Workers' Rights, Public Procurement and Parliamentary Power Dressing, with Dr Sarah Kaine

0:00For me, fashion is a verb. So it's too fashion. You're listening to Wardrobe Crisis with Clare Press. Join me every week as we look at sustainability, ethics and the business and madness of fashion. Hello again. Oops. How did it happen that I waited this long to publish the next episode of this series on workers' rights? Oh dear. Regular listeners will no doubt have thought that it was finished. Actually, someone emailed me today and said, loved your series, well done. It's not finished. There are three episodes to go, including a very important conversation with Professor Surya Dever, who is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to development, and a jaw-dropping finale with James Muldoon, who is the co-author of a book called Feeding the Machine, all about the hidden human workforce behind AI.

0:54I just you wait. That is, oh my God, that one is incredible. But yes, I haven't finished. Stuff happens. Sorry. The joys of being a one woman show. Although I will just say that I'm recording this quite late into the evening before I go to Melbourne, where my short film about the art of craft pleating is premiering at Melbourne Fashion Week. So I'm excited and proud. Anyway, we are back with the rest of this series on workers' rights and a fab interview with one of my favourite guests. She is Dr Sarah Kane from the government. Sarah is a state MP here in Sydney, a member for the New South Wales Legislative Council and she's, well, she's a passionate advocate for workers' rights.

1:40Broadly her background's in academia but also in unions but she's also really big on ethical fashion and bringing that discussion into Parliament. She's the bomb, Sarah. That'll be very clear when you listen to this. Thank goodness we've got people like her as elected representatives. She's just a woman of great integrity and empathy. She knows loads of stuff, but she's also super fun. And it doesn't matter where you live. I think you'll find Sarah's insights very inspiring and broad. Because this is a conversation about why fashion is not frivolous, how to dress as a woman in politics, how parliaments broach dress codes and how that's changed over time what else we talk about Margaret Thatcher oh dear we also of course talk about workers rights and why organized labor is so important we talk about legislation and also what the other levers are for governments influencing fashion supply chains namely procurement and I know there's a lot of discussion going on about this in the UK right now.

2:45Last but not least, we touch on the outrageous current news story in Australia, but I think relevant elsewhere too, around the corporate capture of public universities and the exorbitant salaries paid to vice chancellors and external consultants while teaching staff are under pressure. Okay, let's get to it. Do let me know what you make of this episode and as always if you can help by sharing it I'm very very grateful. If you listen in Apple podcasts please do consider leaving me a review and if you want to support the show hop on over to Wardrobe Crisis on Substack. All right without further ado let's hang out with DSK Dr.

3:27Sarah Kane. Rolling. Okay. Welcome to the Wardrobe Crisis podcast Dr. Sarah Kane. Thank you for having me. I like to call you DSK. I love that. I will take that. Because I do because of AOC. Yeah, I know, and I love that. You're my AOC. I will just say formally, you are a Labour state MP here in Sydney, a member of the New South Wales Legislative Council and chair of the Standing Committee on Social Issues. We know each other because you get involved in ethical fashion stuff. We've done a few events together. We have. We've actually done one in here. Yes. We did a wonderful event for Seamless, which is Australia's national clothing product stewardship scheme.

4:07Yes. We had a fashion show. We did. I think it was the first time that we managed to commandeer the lobby of New South Wales Parliament House to hold a fashion show. And there were some, you know, challenges, including the ringing of division bells. You ran away. I literally ran down a runway. You ran down the catwalk. You did have an excellent outfit on. What were you wearing? I was wearing a vintage, when I say vintage, secondhand, dress that I had got like at a kilo type sale in a vintage place in Marrickville with a jacket that I had bought at a sort of a thrift antique store in Braidwood, which is a tiny town in the south of New South Wales.

