a process of rational deliberation among the people subject to it? How could political philosophers account for the kind of moral exception being claimed by those breaking from this overall cooperative scheme to conduct sit-ins or burn their draft cards?

Rawls finally published his answer at the end of the 1960s. Civil disobedience could be justified as an occasional escape hatch, he maintained in a 1969 essay, when the majority overreached and placed too heavy a burden on others. But individual conscience could not reign supreme: Even if would-be protesters had a serious moral objection to some decisions of the majority, this was not enough to justify breaking the law, as it would result in an unstable scheme of society. In coming to this view, Rawls made a telling shift from his earlier fair play view of social cooperation, in which obligations were voluntarily acquired, to a stronger one that regarded stability as a natural duty binding all citizens within a society. Thus, civil disobedience could be tolerated, but only within strict limits. Such protest had to be aimed at changing a societys laws, and its participants had to accept punishment and arrest without resistance.

Rawlss evolving views on obligation and civil disobedience, Forrester notes, helped shape A Theory of Justice. In general, Rawls believed that the aim of political philosophy was to find a reliable method built on noncoercive procedures to justify ethical beliefs and judgmentsand that included acting according to ones political duty (such as military service) and also according to ones moral conscience (such as opposing an unjust war). Rather than try to generate freestanding moral principles to guide human conduct, Rawls argued, or uncover hidden truths that were separate from life as it was actually lived, philosophers needed to study the ethical principles already implicit in peoples intuitions and actions and then develop a system through which these could be judged and assessed.

Mining the nascent field of game theory, Rawls contended that this system could be built on the rational procedures that follow from someone acting in their economic and material interests. To decipher a moral approach to real-world problems required a system that could, in effect, step outside the real worldone that was bound not by history or sociology but by human rationality alone. Rawls described a hypothetical procedure, conducted from behind a veil of ignorance about ones status in society, for deciding on its basic rules. Heads of households, he argued, should be placed in an original position that allowed them general facts about psychology and economic life but denied them information about the past history of their society as well as where they would themselves end up in the society they were designing. This disinterested position, Rawls argued, would allow these heads of households to formulate rules that would benefit people in a range of social positions, since they would have no clue which one they might fall into, and these rules would then form the basis for a fair and well-ordered society.

Of the many things that Rawls proposed in his 600-page opus, the original position is among the most hotly debated and sharply criticized. It is indeed a move that prominently displays many of the shortcomings of his approach to philosophy. Populating the original position with heads of households involved a seemingly uncritical nod toward patriarchal social relations, and the related organization of family life drew serious and sustained criticism from feminist political philosophers like Susan Muller Okin and Iris Marion Young. Philosophers attentive to race and colonialism, like Charles Mills, likewise criticized the original positions abstraction from the history of society, which Mills argued would serve to obscure issues like racism and other forms of injustice that a theory of justice ought to respond to directly.

While many of these criticisms have teeth, they also demonstrate the profound success of Rawlss thought. The Harvard philosopher Tommie Shelby noted as much in his high-profile debate with Mills: While the latter offered strident objections to Rawlss racial amnesia, he stopped short of providing alternative principles or procedures or suggesting that the liberalism undergirding so much of Rawlss thought should be fully abandoned. And while Mills would later offer his own principles of corrective justice, they were explicitly presented as additions and revisions to Rawlss set. Whether this effort succeeds or not, it was literally proposed on Rawlss terms.

If anything, Mills was ahead of many of Rawlss critics in having a comprehensive and positive position on what constitutes a just society. While there were examples of alternative systems of distributive justiceespecially from the so-called communitariansmost of the writing on the subject was dedicated to critiquing Rawlss system and offering suggestions on what to avoid when theorizing on such questions in the future, whether the objection was to the patterns of abstraction (heads of households instead of past injustice), or to abstracting too much or too freely (e.g., criticisms of ideal theory and of systematic moral philosophy), or even to the purported objectivity or universalism undergirding the abstractions in the first place. But proffered alternatives to the Rawlsian approach were few and far between, and their authors often found it difficult to match the scale and systematic nature of A Theory of Justice, tending instead to offer ad hoc, incomplete, and overly specific moral systems instead of all-encompassing ones.

