If you’ve checked LinkedIn in the past few days, you’ll probably have seen the hoopla caused by the Australian Bar Association’s backflip in disbanding, then quickly reinstating, its Diversity and Inclusion Committee. What began as some low-key administrative streamlining provoked a storm of criticism on social media that led the ABA to reverse course within days.
D&I wasn’t the only committee on the chopping blocks. They abolished their Ethics Committee too, for example. So why isn’t anyone jumping up and down about that? Ethics are still important, right? You might argue that the reason no-one is mourning the Ethics Committee’s demise is because no-one thinks the Bar in Australia has a serious ethics deficiency. By comparison, you might conclude that this week’s outcry underscores the Bar’s enduring problems with D&I.
There have been a few high-profile shockers from Australian barristers this year. One of the most affronting – given the seniority of the two barristers concerned and the brazenness of the behaviour – involved the posting of an offensive homophobic notice in the lifts at Owen Dixon Chambers East in Victoria. The notice was given legitimacy through use of a mocked-up logo in the image of the Victorian Bar Association’s.
In determining disciplinary proceedings against the pair in April, Judge English found the messages in the notice to “convey an impermissible attitude to the LGBTQI community and are antithetical to the inherent principles relevant to the uniform and consistent application of the law and general principles of equality, fairness, diversity and inclusion”. Wow. (For the full decisions, see VLSC v Squirrell [2025] VCAT 344 and VLSC v Perry [2025] VCAT 343.)
The struggle to improve equality, diversity and inclusion isn’t an issue for Australia alone. The Bar Standards Board in England and Wales commissioned a report in 2020 into bullying, discrimination and harassment at the Bar. The conclusions were alarming.
The report opened by noting that prior research showed “bullying, discrimination and harassment is an issue for many at the Bar, with barristers who are female, BAME, LGBT or those having a declared disability particularly likely to suffer from experiences of workplace bullying, discrimination and harassment”. The report found that harassment, bullying and discrimination remained rife, concluding they were “widespread and in some places endemic at the Bar”, existing “in many forms – both overt and implicit, both as ‘one off’ incidents and as sustained campaigns of abuse”.
What is it about the Bar that creates this international phenomenon? The Bar Standards Board’s report noted that counter-inclusive behaviour was “perceived to be tolerated to a certain extent due to the adversarial, male dominated culture and competitive nature of the Bar”.
It’s not just barristers, of course; numerous studies have found the Australian legal profession as a whole to display consistently and concerningly high rates of bullying, harassment and discrimination. This 2024 article from the Journal of the NSW Bar Association helpfully canvasses some of the data.
Last month, the Legal Services Council introduced the Legal Profession Uniform Continuing Professional Development (Barristers) Amendment (Mandatory CPD) Rule 2025. This introduces, for the upcoming CPD year, a new requirement for barristers to undertake at least one unit of CPD in the category of “equality and wellbeing”.
The Legal Services Council, responsible for overseeing the Legal Profession Uniform Law, explains that: “The Rule was developed by the Australian Bar Association to ensure that the CPD framework for barristers expressly requires training on matters such as discrimination, harassment, or wellbeing, given the importance of these issues to professional conduct and culture at the Bar.”
In consulting on the change, the ABA noted that “inappropriate behaviour may arise from a lack of awareness or understanding of matters in respect of cultural or gender diversity”, and said the “proposed amendment will go some way to addressing issues of behaviour, civility and the culture of the Bar”.
So if the ABA knows there’s a problem, why on earth did it scrap its D&I Committee? ABA President Michael Izzo explained that the D&I Committee had been “caught up” in a larger ABA committee restructure, which aimed to minimise duplication of work being done by the state Bar associations. I have quite a lot of sympathy for that explanation, as someone who is responsible for a state-based Law Society that recently reviewed its own committee structure. I also have sympathy for Mr Izzo himself, who only took up the ABA Presidency last week – unfortunately for him.
That said – and accepting a lack of any malicious intent – no-one in the decision-making tree at the ABA seemed to ask what message they might send by abolishing this particular committee at this particular moment in the history of the Bar’s D&I journey. I take my hat off to Mr Izzo and his new ABA Executive for acknowledging this vacuum of self-awareness and swiftly putting things right.
Perhaps more importantly, it’s great that the chair of the dissolved Committee called out the ABA for its decision. It’s also great that so many barristers and solicitors – from all corners of the profession – expressed their support for reinstatement. All this says to me that the issue has elevated in importance. D&I is on the agenda, and the majority in the profession want it there. What happened this week wasn’t the introduction of a D&I policy or strategy or target. It wasn’t mandated or threatened or forced. It was barristers voluntarily and passionately speaking out for fellow barristers. For me, that makes for a very good week in the law.