4:47Your thrifted game is high but also your re-wear game because we were together at this gala dinner for Charitable Recycling Australia. Yes. And it was like fancy. and you were wearing what i was wearing a dress that i had bought and it was vintage at the time i had bought in 1993 yes yes in a small town a small shop that doesn't exist now in berry in new south wales i got married in berry oh it's a beautiful place but so it was old at the time and you've had it for like 30 years i've had it for that long and i thought i'm going to try and squeeze into it and i squeezed into it and thought i'll wear this again i raised this we are going to talk about some serious some serious topics and it's funny actually that I'm starting some slightly frivolous fashion moments even though we're in this very serious place where are we recording we're recording in my office in Macquarie Street at the State Parliament of New South Wales and there are some sort of frivolous things and I think it's fair to say that they're slightly more fun than labour rights so I wanted to say that New South Wales Parliament's fashion game is quite strong we did this event for seamless which had a full-on second-hand runway running through the lobby it was amazing there's also a loud shirt day in the new south wales parliament i believe they do have several days do you know what it's for no it's something to do with hearing raising awareness for here the hearing impaired yes talking about how your clothes can speak i love that and last october you ran a clothing swap here it's my second clothing swap here so in the lovely heritage jubilee room downstairs it's kind of a really interesting juxtaposition of the you know the fancy library walls and then the racks of secondhand clothes does everyone do it no it was well lots of people were willing to bring in clothes but it's kind of teaching people what it's about like it's because there was a kind of a reticence to come and take clothes there was lots of enthusiasm to donate but i didn't realize that i could then come and take clothes and i I didn't ask anyone to pay.

6:47So it was kind of that was an education process. Now it's actually about the exchange as well as just the giving, the giving of things. It's also you can come and see what suits you. And so people got some good pickups, but it took a bit of time to get them, you know, understand. I love it. Actually, I recorded a podcast episode just showing off here in the UK House of Lords. It was 2018, episode 53, if listeners want to go back and listen, and it was with Baroness Lola Young, also about human rights. but we did before we got into that very weighty topic discuss the crazy pomp and ceremonial dress that still goes on in there i mean the guy who comes to let you in downstairs i've forgotten what his name is but they wear like frilly socks with their crazy jeweled buckle shoes and like knickerbockers i was surprised to discover that it happened here until 1955 the new south wales parliament's usher's uniform consisted of a frock coat with a frilly white lace handmade irish crocheted jabbit I've seen a picture of it there you go I don't know the lower house they still have like I have no idea what it's called Claire but like the black coat-y thing with the white kind of collared yeah the frills it's not it's not as frilly yeah it's not lacy but it's certainly it's a thing it's a ceremonial thing it's it speaks of power though doesn't it and there is something about often when not us obviously people charge fashion as being somehow frivolous they forget that for centuries for I'm gonna say millennia think about the pharaohs it has been a signifier of status absolutely and it it can represent power absolutely and if you think of I have two close colleagues who are barristers and when they wig up all the wigs um and cloak up it's it's like who are these people I you know do I need to genuflect what's the story yeah and we still do that I hadn't thought of that of course and when we're talking about law it's about this I want to say, because originally that's what it was for, it was about denoting who was in charge but also intimidating those who weren't.

8:41Like this is serious stuff. Listen, pay attention. And also you see it in here. It's not formal but you see people displaying power through what they choose to wear. And it could be the power to show that they're an individual. I'm not going to conform. I'm going to wear something that's a bit different. Or you get some extreme corporate kind of dressing up to display, I'm going to be taken seriously. I'm very businesslike. It's a fashion show every day of a different type where people are expressing that. Do you feel as a woman in parliament any pressure to look serious? I have sometimes felt that I should become more businesslike and then I go, really, that's not me.

9:23I don't think I'm going to be doing that. But because I have probably a slightly different take on workwear than others, but I have felt a process of, oh maybe I should just get the corporate suit and rock that um this is off on a tangent and we'll get back to the serious stuff but I do remember very clearly when I was given a promotion at Marie Claire it was a long time ago and for some reason why I was I went there to have my first meeting with a lot of sort of upstairs men from the I don't know what some corporate suits from the sales team and I was standing in the lift with the my formidable boss Jackie Frank and I to myself in the mirror and went oh no and I had a I've got long blonde hair I still had then a side plait I look like a school girl and then I was wearing a sort of nipped in blazer that was ginger and smart which made me feel like serious but then I had this appallingly flippy little skirt on and I looked like school girl and I was like no what I wanted to be taken seriously why am I dressed like this did I do it by mistake on purpose to sort of disprove a point so anyway what you wear does matter but how we make it matters more we're going to get onto the serious questions I'll just hit you with this one sure all right to go from that to this why is organized labor so important in protecting the right to dignity and fairness at work and we're going to get into this but you've got this background in trade unions and in organizing and you believe in it Why?