Forrester tracks in exacting detail the responses that Rawlss elaborate system of thought prompted. But if theres a criticism to be made about her book, it is that this meticulous tracking of key figures and concepts risks overwhelming readers with unnecessary detail. At times, Forrester seems to take the challenges posed by the historical moment more seriously than the subjects of her investigations did. As a result, the abundance of detail about how Rawls and his contemporaries did change their political commitments in response to their times can risk obscuring the fact that they mostly did not. Indeed, they were often selective about which of the many philosophical questions posed by their tumultuous times they deigned to answer, and it is this selective conscience that is the most assailable aspect of Rawlss legacy. He may have been speaking on laudable principle when he insisted that Jim Crow was obviously unjust, but in the same breath he also excluded it from philosophical discussion.

Rawlss leadership in the faculty opposition to 2-S deferments marked another principled stand against the consequences disproportionately suffered by others because of race, class, or perceived mental ability. But even here, selective conscience ruled the day. The decades of the Cold War were punctuated by intense levels of violence. The Vietnam War killed 2 million Vietnamese civilians, injured over 5 million more, and displaced some 11 million people. This violence included known massacres like the infamous My Lai incident and untold numbers of unknown ones; as recently as 2001, the results of internal war-crimes investigations lay rotting and forgotten in a nondescript case of records in the National Archives. And yet the body count for this war piled up largely outside the United Statesand thus mostly outside the sphere of domestic justice that Rawls was willing to consider at the time. The barbarity and injustice of the war itself went neglected in his discussions of military conscription and its opponents.

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So too did the violent footprint of the American empire as a whole. Vietnam, after all, was but one theater in a hot war waged by the United States and its allies for control of the global economic and political system. In Indonesia, for instance, nearly 1 million civilians were murdered by a US-backed anti-communist dictatorship. Indonesia was simply one of 22 third world countries in which the United States facilitated mass murder between the end of World War II and the 1990sat which point, Forrester observes, international politics finally attracted Rawlss consideration. Throughout the period of the Vietnam War, liberation movements confronted US-supported apartheid regimes in wars of national liberation: in Mozambique, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, and South Africa. What differentiated Vietnam from these struggles? I can hazard a guess: their lack of major deployments of US troops, and thus a link for a domestically focused philosopher like Rawls to consider.

To his credit, Rawls was a vocal and public opponent of the Vietnam War from the beginning. But amid all the global carnage, it was the draft deferments that he chose to organize against. The primacy of domestic justice and the natural duty of social stability directed his political action toward fighting the unjust distribution of draft cards in the United States rather than the unjust distribution of napalm and Agent Orange in Southeast Asia. One would be on principled grounds to insist, contra Rawlss own theory and pattern of political action, that addressing the latter injustice ought to have far outweighed addressing the former. Such an approach might acknowledgeas a younger and perhaps wiser Rawls had clearly been willing to dothat neither God nor justice should care whether you were American or Vietnamese.

Rawlss selective concentration on the homeland has parallels in the basic tenets of his political theory. He developed what has been called a two-tiered approach: Domestic politics constituted one tier and international politics the other, with the former taking precedence. Meanwhile, waves of national liberation struggles in Africa and Asia upended the map of the world. Through it all, the Cold War stamped the domestic politics of these new nations and the old ones alike with the indelible mark of geopolitical maneuvering. Rawlss theory gave so much primacy to domestic justice that Forrester describes him as having set aside the international realm altogether until the 1990s.

Despite Rawlss relative inattention to supposedly secondary global matters, prominent philosophers in the 1970s began to bring his insights to bear on the international realm. The fit was odd and unwieldy: Rawlss theory makes the basic structure the target of domestic justice, which he takes to be the institutions that primarily distribute the benefits and burdens of social cooperation.

Under the highly theoretical conditions of A Theory of Justice (including a society that is closed to external intervention), the basic structure can reasonably be assumed to refer to a given country. But in the context of an international system, the central Rawlsian assumption of a closed society does not apply. The United Nations debated a New International Economic Orderone predicated on economic sovereignty for every countryunder pressure from many of its new member-states. The most dynamic political movements of the time were attempting to literally remake the world, and Rawls and his colleagues were content merely to add the occasional epicycle to their existing theories of ideally just practice.

