The 41,000 urgent priorities our new anti-slavery commissioner has to tackle

This opinion piece by Human Rights Commissioner Lorraine Finlay was published in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Most people would be surprised to learn that slavery still occurs in Australia today. Not only does it still exist, but large numbers of people are affected by it.

The Global Slavery Index 2023 estimated that there were 50 million people around the world living in modern slavery on any given day, with 41,000 of them living in Australia.

For context, that is enough people to fill the stands of the Gabba in Brisbane to capacity – all experiencing a range of serious exploitative practices such as human trafficking, forced labour, child labour and forced marriage.

Everyone deserves to live free from harm and exploitation. And all Australians would surely agree that no level of modern slavery can ever be acceptable.

That is why the appointment of Chris Evans to be Australia’s first anti-slavery commissioner is a welcome step.

Australia has long been at the forefront of the global efforts to eradicate modern slavery. In 2018, we were the second country in the world to introduce national laws to tackle the issue. And earlier this year, we were one of just 33 nations to be ranked as a Tier One country in the US Department of State’s 2024 Trafficking in Persons Report, which recognises us as among the world’s very best in our efforts to eliminate human trafficking.

There are, however, concerning signs that Australia is starting to fall behind, and there is much more that still needs to be done.

The 2022 Supply Chain Law Scorecard, which is compiled by the International Justice and Human Rights Clinic at the University of British Columbia, compares supply chain laws from jurisdictions across Europe, North America and Oceania. In this, Australia’s modern slavery laws ranked last. We were judged to have weaker laws than countries including Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany and the state of California in the United States.

These legal cracks are exposing people to exploitation and harm: women trapped in forced marriages without adequate supports to help them safely escape; domestic workers vulnerable to exploitation because they work behind closed doors; international students trying to support themselves in an unfamiliar country; backpackers and temporary migrant workers – often seeking opportunities in regional and rural areas – working in the agricultural, horticulture and meat processing industries and at risk of forced labour, deceptive recruitment and, in extreme cases, sexual servitude and human trafficking.

This reflects the findings of the 2023 McMillan Review into Australia’s modern slavery laws, which found that there was “no hard evidence” that the Modern Slavery Act 2018 “has yet caused meaningful change for people living in conditions of modern slavery” in Australia, and clearly showed that more needs to be done.

The McMillan Review was a comprehensive statutory review of the first three years of the operation of the Act. It identified key weaknesses in the existing laws, and made 30 recommendations for change. These included lowering the revenue threshold for modern slavery reporting (from $100 million to $50 million), introducing penalties for non-compliance, requiring reporting entities to have a due diligence system for responding to modern slavery risks, and introducing a high-risk declaration procedure.

While there have been some positive steps taken since the McMillan Review, it has been over 500 days since it was tabled in parliament, and we still have yet to see a formal response from the federal government to its recommendations. If introduced, these recommendations would make a real difference in the lives of those 41,000 people experiencing modern slavery in Australia, and in reducing risks long-term.

While the appointment of a national anti-slavery commissioner is a welcome step in the right direction, the government needs to act on all of these recommendations with a much greater sense of urgency than we have seen to date.

Everybody in Australia deserves to have a fair go to live a dignified life. Nobody in Australia should be forced to live in modern slavery.

Lorraine Finlay is Australia’s Human Rights Commissioner.