The High Court decision yesterday was a 5:2 majority call that the Federal government was well within its Constitutional corporations head of power in instituting its sweeping workplace relations laws.

The States have lost the battle and in doing so, they have lost the war, too. This court decision means that the Commonwealth ministers will be lining up for advice from the Australian Attorney General’s Department and the Australian Government Solicitor as to how far they can push their own portfolios via the corporations power.

When it happened in the Tasmanian Dams case under the Hawke government, I didn’t care - I was on their side. Damn straight the Tasmanian government should not be permitted to dam the Franklin, was my view. But now the shoe is on the other foot, so to speak, and I am all for federalism. What else have we got to protect us from the kind of sabotage of workplace relations and now potentially also of the health and education portfolios that this Howard government commits with such gleeful, smug abandon?

Read more about views of the High Court’s conservative ascendancy leading to the judgment here

Read about the case and find links to the judgment here

For anyone looking for a light blog-read, this is not the post for you.

I just had my first experience of sexual harassment. There. I said it. “Sexual harassment.” It makes me feel dirty and ashamed to just write it like that, even though I am not the one who should feel dirty and ashamed.

And therein is the heart of the matter. I have left my job so as not to work with my boss after his offensive and inappropriate behaviour towards myself, because in an office of 3 there is nowhere to hide and when you have been working somewhere for almost a year but still on a temp contract there are very few protections for you but the one you provide yourself - the ability to leave at a day’s notice. I have been in touch with the HR area of the larger body which my workplace was an offshoot of, and I have been in touch with the temp agency I was hired through, and I have been in touch with the Equal Opportunity Commission. The bottom line is - how much pain and sorrow do you want to put up with in order to feel like you have received some validation of your experience? Because the ultimate result might be an apology, or maybe some compensation, or a promise to implement sexual harassment training. None of these equals a feeling of safety in my workplace. None of these was going to help me to stay in my job.

My boss has already apologised to me, but that doesn’t mean I can ever trust him again enough to work with him. It doesn’t mean I am not jumpy when I see men of a certain age and stature. It doesn’t stop me, a fairly strong and independent woman, crying uncontrollably all day and feeling utterly disempowered and worse, to blame.

I don’t know what the answer is. I think it is positive that there are sexual harassment policies and I am assuming that the worst of the above reactions will pass with time. But the repercussions for me and my boss are so horribly unequal in the current situation - me jobless and income-less in order to remove myself from a situation that was giving me livid red hives all weekend, whilst my boss has only his conscience to answer to - that the bare fact of it is injustice, straight up, no ice.

To do something, anything, about it, I decided to at least contact his boss (my boss is a contractor to someone else, which just complicates things a little more and waters down the available protections) and tell him what had happened. I’ll let you know if I get any kind of response which makes me feel any better. That’s the focus right now - fighting the good fight, and making myself feel a little better.