None of this is to say that they were politically unserious or responding cynically to the events of their day. In Rawlss case especially, the point is exactly the opposite: At the end of the day, he was genuinely committed to the project of liberal philosophy as he understood it. As such, he was also committed to the fundamental intellectual tenets that sustained it: trust in liberal political principles and in the basic common-sense arguments of the state system that had spread them (even though he was less interested in the historical particulars of how that spreading was done).

As a serious and committed liberal, Rawls did not position his theory as a response to the many radical tendencies of his day, because he was convinced that his position, like liberalism itself, already represented an adequate response. These challenges were, in the main, the same radical challenges that liberalism has faced since its inception. That inception did not take place in a hypothetical state of nature but rather in a real era of slave states and imperial conquest on a planetary scale, and it was these forces that spread its putatively universalist tenets around the world as it developed ever more incisive criticisms of injustice and inequality. That liberal vision had long been wedded to theories of property and popular sovereignty formed in response far more to imagined histories of political and economic inheritance than to the actual history that explained the distributions of income, rights, and privileges that liberalism and liberals promised to equitably manage. By every indication, Rawls really meant what he said about equality, fairness, and justice in his personal and intellectual life, though he came to a partial and selective understanding of what those things required of him and the structures around him.

Of course, things could be worse. Many of liberalisms cousins to its political right could not manage to sustain even a pretense of interest in equality and justice for all. Perhaps this lack of even a pretense is what irked the young Rawls as he listened to that first lieutenant insist that God was on their sideand their side alonein their deadly struggle with the Japanese. Whats so godly, after all, about a selective conscience?

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John Rawls and Liberalism's Selective Conscience - The Nation

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Liberal Party members are running in the upcoming council elections as independents and under the banner of community tickets, with no mention on their websites or promotional material that they hold Liberal Party membership.

The NSW Liberal Party does not endorse candidates in some council areas, including North Sydney, Kiama and Shoalhaven.

Local Liberals who wish to run for office in those councils are not allowed, under Liberal Party rules and the NSW Electoral Act, to use Liberal Party branding, even if they openly identify as Liberals.

Elle Prevost, a first-time candidate who is running as an independent for North Sydney council, said she was a proud Liberal party member.

North Sydney candidate Elle Prevost.Credit:ellefornorthsydney.com

I am a Liberal, but we are not endorsed in the North Sydney area, she said. Maybe its me being naive, but because I am not endorsed by the Liberal Party, my understanding is Im an independent.

Ms Prevosts ticket is called Team Elle. Its website announces her as an Independent for North Sydney council and her Liberal Party membership is not mentioned. The membership is disclosed in Ms Prevosts candidate nomination form, filed under a subheading in a PDF document on the NSW Electoral Commission website.

This is a really Liberal area, so I should be screaming it from the rooftops because it would win me more votes, she said.

Retired naval officer Mark Croxford is a member of the executive of the NSW Liberal Party, and a Liberal Party member. But his connection to the Liberal Party is not mentioned on the promotional materials for his run at the Kiama council in the upcoming elections on December 4.

Mark Croxford is standing for election in the Kiama LGA elections.Credit:Janie Barrett

Mr Croxford is at the top of the Your Community Candidates ticket, which pledges to form a council free from party political agendas. The groups website urges voters not to risk a council influenced by party politics and says that party politics has no place in local government.

Mr Croxfords bio on the Your Community Candidates website lists his background as a lobbyist and a senior ministerial adviser in the Howard government, but not his position as a country representative on the NSW Liberal Party executive, or his party membership.

The membership is declared on his nomination form on the Electoral Commission website.

I hide in the open, Mr Croxford said. I am in the Liberal Party for the purpose of federal and state politics. I personally dont believe there is any room for party politics in local politics.

He said he always discloses his Liberal Party roots when he is speaking to constituents.

I am happy to say I am a Liberal member but as a councillor I want to be a representative of my community, he said.

The Declaration of Independents Local Government, created by the Voices of North Sydney group, has been signed by 56 candidates in the Lane Cove, North Sydney, Willoughby, Hunters Hill and Georges River councils.