10:51Because when there is any situation where there's an imbalance of power anywhere, it's almost impossible for an individual to affect change. And it can happen, but mostly it requires collective thought, collective action, collective commitment. And you see that very starkly at the workplace where the power imbalance is just it's inherent and without people getting together with each other it's a really big ask it's a really big ask for people to stand up for themselves when their livelihood is at stake and so having the the safety of other people with you it's not just it might be the right thing to do it might be fair it might be just that you want to fight for a cause but doing it on your own your chances of success are really slim when you put it like that it seems so obvious in a way just think about it going to your boss and saying i demand this or that or i feel that i've been victimized in this or that way it's obviously intimidating and it's and imagine then if you translate that to a garment factory whether it's here or on the other side of the world where you probably have no dialogue with that boss and then you're expected to go there and fight for your rights on your own, you're not going to do it.

12:09Or if you do, maybe it's not going to work. It's certainly intimidating. It is. And I've seen this in my work across the union movement with different workers. It's intimidating for any worker. I've worked with academics and professors find it intimidating and say, I don't want to do it. I'm scared. And these are people who are equipped with all the tools you would imagine. Then you'd say, okay, well, what about a worker who maybe doesn't speak The language maybe doesn't have other labour market options. How could it be expected that they would be able to have the tools to effectively counter the arguments and the pressure from a boss?

12:42All right, so broadly what might stand in the way of unionisation, if we can listen to what you just said there and think, well, it makes sense to work together for collective action. How did we get to this dominant narrative that unions are somehow obsolete? Do you agree with that? I feel like, I don't know, we certainly know that fewer people across the board I've got stats from Australia, joining unions, membership is declining. But also I feel like in the kind of dominant narrative discourse, there's this idea that you're troublemakers, unions are annoying, maybe they're corrupt as well, that's another side.

13:17But how did we get to a place where, I don't know, unions aren't the first choice for the majority? I think there's been a range of factors that have contributed to this. some are economic some are political and some are social so economically from sort of the heyday of union membership sort of 70s 1980s we have seen a massive restructuring of the global economy where we you know we have globalized I'm not going to say in an unprecedented way we've always had a global economy but we've globalized in a different way which has taken industries which were traditionally very well organised and offshored them, which has meant that those areas of collective power no longer exist, for example, in Australia.

14:03And that's been around the developed world. It's not the same in other countries. So that's one part of it. You know what, that's actually quite a chilling thought, isn't it? Because what it really is, is there's nothing left to organise. Exactly. So if you think about the Thatcher-Ragan era of neoliberalism, which was about saying this long agreed sort of informal agreement that you had the bosses and you had the workers and they would both speak for themselves and there would be negotiation. That was then purposefully eroded by this agenda pushed in the UK by Thatcher and in the US by Reagan and then spread across the world which was that corporate power beats that and we're going to try very hard to suppress you if you unions.

14:41That's 100 % the case and that's really that intersection between the economic and political. So political ideology and policy pushed that sort of economic restructure. And we had the same in Australia. We had it a little later and we had an organisation called the HR Nickel Society, which was a conservative think tank, if you like, driven by right-wing Labour lawyers who ran cases to bust unions. I've never heard of this. Yeah. So HR Nickel Society, Bob Holt called them the, I think he called them something like the lunatic fringe of industrial relations in Australia because they were following to the extreme that neoliberal view of individualism, break unions, following that sort of Thatcher-Reagan model.

15:21Okay, but what are some of the other things that might stand in the way of unionisation? Well, the other part of it is I think parallel to those changes, those economic and political changes, we also have seen a social change where lots of collective institutions have seen a decline. So volunteer organisations, organised religion, the types of places that have other sort of collective emphasis also have seen a decline. And I mean, again, I'm not going to blame everything on Margaret Thatcher, but I mean, she did say there is no such thing as society. So it kind of exemplifies this idea that we're all individuals.

15:56Do you know what? I'm reading this excellent book, which I mentioned in a podcast that I just recorded yesterday with Professor Surya Deva, but it's Yanis Varasakis, Another Tomorrow. and literally yesterday I was reading the page where they mention an interview that Margaret Thatcher famously gave to Women's Own magazine where she said, she was asked, what is society? And she said, who is society? There is no such thing as society. What she was saying was she wants it all to be about the individual. Yeah, absolutely. And that's actually to me, I mean, obviously it depends what your worldview is.

