Is being ‘better than America’ good enough for Australian employers?

Excuse me if you don’t find me sympathetic to employers moaning about ‘talent shortages’.

A succession of surveys and research released in the past couple of months paints an alarming and depressing picture of how a not-insignificant minority of Australian employers are the primary cause of their own problems in recruiting and retaining workers.

This week, the Australian HR Institute (AHRI)’s latest survey of more than 600 business leaders or senior human resources decision-makers reported that seven in 10 employers are excluding candidates in certain groups, including those who live with a long-term illness, disability, mental illness, or are over 55.

What’s more concerning is the trend over the past two years.

In 2026:

• 47% of employers said they would not consider a candidate with a criminal record, up from 33% in 2024.
• 41% of employers said they would not consider a candidate with a history of drug and alcohol problems, up from 29% in 2024.
• 32% of employers said they would not consider a candidate with a history of mental illness, up from 18% in 2024.
• 28% of employers said they would not consider a candidate with a long-term illness, up from 19% in 2024.
• 19% of employers said they would not consider a candidate over 55 years old, up from 11% in 2024.
• 19% of employers said they would not consider a candidate with a disability, up from 13% in 2024.
• 16% of employers said they would not consider a candidate who was neurodiverse, up from 14% in 2024.
• 10% of employers said they would not consider an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, up from 7% in 2024.

The only category where attitudes have softened is the long-term unemployed, where 11% of employers would exclude them, compared to 11% in 20024 (probably because respondents are more likely to know a long-term unemployed worker in 2026 than in 2024).

To emphasise, this is self-reported behaviour, which would suggest these figures are conservative and likely to be much higher in reality.

The key phrase here is ‘would not consider’: in other words, the person would conduct no further inquiries into the specific individual job seeker’s skills or motivation, but would simply exclude them because they are categorised as one of the above.

Although the figure for indigenous discrimination is the ‘best’ of the listed categories, there is little for many employers to congratulate themselves about.

The Gari Yala 2 (Speak the Truth) study, conducted by the Centre for Indigenous People and Work (CIPW) at the University of Technology Sydney, surveyed more than 1,100 Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander workers across Australia and concluded, “Racism remains entrenched across workplaces in Australia.”

Just over half (53%) of Indigenous employees report experiencing inappropriate race-based comments and assumptions at work.

Overall, 25% of employees reported working in a culturally unsafe workplace, while 35% reported working in a moderately safe environment.

“Although, there has been some progress since our first report in 2020, racism and lack of cultural safety remain widespread,” said CIPW director Nareen Young in a statement.

According to the findings, 63% of the respondents are in workplaces without anti-discrimination training. Another 69% belong to organisations without a racism complaint procedure.

Earlier this month, new data released by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA), underscored persistent gender earnings inequality.

The 2024/25 Employer Gender Pay Gaps Report shows that 54% of employers have a gender pay gap larger than 11.2% in favour of men, with men 1.8 times more likely than women to be in the highest-paid quarter, while women are 1.4 times more likely than men to be in the lowest-paid quarter. Large differences in discretionary payments, such as performance bonuses and overtime, remain a key driver of employer gender pay gaps, the report noted.

Last month, a report from the RMIT Business and Human Rights Centre (BHRIGHT) revealed the severe exploitation faced by migrant workers under the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme in the Australian meat industry.

The report details restricted freedoms, severe underpayment, unpaid work and excessive hours, high-cost, low-quality accommodation, and a lack of access to workplace protections.

One of the authors, Ema Moolchand, said, “This research shows that PALM scheme workers are facing systemic exploitation, not just isolated incidents of mistreatment. Their dependency on their employer makes them highly vulnerable to abuse.”

In January, as part of a six-day operation in Far North Queensland, Australian Border Force field operations officers identified labour-hire intermediaries who deliberately encouraged PALM scheme workers to abandon approved employers before exploiting them through illegal cash-in-hand arrangements and charging them to live in squalid, overcrowded accommodation – conditions likened to modern slavery.

In the same month, a Monash University analysis of nationally representative Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey data found that LGBTQI Australians face persistent structural inequalities in employment: higher unemployment, lower labour-force participation, more part-time or unstable work, and over-representation in lower‑paid sectors compared with heterosexual and cisgender peers.

These disparities persist after accounting for age, education and socio-economic background, indicating workplace and systemic barriers rather than individual characteristics alone, according to the data.

All this recent research points to an uncomfortable fact that although a majority of employers in Australia do their best to recruit and retain their employees in a way that is competent, legal, humane and even generous, there remains a small, but growing minority of employers who are incompetent, break laws and, worst of all, treat their employees inhumanely.

Pew research on social cohesion, released last week, highlights that Australians still maintain a high degree of “shared morality”. The report notes that Australian workplaces have avoided the “moral meltdown” seen in the United States, and our country’s “social fabric remains remarkably resilient.”

However, there’s not much to celebrate in being ‘better than America’ when many employers’ recruitment and retention practises still have much to improve on.

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