Rod Simpson, the co-convener of the Voices of North Sydney group, says the intention of the declaration is to get some transparency into local government.

Its asking people what their political status is and whether they have been [a member of a political party] in the past and whether they have made political donations or been a staffer, says Mr Simpson, who is a former environment commissioner with the Greater Sydney Commission.

Its really hard for people to untangle this and we are just trying to bring it up to the surface and make it easy for people to see what on earth is going on.

The Declarations stated intention is to differentiate community-minded independents from independents who are affiliated with political parties. A community minded independent is defined as a candidate who is not currently a member of a political party, and will vote as an individual.

At the Shoalhaven Council, Serena Copley is billed as an independent on the ballot form, but the NSW Electoral Commission records show she is also a Liberal Party member.

Serena Copley is a candidate for Shoalhaven City Council.Credit:Facebook/Serena Copley for Shoalhaven City Council

The same goes for the other candidates on her ticket, Fred Campbell, Leonard White and Francoise Sikora.

Ms Copleys team is called A Fresh Approach and does not mention any connection with the Liberal Party in its promotional materials.

Council candidates Fred Campbell OAM and Leonard White.Credit:Facebook/Serena Copley for Shoalhaven City Council

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In response to questions from The Sydney Morning Herald, Ms Copley said she had been a member of the Shoalhaven community for more than 30 years.

They know me and what I stand for, she said. I am running as an independent so I can represent my community and only my community, not any party or their agenda.

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Liberal Party members running as independents, community candidates in local elections - The Sydney Morning Herald

The site is bounded by busy roads and opposite the Waverley Bus Depot, which in the past has been speculated as a target for property development.

Ms Glass said the apartment towers would destroy a local heritage area and overshadow Oxford Street, creating wind tunnels like the ones further east on the street.

Ms Glass also criticised the planning process under which changes were made to local planning rules to accommodate the development.

The state government in 2019 approved an increase in maximum height and floor space ratio controls for the site to support urban renewal, a Planning Department spokesman said.

More than 570,000 new homes have been approved in NSW in the past decade, with 194,000 more homes planned for delivery by 2026.

Planning alone cant solve housing affordability, but were driving the biggest reforms to the planning system in decades to unlock more housing supply, the spokesman said.

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Waverley Liberal councillor Angela Burrill said the apartment towers were an overdevelopment and would breach height limits, which were more than doubled to 36 metres over the opposition of residents and the council.

The site is in a high traffic area and can only increase congestion already experienced locally, she said.

Cr Burrill said a huge amount of apartments had been built in Waverley Council in the past five years, meeting housing targets so there was no need for the overdevelopment of this site.

Certainly residents voices, impacts on congestion and density as well as heritage should factor into decisions on increasing heights that allow these large apartment blocks, she said.

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Waverley Labor councillor Paula Masselos said overdevelopment, affordable housing and population growth were major concerns for voters who will elect a new council on December 4.

She said the proposal showed a total lack of concern about its negative impacts on the community and stress it places on already overtaxed infrastructure.

Feeder schools have already said they are full and cannot take any more students, while Oxford Street is already gridlocked, she said.

Cr Masselos said the apartment towers would also undo efforts by local mayors to protect Centennial Park from the impact of private developments.

This building is visible from the centre of the park, which goes against the charter of the park that promotes views of the sky to the horizon not high-rise buildings, she said.

But Mr Leis said the project did not directly impact on any neighbouring residents or encroach on the heritage area or Centennial Park.

Mr Leis said Bondi Junction was an established town centre with good public transport links, access to park and beaches as well as shops, schools and medical services.

The site was presented to us by a local agent who highlighted the merits of the location for residential housing and held the view that this end of Oxford Street was also in need of some revitalisation, he said.