16:25Yeah. Everyone's welcome to have their own worldview. Of course. But for me, that's just so sad. like I think that individualism and the myth that we can I don't know we're only responsible for ourselves and then we can rise up and beat everyone else is it what's wrong with everything I've got to say I agree and uh you know just on another aside um I'll you know I'll agree with Yanis Varoufakis who was my first year economics lecturer no way I'm obsessed with him was he that's my brush tell us tell us uh who he is and what he did just briefly in case people want to look up so janice farrakas when i was at sydney uni in the early 90s studying economics i mean he was teaching economics 101 but of course when we were green we didn't know what you know where his politics were except you do afterwards so politics 101 with a janice spin on it now i realize uh so it suited me down to the ground i've got to say but he's a greek australian yes he's also been a minister in the greek government yes and the first book that i recently read of his which is actually old but it's terrific it's called conversations with my daughter about the economy and it is skinny and eloquent and he wrote it for his daughter so you could share it with your kids or just read it if you want to understand what economics is which i did yeah bloody good all right fine we digress so back to this what here are the stats that i've got from the australian bureau of statistics trade union membership declined since 1992 between 92 and 2024 the proportion of employees who were trade union members fell from 40 % to 13 % and it's worse with young people slightly improved the older you get.

18:06Yeah it's been a huge decline over those decades. It's interesting though because it's like any aggregate data it doesn't really tell the story in that there are some industries that are extremely well unionized and I think it again reflects the changes in the economy. So we don't have the same manufacturing base we used to. We have a lot of service industries. We've had the growth of the gig economy. These types of jobs are extremely hard to organize. It's extremely hard to get people together, literally. Because of the way they're structured in order to isolate you, or if you prefer a different spin on it, maybe you think, no, it's wonderful.

18:45It's about freedom. It's about flexibility. What do you think Sarah? You might have just seen me pull a slight face. Flexibility with regards to the workplace I always have a little issue with because flexibility has so often meant flexibility for organisations and employers not flexibility for workers and it tends to be one of those ones where it's dressed up as an opportunity for the workforce to be extremely flexible by not having a set wage. But it's also the flexibility to not pay you holiday pay. Exactly it's very flexible flexible for you not to have sick leave yes so I did flexibility is one that I kind of you know visibly flinch when I hear how did you get into this era were you raised by trade unionist parents where do your ethics come from you mentioned that you studied economics how does it all link you worked in academia talk about your background and why you care about this area so I do my father was is a union person so you would say we were a labour family but my mother wasn't she was more a sort of catholic social justice you should do the right thing you should be a good person you should look after others you should see what you can contribute so they kind of joined forces and I guess we didn't really stand a chance in terms of our politics with that how many do you have brothers and sisters?

20:09I do. I have both of my siblings, my sister's just about to join, start working for a union for the first time and my brother also works for a union. All right, fine. Yeah. So there's a background of this. Yes. So I started with working for a union back in 1993 when I was at university. Oh, did you? Yeah. So I went and did an economics degree, not ever wanting to go into economics or, you know, sort of the corporate world, but thinking if I don't know how this works, I won't know how to counter it I need to understand sort of the basic principles that are always I guess used to explain things if I'm to be any used to anyone trying to make change so that's so interesting yeah I'd love to say oh that's why I did politics but I don't think I was that far advanced in my thinking I did politics university I think I just did it because I thought it was interesting but I didn't think as as deeply about it yeah that's why I stopped you there because now I can see that that is such a good tactic.

21:04If you don't understand the system, how on earth can you try to counter it? Yeah, no, that's exactly the case. As a cute kid, Sarah? Well, I don't know, maybe brainwashed, you know, as we've just heard. So an opportunity came up to work. The union movement brought in a program to recruit young people to go work for them back when I was at university. And so I went and joined them through a program, which I think is still going called Organising Works. And so I met people who are still in the union movement today. There's a bit of an alumni network of us, I guess, and started working for a union then.

21:35So that was a blue-collar male-dominated union called the Australian Workers' Union with whom I have a very close relationship now still. So I did that for some years. The academic thing came after I had kids, went and did a PhD, became an academic. Oh, you went back? Yeah, I went back. And did it in what? Industrial Relations. So I worked for unions, worked in the movement, married a unionist. uh you really like unions yeah I really like unions what can I tell you I mean there's a theme here isn't there um and had two babies quite quickly and didn't feel that that was compatible with two people very much engaged in union work and so went back and did a PhD when the kids were small fashion break yes because sort of sustainability break could you please tell us about the tablescapes for your wedding oh sure sure can i just say in true modern um modern podcast style that's for my second wedding i mean it's quite the so sure i am happy i'm happy i read it in saying that if we want a fashion moment for my first wedding i wore a collet dinegan dress which was uh burgundy burgundy and black oh so i just so there you go there is a fashion moment from that wedding i I just feel very Elizabeth Taylor right now.

