Dialogue with The Commisioner for Mature Age Discrimination, Susan Ryan

Hello Susan

My name is Christine Kent.  I have been working, with the support of a few local politicians, to put together a practical alternative to the current system for mature age workers who find themselves surplus to requirements.

My idea is a ground level support and work creation scheme that will, in all probability, find most of its participants successfully and gainfully employed in work that respectfully engages their full suite of skills, abilities and desires.

I would like the opportunity to talk this program through with you personally and establish what support you and/or your office are able to offer at a practical level to get such a ground level scheme implemented.

I have attached the table of contents and the executive summary of a document that is “under development”. If you, or a senior member of your policy team, would be interested in discussing the practical details of this document, I can send the full version prior to that conversation.

Could you please reply to this email with an appointment time to discuss the document (or with a clear statement that you are not interested at this time).

Please forgive my request for clear and unambiguous communication, but one of the things I am doing is logging who will talk to me, what they are willing and/or able to do, and how long the process takes. The level of support those of us with workable practical initiatives are able to solicit through formal channels informs the entire debate on how best to deal with the rampant discrimination against mature age workers.


THIS WAS FOLLOWED BY A PHONE CALL FROM DIMITY HODGE. This led to Dimity sending me one link to a hub in Sydney that has no relationship to anything I am proposing, and a link to an article on why employers should employ mature age workers. I decided to email again to see if I could get any support to further my idea.



Thanks for this Dimity.

In summary of our phone conversation yesterday, I think the upshot of that conversation was that your office can provide no guidance or support to help me further my proposal for an action plan that will redress the entire mature age worker problem from ground level.

In other words, I think you effectively said, “go away, you are on your own”, without actually saying that.

In case I misunderstood, let me summarise my perceptions and see if there is some way in which you can support me.

I have seen and read many reports from both Susan Ryan’s office and COTA, and whilst they seem to be excellent documents that replace the need for me to do any primary research myself, there does not seem to be any pathway from rhetoric to action.

My proposal is an action plan, and my need at this point is to find any avenues to get my ideas reviewed and, if practicable, trialled. As yet I have found no access point to government policy or bureaucratic implementation and so have found no practical support for a grass roots initiative from any official tax payer funded individuals or bodies.

However, you did ask what help I wanted from you and my response was a bit indecisive, as I do not know what you CAN offer. So, in hindsight, here are some ideas for ways your office could help:

• Offer to read the entire plan and assign someone to work with me on it to improve it.
• Once you have reviewed the plan and ensured it meets with your approval, assign someone to find out how ideas like this make it into government policy and implementation – if you do not already know. 
• Once you have identified pathways for implementation, provide an introduction to the relevant politicians and bureaucrats who are in a position to do something with the plan
• Short of supporting the plan yourself, provide me with details of political or bureaucratic contacts I can approach myself.
• Suggest pathways that other groups experiencing discrimination have found to be successful. (Bear in mind that there is no group yet for any individual to join including myself, so I am currently “the group”.)

I acknowledge that supporting grass roots practical initiatives from a group experiencing high level discrimination might be beyond the mandate of the Human Rights Commission.

If this is the case, can you put, clearly and unambiguously in writing, that it is beyond your mandate to either support grass roots initiatives or provide details of other individuals or organisations who may be able to support grass roots initiatives (if there are any).

I am seeing a lot of people and talking to a lot of people, and they are all referring me off to someone else who they think might be able to help. I am documenting this process and hopefully, by the end of it, I will know who really is able to help and who simply does not have support of ground level initiatives as part of their mandate.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Reply from Dimity Hodge

Hello again, Dimity

I thought you might like to see this section that I have added to my proposal for a mature age think tank network. The first sentence was already in my proposal (which includes a range of projects through which we can change community attitudes.) However, I have added the rest since our conversation.

All conversations, no matter how seemingly fruitless on the surface, increase my own personal level of understanding of the problem we are facing as a demographic.

                                                                                                                 

Changing community attitudes

We need a community re-education program that shows a full spectrum of older characters in a positive light, with richly complex personalities, living life as fully as any other demographic.

However, this re-education program cannot be done for the under-employed mature age worker, by those who are not in this demographic.

The Australian Human Rights Commission makes this statement on their website:

“At the Australian Human Rights Commission, we are tackling the fundamental societal attitudes that underlie age discrimination. We also want to focus on policies and laws that prevent older people working, even when they can find jobs. One example of this is Working Past our 60s.  http://www.humanrights.gov.au/working-past-our-60s.”

Whilst we need to ensure that there are no legal barriers to mature age employment, the example of feminism has shown that changing laws does not change attitudes. There is little evidence at this point that attitudes are improving towards mature age workers. On the contrary, they appear to have been deteriorating for at least 25 years.

However, there is no reason why community attitudes should change while this demographic is regarded as incapable of addressing its own needs to the extent that it must be represented by the privileged; those who have made it through the glass ceiling and who do have community respect for that reason.

A white person cannot win respect for an aboriginal, a man cannot win respect for a woman, a privileged member of society, no matter what age, cannot win respect for a mature age worker experiencing workplace discrimination.

Community attitudes must be changed from ground level up, and the only people who can earn respect for their own demographic are those within it. Think-tanks and working groups of mature age underemployed workers that achieve great outcomes once they work together, are one, and potentially the only, mechanism through which community attitudes to mature age workers can genuinely be changed.

                                                                                                                

I do think you (and, as you are acting as her “gatekeeper”, Susan Ryan) could have shown just a little more interest in listening to the ideas for solutions for exactly the problem you are attempting to address, presented by a member of the demographic you purport to represent. I can understand that you need to protect yourselves from complaints, but I do not accept that you need to protect yourselves from potential solutions.

I have experienced your response (your unwillingness to discuss my proposal with me, your unwillingness to even provide contact names, your cut and paste from your website in reply,) as dismissive and discriminatory against myself personally and by default, against the mature age worker demographic.

If the Age Discrimination Commissioner will not respect input from members of the demographic she is supposed to be representing, who will?

Reply from Dimity Hodge