When the ABC quietly announced in an internal newsletter that it was ending its memberships with ACON’s Pride in Diversity program, the Australian Disability Network, and the Diversity Council of Australia (first reported by the Guardian), the framing was careful and corporate: the partnerships were “no longer providing sufficient value,” and the broadcaster needed to protect its editorial independence. It was presented as a governance decision. A sensible tidying up.
I want to offer a different frame entirely. Because what the ABC has done — and what many organisations across Australia are doing right now as DEI investment quietly contracts — is sever a critical link between the people inside the organisation and the communities they exist to serve. And that has consequences that go well beyond optics.
Let me explain what I mean by workforce-market synergy. A public broadcaster’s legitimacy rests on one fundamental premise: that it reflects and serves all Australians. That means the people inside the ABC need to be representative of that audience — First Nations Australians, people with disability, LGBTIQA+ Australians, culturally and linguistically diverse communities, people of faith. And critically, those people need to feel safe, included, valued, and respected in order to do their best work and carry the lived experience of their communities into every editorial decision, every story selection, every framing choice.
When that internal safety is undermined — as some of the ABC’s own LGBTIQA+ staff have now said publicly, describing the decision as “insulting” and “cowardly” — the external quality of the organisation’s output suffers too. You cannot separate the two.
This is not a niche DEI argument. It is a basic organisational logic. When marginalised employees thrive in the workforce, they contribute more fully, advocate more confidently, and bring perspectives that strengthen decision-making. We know the opposite is equally true. Exclusion, discrimination, and disrespect are not just uncomfortable — they are psychosocial risks with real costs. They suppress productivity, deepen health inequities, and concentrate disadvantage into postcodes that already carry the compounding weight of class, race, disability, and First Nations status. You don’t need a research paper to see this — you just need to scan Australia by postcode and observe where marginalised communities live, educate their children, and access health care.
The decision to frame DEI partnerships as a threat to editorial independence is, frankly, a conflation that does not hold up to scrutiny. DEI practice has an ethics and integrity layer embedded in it. When a marginalised employee in any workforce experiences genuine equity in pay, promotion, and psychological safety, that stems from structural equity-making — this is ethics and integrity in action, it is the right thing to do, is it not? The ABC was not paying ACON to influence its news coverage. According to the Guardian, the ABC was investing — modestly, at $12,000 per year — in ensuring its LGBTIQA+ employees were treated fairly.
What concerns me most is what this decision reveals about where most Australian organisations sit on their DEI maturity curve. Harvard Business Review’s framework on the five stages of DEI maturity — aware, compliant, tactical, integrated, and sustainable — is instructive here. In my experience working with organisations across Australia, even the most earnest are sitting at aware or compliant at best. They know the language. They have action plans. But when we examine those Cultural Diversity Action Plans, Pride Action Plans, and Disability Inclusion Plans up close, what we find is mostly education and awareness activity, with negligible budgets and the real work offloaded onto volunteer employee resource groups — who carry the emotional and labour burden of inclusion on top of their actual jobs. This demonstrates weak institutional accountability.
In those identity based action plans, that seemingly prioritises positive action for marginalised staff in workforces; what is almost entirely absent is the institutional, structural work: rigorous audits of recruitment, selection, onboarding, development, pay, and advancement for marginalised populations. Without that, we are not building equity. We are building the appearance of it.
And here is the legislative reality that should alarm us all: beyond the Respect at Work legislation and WGEA reporting — which, critically, does not disaggregate gender data by race, disability, or First Nations status, meaning we have no visibility on First Nations women’s pay inequity, migrant women’s advancement gaps, or the compounding disadvantage of women with disability — there are no meaningful targeted legislative reforms in Australia pushing organisations to disclose and act on intersectional inequity. The UK requires ethnic pay gap reporting. We do not. For First Nations Australians, CALD communities, LGBTIQA+ people, and people with disability, the framework is broad anti-discrimination law and the goodwill of individual organisations. Goodwill, as we are now seeing, is retractable.
Even our gender equity progress, which we celebrate, should be examined honestly. The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index ranks Australia outside the top 20, while New Zealand sits at number five, Iceland continues to lead at over 90% parity, and the UK ranks fourth. And the gains we have made domestically have disproportionately benefited women with class privilege and Anglo-Celtic and Anglo-European heritage. WGEA, Respect at Work, and Board diversity initiatives are membership-based governance mechanisms — and yet the 2025 Watermark Search International Board Diversity Index, produced with AICD and Deloitte, tells a stark story: Anglo-Celtic directors hold 91.9% of ASX300 board seats, only five First Nations directors hold seven seats across the entire index, there is zero disability representation, and just four openly LGBTIQA+ directors are identified. Gender has moved. Everything else has stalled or gone backwards.
This is why specialist organisations like ACON’s Pride in Diversity program, the Australian Disability Network, and the Diversity Council of Australia matter so profoundly — not just as support services, but as governance mechanisms in the absence of mature national legislation. They set parameters for what good looks like. They provide benchmarking. They create accountability rhythms that organisations simply do not generate for themselves.
It will be telling to watch whether, having exited these memberships, the ABC now pursues genuine structural equity work in its own people systems — auditing pay, promotion, and pipeline data by identity, year on year, transparently. I would welcome that. But in over two decades of this work, I have rarely seen an organisation self-govern its way to intersectional equity without external structure, benchmarking, or legislative mandate. We should not assume the ABC will be the exception. In fact, many of the DEI leads in organisations don’t have the lived experience or equity expertise to even ask the right questions. I truly hope I am proved wrong about the ABC.
If we are to truly do workplace DEI well, we should be courageous enough to link it to upward social mobility – i.e. the ability of individuals or families to move up or down the social ladder (class, income, or status) within a society. It represents changes in wealth or position, often measured between generations (e.g., children surpassing their parents’ income) or over a person’s career. The World Economic Forum’s Global Social Mobility Index places Australia at 16th out of 82 nations, but that ranking does not incorporate Closing the Gap data for First Nations Australians or any other data on vulnerable populations. Our social mobility story, told honestly through a marginalisation lens, looks very different.
Here’s hoping we can elevate our positioning of DEI work, to what matters most, to the people who need it the most – rather than pretending we are progressing on scales and indexes that ignore intersectionality.
Div Pillay is CEO of MindTribes, a specialist DEI consultancy focused on intersectional equity. She is a named 100 Women of Influence, by the AFR and an Honorary Fellow at Monash University. Div is currently completing a PhD at Central Queensland University investigating workplace equity and upward social mobility in Australia.