22:52Which wedding would you like me to talk about? Number two, please. So for number two wedding, shout out to my lovely husband, we decided that we would do as much as we could. We recycled everything. So we went to all the sort of vinnies and op shops and whatever and bought all not-matching crockery and champagne glasses. I love champagne cups, so we tried to find as many of those. Oh, like the bosom of Josephine? napoleons exactly exactly whatever she would be well my husband is french so there you go so your current husband sorry my current one i don't know about my future one can i tell you well i was gonna say i don't know how many liz taylor had didn't she keep marrying the same man over and over again as well didn't you marry burton a few times i think so you could do it again all right well we'll stop the fashion break but i love that i love a personal download and we'll get back to series see how see what i'm doing here anyone who's thinking oh trade unions know things i want to have fun we're having both yes trade unions and fun lots of fun all right but so so you went back to do a phd you then spent several years as a professor at where were you i was an associate professor at utf right yeah and so my teaching teaching researching um my discipline is industrial relations and so i was very much looking at decent work uh labor standards and supply chains, the gig economy, how you can try to influence labour standards outside of labour law because a lot of, in Australia, a lot of the arguments about labour law just immediately become political and so it's either you're labour and you're for it or you're not and you're against it.

24:33It just gets a bit polarising very quickly. Isn't that the case everywhere? Maybe not. To a degree, but I think because of Australian Labor's deep connection still to the union movement, which is a very different state of the States. And I know that there's that connection in the UK, but I don't feel like it still has the same resonance that it does. Yeah, because Tony Blair followed the sort of... Tony Blair, who was sort of the UK's Clinton, the centrist left, hipster left. Do you remember all that? Anyone in the UK who is my age will remember Tony Blair's excruciating cool Britannia business, which was about sort of inviting Oasis to number 10 and trying to say that labor was really modern.

25:20It was the partner of business. It was a partner of the arts, which sounds lovely, but definitely a kind of reaction to the Thatcherite stuff, which was like, no, we're not here advocating for labor rights for the miners. We're here trying to, I don't know, cozy up to the consultants. Yeah. So less here. Okay, but why is it so important then to elevate this? Because we're actually talking about human rights, the law, this shouldn't be polarized to being purely political. It's everybody's right, universal human right to be treated with dignity and respect, to have the right to work. So do you want to comment on that?

25:56This should be above it, just like climate action should be. Yeah, I completely agree. And so I think that was what I was trying to get at in my research as well, which is these are fundamental things that go beyond or above the political. This is about, you know, whether it's okay to be safe at work, whether you do have a living wage, whether, you know, you can support a family. These are really fundamental questions that, yeah, are really above and beyond that political angle and really have nothing to do with whether you support any political party. They're just sort of about decency. it's a really difficult part of the work isn't it to try to combat this polarization from a climate perspective i just feel so sad that we've got to a place where if you're on the shall we say right or the center right i don't know you're not meant to care about climate because of the hijacking of the discussion yeah by corporate lobbyists and think tanks funded by corporations who benefit from it this is actually what you reveal if you scratch the surface there's a reason why this stuff has been politicized to the extent that it has They want you to feel that it's not your fight.

27:02Yes, exactly. And I think in just about any issue that I care about, it is a question of identifying that common thread, that common humanity in whatever it is, whether it's anti-war, whether it's making sure workers are treated okay, what is the common element, the common humanity across it all that really transcends the political? And I think about being in here and I think of my colleagues from other parties here. And honestly, I don't believe that they are bad people who don't want to do good things. I don't believe that. And I think people out in the non-political world actually don't see or understand how much we all have in common in here.

27:45That's good. I can at least see that in them and I think it's generally reciprocated. There is actually that common humanity. it just sometimes gets a bit overshadowed by the day-to-day politics. Why did you enter politics? I'm an extremely practical person. So whilst I like being an academic, writing about stuff and researching is interesting and hopefully can be helpful. But it's like, well, let's do the thing now. What is the thing that we said we should be done? Let's try and actually do it. So I think it's that drive to try and implement change as well as just encourage or suggest or think about it.