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No need for overdevelopment: Labor, Liberal councillors united in opposition to apartment towers - The Sydney Morning Herald

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Harassment and bullying are on the rise in the public service. The number of recorded complaints made by federal public servants has increased in recent years, from 422 in 2018/19 to 588 in 2020/21. And the number of recorded complaints of sexual harassment more than doubled from 32 in 2019/20 to 78 in 2020/21. "There is no doubt that more work is also required to improve the reporting culture around harassment and bullying," the latest State of the Service report says. The report, tabled in federal parliament on Monday, says a refreshed gender equality strategy is set to be released soon, strengthening ways to prevent and respond to gender-based harassment and discrimination, sexual harassment, sexual assault, and bullying. Unacceptable behaviours, such as harassment or bullying, were not tolerated in the Australian Public Service and contrary to its values and code of conduct, the report noted. "The APS monitors and actively works to eliminate incidents of these negative acts." The proportion of people experiencing harassment or bullying had fallen from 17.2 per cent in 2015 to 11.7 per cent in 2021. But the most common types of harassment or bullying have remained the same: verbal abuse, interference with work tasks such as undermining or sabotage, and inappropriate and unfair application of work policies or rules Australia's response to the COVID-19 pandemic has seen public service workforce numbers rise. The report showed there were 153,945 employees in the Australian Public Service - up 2.3 per cent on June 2020. Public Service Commissioner Peter Woolcott described it as a "modest" rise. "This was a rise in both ongoing and non-ongoing roles to assist the government's recovery plan, providing essential services and supporting the roll out of the 2021 Census," he said. Mr Woolcott said while there were more women, Indigenous people and non-English speakers joining the public service, there was more work to be done on increasing the representation of people with disability. "People from non-English speaking backgrounds, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employees and public servants with a disability also still remain under represented at the most senior levels. "For the first time women in the APS have reached, and in most cases exceeded, parity with men at every level up to and including the collective (executive) cohort." Women comprise 60.2 per cent of the public service. Australian Associated Press

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November 29 2021 - 12:46PM

Harassment and bullying are on the rise in the public service.

The number of recorded complaints made by federal public servants has increased in recent years, from 422 in 2018/19 to 588 in 2020/21.

And the number of recorded complaints of sexual harassment more than doubled from 32 in 2019/20 to 78 in 2020/21.

"There is no doubt that more work is also required to improve the reporting culture around harassment and bullying," the latest State of the Service report says.

The report, tabled in federal parliament on Monday, says a refreshed gender equality strategy is set to be released soon, strengthening ways to prevent and respond to gender-based harassment and discrimination, sexual harassment, sexual assault, and bullying.

Unacceptable behaviours, such as harassment or bullying, were not tolerated in the Australian Public Service and contrary to its values and code of conduct, the report noted.

"The APS monitors and actively works to eliminate incidents of these negative acts."

The proportion of people experiencing harassment or bullying had fallen from 17.2 per cent in 2015 to 11.7 per cent in 2021.

But the most common types of harassment or bullying have remained the same: verbal abuse, interference with work tasks such as undermining or sabotage, and inappropriate and unfair application of work policies or rules

Australia's response to the COVID-19 pandemic has seen public service workforce numbers rise.

The report showed there were 153,945 employees in the Australian Public Service - up 2.3 per cent on June 2020.

Public Service Commissioner Peter Woolcott described it as a "modest" rise.

"This was a rise in both ongoing and non-ongoing roles to assist the government's recovery plan, providing essential services and supporting the roll out of the 2021 Census," he said.

Mr Woolcott said while there were more women, Indigenous people and non-English speakers joining the public service, there was more work to be done on increasing the representation of people with disability.

"People from non-English speaking backgrounds, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employees and public servants with a disability also still remain under represented at the most senior levels.

"For the first time women in the APS have reached, and in most cases exceeded, parity with men at every level up to and including the collective (executive) cohort."

Women comprise 60.2 per cent of the public service.

