Long time coming. Long, long time. For decades, workplace victims of sexual violence, of bullying, of harassment, have been silenced with a tool used by business and government alike, the non-disclosure agreement (NDA). It's a one-size-fits-all shooshing machine.
We all hate being silenced - and in this case we should all rage against the machine.
That is especially true if the perpetrator is a rainmaker, someone valuable to the company, to the organisation, to government. Take AMP's behaviour when it knew its big money man was behaving badly. Zero action until the heat got hot. And we have to thank Julia Szlakowski, who bravely took on AMP and spoke out to protect all of us.
In so many instances, appalling behaviour is rolled over, from one episode of harassment to the next. The rainmakers keep making it rain so the employers just keep on paying to silence women.
The good news? We are seeing the beginning of the end. In a breathtaking turn of events, the Minister for Veterans Affairs Matt Keogh confirmed a leave pass this week to any former veteran who wants to speak truth to power. He confirmed non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) with the Commonwealth would not be enforced for the inquiry into sexual violence in the military, to begin later this year.
Let me introduce you to Julia Delaforce. In 2010, she was sexually harassed at knifepoint on a NSW military base by a senior male corporal. She was then forced, by her superiors, to drive her assailant home. That's all on the public record.
She complained to her bosses and then she put in a complaint to the Australian Human Rights Commission. But the out-of-court settlement meant Delaforce could not speak out against the treatment she'd received in the military. She stopped working. She still suffers from complex post-traumatic stress disorder.
But there is one thing which kept Delaforce focused - and that was her determination to help others speak out. In 2025, she was finally released from the terms of her non-disclosure agreement. She founded Ban The NDA and now works with two other survivors, Anna Hough and Kirsty Prince.
This week I spoke to her just as she was about to walk into a screening of Silenced, a documentary produced by international human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson. That film details how defamation laws are weaponised to silence survivors. There is, indeed, a long list of ways in which survivors are silenced but NDAs and defamation laws head the list. Delaforce was thrilled at Keogh's decision.
"I've been in his ear relentlessly for the last couple of years," she tells me proudly. She finally met Keogh on Thursday, shook hands and thanked him. Humble, grateful. Some people are lovely even if they've been severely done over.
Campaigning works. In 2024, two lawyers Sharmilla Bargon (now at the Women's Legal Service NSW) and Regina Featherstone of the Human Rights Law Centre, put together Let's Talk About Confidentiality, a research report which revealed how sexual harassment practitioners were resolving out-of-court sexual harassment settlements and how they approached confidentiality terms. They are now both part of the campaign to change NDAs: Our Silence is Not For Sale.
Omigod. Bleak. Sexual harassment practitioners. It's like the act of sexual harassment is practised and perfected. Freaking heartbreaking. And we already knew, from the groundbreaking work of former sex discrimination commissioner Kate Jenkins, that NDAs were rife. The Respect@Work findings, delivered six years ago now, were thorough and detailed. Positive duty has found its way, or at least trying to find its way, into organisations. That's the legal obligation for employers to take "reasonable and proportionate measures" to eliminate, among other things, sexual harassment at work, sex-based harassment and sex-related acts of victimisation or risk.
The next real battle? Changing defamation laws in this country.
Sarah Ailwood, associate professor in law at the University of Wollongong, says: "To protect women, the most important thing is to extend the absolute privilege defence to disclosures about gender-based violence in the workplace, and ideally everywhere."
But she argues it would also be useful to shift the burden of proof for establishing either the defamation or the truth defence.
"But this would still require a hearing and what we want is to stop the case in the first place."
Then she tells me a shocking story. She says that in 2022, the Standing Council of Attorneys-General reviewed the Model Defamation Provisions. They took evidence about the impacts of defamation threats on women who were reporting gender-based violence in the workplace.
"They decided that the reputation of the perpetrators was more important than protecting women speaking out against violence," says Ailwood.
She puts it succinctly: "They are just not interested in the gender dimension of speech and power."
There is more good news on the horizon for the safety of women at work. Ailwood tells me that a 2025 judgement says employers are now under a positive duty under the Sex Discrimination Act to stop threats of defamation action for complaining about sexual harassment. The judgement says: "[It] is a dangerous course unless comfortably satisfied that the allegations are baseless."
Delaforce says there is a long way to go in the battle to allow victims to be heard. Non-disclosure agreements, she says, only serve to protect the employer's reputation and the perpetrator's reputation.
"And perpetrators have been able to go on and have careers . . . there are men in very high ranking positions in the military who are still there today because of NDAs. And the same goes for Parliament.
"They've supported the perpetrator and that is wrong," says Delaforce.
Want to know what NDAs do? They prevent victims from speaking out.
You can't talk to your therapist. You can't talk to your GP.
"You can't tell your mum," Sharmilla Bargon tells me.
You can't even tell your mum.
And that's the greatest grief of all.