28:25So that really is the driver for me. What can I do to affect change? And I've got to say, it's not always that simple, even when you're in here, to try to implement change. May I just quickly ask about women in politics? Do you know what roughly the percentages are in this legislature? I know in our party, so we have just under half the cabinet is women, which is very, very good. In my party in the upper house, we have more women or at least equal. Obviously, we have quotas in the Labor parties, which will mean at the next election next year, we will have to have 50 % of candidates in winnable seats will have to be women.

29:09Because one of the things I personally think, but also hear from others is that, oh, entering politics is more trouble than it's worth as a woman because you just get completely slandered all the time. And I don't know, it's hard. you know it's just being a woman in politics daring to speak about these issues can be extra you get extra mudslinging you do and maybe do you no you do you do I think anyone who's going to enter politics you and particularly in an era where politics has become a less respected maybe deservedly so but then I think anyone who's going to come into it has to be prepared for it to be quite uncomfortable a lot of the time like you have to be up for that it's it's not a comfortable thing all right I just want to briefly touch on this simply because we were talking about the university sector and that's your background but also because there's quite a lot going on in the sector right now in Australia I know you showed up in a in solidarity at a recent strike action at UTS University of Technology Sydney and I mentioned that because I've got lots of friends there who work there as academics I deal with a lot of students from there and it's got one of the top 100 fashion degree courses in the world in the rankings.

30:23Can we just talk briefly about the ABC Four Corners that showed in March? It was called Campus Chaos. I watched it and I was gobsmacked. I've heard some of this stuff, read it in the news, but watching this, it's a lot. We'll share a link. You can watch it if you're in Australia. It exposed a crisis in Australian unis broadly, highlighting systemic governance failures and a$1.8 billion spend on consultants and corporatisation. And this ABC documentary found that universities are cutting courses and jobs with significant spending on external consultants instead of internal expertise. What is the New South Wales Parliament doing about that?

31:01Well, I initiated an inquiry into university governance in New South Wales with the view that I had been on university council, I'd been elected university councillor at UTS and I'd been concerned about governance in universities since then. This goes to answer to my previous questions about wanting to do stuff in here. What's not very well known is that New South Wales, if you like, owns the acts of parliament that create all of the universities in New South Wales. So we hold a lot of the levers about governance through those acts. And so I wanted to see, given that we had seen in the report in the media and I had had people coming to me saying there are situations at our universities that don't seem to accord with what should be happening in public institutions that are meant to be for the public good.

31:49And so we have been asking universities to come to our inquiry and explain why they have said that they need to cut hundreds of staff. Why are they claiming to have huge budget deficits when their own professors have assessed the books and said, we don't have to do this. and I think what's also not very well known is that universities have less accountability measures than not-for-profit organizations than corporates wow than just about any other organization I find this very disappointing because in my sort of just personal views of war who's got ethics and who hasn't I'm often like thinking oh I can't trust big corporations but then you think oh Oh, but education, that's where you could work with your ethics intact.

32:43That's where people care about what they're really there for. But in fact, what we're seeing here, and these are my words, not yours in your role, let's just make that clear, is to my mind the corporate capture of our educational institutions. I'll happily endorse those words. They can be my words. They most certainly have. And I think you're 100 % right in identifying the motivation of 99 % of people who work in education and tertiary education is because integrity they believe in it they want to contribute we have seen the corporate capture of university leadership we've seen an over-reliance on consultants we have seen a sort of corporate network used to probably be called you know yeah but boys net an old boys network it's probably less gendered than it was but still probably quite gendered if you look at how many vice chancellors are male all of those are huge issues that have to be dealt with and And just, we'll get off this because I know it's quite a niche discussion, but it does lead into the broader unionization conversation and we'll come back to fashion.

33:43But I just want to just put it out there. In case you're listening internationally and can't watch the ABC show, do check the notes for links and I'll put the information in there. But when we think about struggling academics, and I know many of you are listeners and you're paid peanuts to do important things. And when we think about student debt, like, oh my goodness, how much you have to pay to do to get an education these days. When you hear how much the vice chancellors get paid, you will flip out. It is a shocker. We're talking about nearly a million bucks a year. Come on. I mean, nearly, mostly more than, and more than, this is one shout out to the international listeners, our universities in New South Wales pay their vice chancellors on the whole more than people who run Cambridge and Oxford.