Australian Associated Press

Link:

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Belgian teenager Theo Hayez was ejected from a Byron Bay bar without a chance to tell his friends the night he disappeared two years ago. An inquest into the 18-year-old's disappearance has heard the ejection has caused his family great distress. Theo was near the end of a backpacking trip around Australia when he went missing on the night of May 31, 2019. His remains have never been found, nor have his phone or clothes. A hat he was wearing was found in bushland on the route he walked after being kicked out of the Cheeky Monkey's bar. Counsel assisting the inquest, Kellie Edwards, told the NSW Coroners Court in Byron Bay that police's working theory is he tried to climb cliffs at Cosy Corner beach, fell and was swept out to sea. However, the coronial investigation has found no evidence he was reckless, engaged in dangerous physical activity, or was particularly interested in alcohol or drugs. Although his phone hasn't been recovered, it continued to send a weak signal until the next afternoon. He was close with his family, had good, close relationships with friends and was looking forward to starting the next phase of his life when he returned home, an engineering degree. There is "no evidence at all" to suggest he would kill himself, Ms Edwards said. Theo had consumed some cheap "goon" wine at his hostel with fellow backpackers before heading out to Cheeky Monkey's about 9pm. While there, he had two schooners of beer. CCTV footage shown to the court showed the occasional stumble, but the evidence he was actually intoxicated was "ambiguous", Ms Edwards said. The backpackers he was at the bar with only learned he'd been ejected by security around 11pm during the police investigation. They were confused when they learned about it, Ms Edwards said. "Theo didn't seem drunk and others in the bar seemed much more drunk," they told investigators, Ms Edwards said. He only had contact details for one of the people he was with. Theo's ejection on his own, without any chance to tell his friends, had caused his family great distress, she said. His family, some of whom have flown in from Belgium, are sitting in the courtroom observing the proceedings. Google account data shows Theo searched for directions back to his hostel after his ejection. However, he walked in the opposite direction to Tallow Beach. The last data point put him at Cosy Corner. He appears to have turned off his location services just after midnight to save battery. The last messages sent to his friends and family were lighthearted and in French, suggesting he had his phone on him and that he felt safe, Ms Edwards said. The last message was sent to his stepsister Emma at 12.55am. The inquest into his disappearance is expected to run for two weeks. Lifeline 13 11 14 beyondblue 1300 22 4636 Australian Associated Press

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November 29 2021 - 12:46PM

Belgian teenager Theo Hayez was ejected from a Byron Bay bar without a chance to tell his friends the night he disappeared two years ago.

An inquest into the 18-year-old's disappearance has heard the ejection has caused his family great distress.

Theo was near the end of a backpacking trip around Australia when he went missing on the night of May 31, 2019.

His remains have never been found, nor have his phone or clothes.

A hat he was wearing was found in bushland on the route he walked after being kicked out of the Cheeky Monkey's bar.

Counsel assisting the inquest, Kellie Edwards, told the NSW Coroners Court in Byron Bay that police's working theory is he tried to climb cliffs at Cosy Corner beach, fell and was swept out to sea.

However, the coronial investigation has found no evidence he was reckless, engaged in dangerous physical activity, or was particularly interested in alcohol or drugs.

Although his phone hasn't been recovered, it continued to send a weak signal until the next afternoon.

He was close with his family, had good, close relationships with friends and was looking forward to starting the next phase of his life when he returned home, an engineering degree.

There is "no evidence at all" to suggest he would kill himself, Ms Edwards said.

Theo had consumed some cheap "goon" wine at his hostel with fellow backpackers before heading out to Cheeky Monkey's about 9pm.

While there, he had two schooners of beer.

CCTV footage shown to the court showed the occasional stumble, but the evidence he was actually intoxicated was "ambiguous", Ms Edwards said.

The backpackers he was at the bar with only learned he'd been ejected by security around 11pm during the police investigation.

They were confused when they learned about it, Ms Edwards said.

"Theo didn't seem drunk and others in the bar seemed much more drunk," they told investigators, Ms Edwards said.

He only had contact details for one of the people he was with.

Theo's ejection on his own, without any chance to tell his friends, had caused his family great distress, she said.

His family, some of whom have flown in from Belgium, are sitting in the courtroom observing the proceedings.

Google account data shows Theo searched for directions back to his hostel after his ejection.

However, he walked in the opposite direction to Tallow Beach.

The last data point put him at Cosy Corner. He appears to have turned off his location services just after midnight to save battery.

The last messages sent to his friends and family were lighthearted and in French, suggesting he had his phone on him and that he felt safe, Ms Edwards said.

The last message was sent to his stepsister Emma at 12.55am.

The inquest into his disappearance is expected to run for two weeks.

Australian Associated Press

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