Staff at the Australian Parliament made 30 complaints in nine months on serious workplace offences such as sexual assault, harassment and intimidation.
The Parliamentary Workplace Support Service received 30 reports of serious offences from 339 cases in the first nine months of its operation from October 2023 to June 2024. Sexual assault, harassment and intimidation were among the allegations of serious offences, but the service did not confirm whether any of the cases had been referred to the police or whether any prosecutions had been brought.
The service opened in October 2023 as a confidential service for federal parliamentary staff. It was set up after a 2021 government report found that one in three staff in Australia’s parliament, based in the capital Canberra, had been sexually harassed.
In 2023, an Australian senator said she was followed, propositioned aggressively and touched inappropriately by another senator. In April, an Australian judge ruled that a former government councillor raped a colleague in Parliament House, dismissing a defamation claim in a case that has swept the country facing a wave of allegations in the Me Too movement in 2022.