34:27What are we doing? And it's not that we don't have very good universities. We do, but they're not Cambridge and Oxford. So I think we should be asking some serious questions about executive pay in universities. All right. So when I invoked the idea of corporate capture, universities are a tragic example to my mind, but this stuff is everywhere. And what we mean by that is the influence, the power and money of big multinational corporations, Deloitte's McKinsey, could probably think of some other ones. EY. You also see it in the fossil fuel industry, for example, with government ministers then leaving their positions to work with their lobbyist friends with directly employed by fossil fuel companies.

35:11And then they might go back into government. And this happens, this sort of slippery, I'm calling it a slippery bridge between public institutions and corporations. Would you agree that we're also seeing this across the board worldwide? and what do you think it means for bringing it back to unions and workers' rights? I think we do see that in networks of power and it can be in whatever we're talking about, whether it's big corporations that command supply chains across the globe. Even in NGOs and UN stuff? It's everywhere, right? So I would just say anywhere where there's networks of power then you do tend to see this intertwining of the personal interest and sort of outcomes that you're going to get.

35:57So I would say you could probably, there's probably some really nifty AI tool that could do the network mapping for us and we would probably be horrified. And I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but to understand the connections that do exist across those networks of power. Before we get mired in too much negativity, I wanted to ask you how you would like to see the world change and what your vision is for a future, perhaps focused on the world of work? So I think with the world of work, I think a much greater recognition of the importance of autonomy, the importance of, I've heard you talk in your podcast about creativity at work.

36:41There was, of course, all of the amazing outcomes of the Whitehall Studies that were undertaken in the UK for all those years. I don't know what that is. Oh, okay, so the Whitehall Studies, and I'm trying to remember a very very famous professor who undertook these studies long-term studies of public servants in london and looked at what were the characteristics which enabled someone to flourish at work so what enabled human flourishing at work really and they were um autonomy all the things that you would expect autonomy creativity um the things that are normally absent in a entry-level job where you have no power and no agency.

37:23And what he found over all of these, I mean, it was decades long research was that actually people in positions of authority, you might think that being a CEO might be really stressful or being a high manager would be stressful. No, they're actually the least stressed in the workforce because they have the agency autonomy and control, control is the word, over their own roles the people who are most stressed are those people without those three elements um you know you're sort of entry level and you could you can transfer you're not being trusted to do to think through a problem and find the solution exactly do it well and that would transfer i mean that's in in a public service context but imagine that in a in a factory where you're doing one job repetitively where everything that might assist you to flourish as a human has been stripped away in a context where you're spending a lot of your time there so I think we could do a lot more with that that does require of course thinking about what that means for the economics of that business and that's the confronting bit why do you have a poster on your wall maybe it isn't on your wall oh you do I saw on your Instagram I can see it right now that reads well-behaved women seldom make history this was given to me by some friends of mine I think they were being a bit facetious because I think they think I'm not necessarily well behaved but also because I was brought up in a very lovely way to be very polite to be very good and you know all of the things that and I'm you know I'm not saying my parents did it deliberately but that young women are meant to be and so often that kind of unspoken conditioning of oh that's not polite or how many times can I say sorry in a conversation or I remember having a confrontation in a meeting in here and being told afterwards that I wasn't deferential enough to one of my male colleagues and I guarantee you no man in that forum has ever had that said to him so it's just a little reminder to me every time I come into the office that I may not make history at all but if there's any chance that I'm probably going to have to put aside some of those very lovely sort of etiquette considerations I love it I think take that as permission to stylishly make legal trouble all right I want to just come back to what government can do when it comes to fashion or let's talk about apparel yep uh you were part of parliament's modern slavery committee but what can the New South Wales Parliament and government do around this question of responsible production in apparel?

40:09Yeah, it's a really good question. And it is overwhelming if you try to solve the whole modern slavery question in the world and how do we get those 50 million people out of slavery? I'm not going to be able to do that. What can we do? And that was very much the key question of a procurement inquiry that I ran on behalf of the New South Wales government, which is we have a very big economic footprint. We purchase$42,$43 billion worth of goods in services each year. That's a lot of power. Does that mean it's like a big business, like it's one of the biggest businesses in Australia? Exactly, exactly.

