Australia's Modern Slavery Act, heralded in 2019 as a game-changing first step, was limited, as first steps always are. The first three-yearly review, provided for in the act, will be with the government shortly. It's an opportunity to put things right.
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The act requires large Australian businesses to report on the risks of modern slavery in their supply chains and the actions they are taking to assess and address those risks.
Some business produce as little as a page. Others produce reports with chapters. But all the act requires is reporting.
The law prevents nothing, including the use of goods produced using forced labour in China's Xinjiang region.
A bill introduced in 2020 by Senator Rex Patrick to ban the import of goods produced using forced labor in Xinjiang proved unsuccessful.
That same year the Australian Strategic Policy Institute released a report that identified 82 companies - many major foreign brands - with suspected links to forced labor in Xinjiang. Building on evidence collected by the New York Times, Center for Strategic and International Studies and US Congressional Executive Commission on China, the report highlighted that some of these companies are known to export products to Australia, including clothing, electronics, and solar panels.
This month ABC's Foreign Correspondent reported on crime syndicates in Cambodia that detain cyber scammers in complexes surrounded by barbed wire, forcing them to work 15-hour days extorting money from people on the other side of the word.
Modern slavery encompasses human trafficking, servitude (where workers are not free to stop working or leave their place of work and sometimes have their passports taken) forced marriage, debt bondage, and the serious exploitation of children and child labour.
While Australian companies are required to ask questions of their suppliers, they are not required to inquire further if those suppliers assure them everything is alright.
Global supply chains typically involve multiple tiers or levels of suppliers, with each tier consisting of different subcontractors who contribute to the production process.
Many Australians are unlikely to know that while a T-shirt may be made of Australian-grown cotton, the cotton may well have been ginned and spun in Vietnam, then woven in Tamil Nadu in India, then likely exported to China and made into a T-shirt there before being sold by a retailer back in Australia. The label will tell you very little.
Fast fashion, involving unreasonable timeframes, is one huge driver of modern slavery, and part of a system that generates excessive carbon miles.
In its submission to the review, the advocacy group Be Slavery Free asks for a tougher act that requires Australian businesses to ask more questions.
It also wants penalties for non-compliance, negligence, or falsifying reporting.
And it wants a ban on importing high-risk products from countries and regions identified by an Australian Anti-Slavery Commissioner as being at high-risk of modern slavery.
Should companies want to import from these regions they would need to provide evidence that had asked the right questions and would in some cases need to be able to prove the goods were not made with modern slavery.
People harmed by modern slavery would be able to seek damages from Australian companies in Australian courts and take advantage of a national compensation scheme.
NSW has an anti-slavery commissioner to monitor compliance with its Modern Slavery Act.
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In the ACT, a member of the Legislative Assembly is drafting a private member's bill to address modern-day slavery in the territory and the government's own supply chains, a move very much championed by local churches.
Extending the Commonwealth Act and introducing an ACT act are measures worthy of support. But in the meantime, in the leadup to Easter, there's something small all of us can do. That's to buy chocolate from good suppliers.
A coalition of non-for-profit organisations working with Macquarie University, the Open University and the University of Wollongong is about to release an updated chocolate scorecard that names the best brands whose practices do the least damage.
It will grade them on the traceability of their supply chains, whether their suppliers pay living incomes, and their exposure to child and forced labour, as well as their involvement in deforestation and use of agrochemicals. It's only fitting that a festival all about new life and reconciliation should see more of us thinking about what we eat to celebrate the season.
- Toni Hassan is an adjunct research fellow with the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture, Charles Sturt University, based in Canberra.