40:41In fact, in the Southern Hemisphere. We have a lot of economic leverage. So how do we exercise that in a way that promotes better accountability, better transparency, better outcomes for workers in supply chains? And so we've looked at how we do that and made some recommendations to the government, which the government is trying to implement with regards to modern slavery due diligence. We also do have an anti-slavery commissioner in New South Wales and an act in New South Wales as well. Was it like the first one? Am I wrong? And our anti-slavery commissioner is charged largely with overseeing what happens in government procurement.

41:19So that's quite a unique arrangement. Procurement of what? Everything. That could be, that's true, it's to talk about procurement, it could be the desk that we're sitting at, the pen that we're using, the uniform that I'm wearing as a nurse as a policeman police person or a fire person so any of those and we buy a lot we do have a lot of textile clothing uniform footwear requirements and it's good for us to think about this when we talk about fashion it's just a sort of headline word but it actually means everything anything you wear everything anything and everything you wear and so we have the capacity through purchasing those to influence you know the suppliers we can put caveats on contracts.

41:59And so we are in the early stages of seeing what that looks like and how to exert that. And of course, it would be great if in the same kind of exercise, we promote local manufacturing. We've lost sovereign capabilities to a large degree, not entirely. And there is a myth that there is no local manufacturing of textiles and apparel in Australia. That's not exactly true. We've lost a lot of capability. But through our purchasing power we can foster that and the benefit of that obviously is economic but it's also we have much closer line of sight to both labor outcomes and environmental outcomes and we think of the PFAS that is in a lot of all right textiles oh and also if you think about firefighting exactly so many of the textiles are specialized that you need in government that we do need to be thinking about that that's one of the things that I'm very keen to be pushing in my next few years so what did that inquiry find and what are the recommendations and do they go far enough?

43:00Look, it found that the previous procurement system, so how we bought, how we purchased things, was too devolved to really allow for the oversight that would be required to check, particularly labour and supply chains. So what, just too long supply chains produced offshore and you got no idea? Yeah, and devolved to agency levels. So the government, the government in inverted commas, didn't really have line of sight. So not because anyone was willingly doing anything wrong, but because if you say, well, you do your little bit and you do your little bit, then everyone's chasing the cheapest price for whatever bit of the uniform they need.

43:38So it was really found that that is unhelpful. And also that we probably don't have the correct due diligence. There's a lot of ticking boxes. Of course, we comply with all labour standards. Well, do you? Where's the check on that? There actually does need to be better due diligence in that. Do people think, oh, who cares? We've got bigger things to deal with. We're thinking about the housing crisis or inflation or whatever it is. Like, is it hard to get this stuff on the agenda or is this simply the work of the parliament? You said there were scores of inquiries happening at any one time. It's a bit of both.

44:12And I see my job as, how do I describe myself, an enthusiastic backbencher as almost literally chasing ministers down corridors on the issues that I care about. So this is one that I really care about and it combines with the work that we've done on the Modern Slavery Committee on textiles in particular. And so I see my role as the chair of this committee as not just having a nice inquiry and coming up with a nice report, and it is a nice report. Did you outsource it to Deloitte? I did not. But then there's no point in having a report that just sits there. There are recommendations in there and I want them implemented.

44:48And so my role is to be, you know, a little bit troublesome and annoying as a backbencher and annoy our ministers to see how much of it we can get implemented in the time that I'm here. I wanted to end on asking you what keeps you going, but I'm going to change it and say, what would you say to little Sarah in looking back at your young self in terms of advice on how to make good trouble?

45:14Would she be proud of you? Yes, I think she'd be surprised because little Sarah was very much trying to be good Sarah, but little Sarah also from quite early wanted to do things that felt like was useful and helpful. And so I think little Sarah would be happy with that, but she might be surprised at how much trouble I let myself get into. Can you procure me a T-shirt that says DSK for president? Ethically. Ethically. I mean, that might take me some time, but I certainly will. This has been so wonderful. Thank you very much for your time, Dr. Sarah Kane. Thank you, Claire. Thank you for listening to Wardrobe Crisis.

45:53You can find the show notes for each episode over on our website, thewardrobecrisis.com. I hope you've enjoyed the show. I'd love you to help us spread the word. Tell a friend, share on social media, or leave us a rating and review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps new listeners find us on the app. You can get in touch with us on social media. the show is on instagram at the wardrobe crisis and i'm on there too i'm at mrs press