Hard to look away Steve Bairds fight against modern-day slavery

Steve Baird, airline executive, looked at his phone and saw the text message. A friend had sent him a link to an ad for the top job at the International Justice Mission, an anti-slavery charity.

Baird knew little about the scourge of modern slavery, other than it was fundamentally immoral and abhorrent. And he wasn’t keen on working in the charity sector, assuming non-government organisations never had enough money to drive big, consequential change.

“I could see the downsides of going into an NGO,” he said. “It just wasn’t a path I thought I would go down. Yet what had always appealed to me was how to help people who need a leg up.”

Steve Baird knew little about modern-day slavery until he took on a job trying to prevent it.Credit:Wolter Peeters

But his wife, Annemaree â€" who’s a “tough critic” â€" knew and admired the organisation, from her time working as a lawyer in Washington. “She said, ‘the work they do is brilliant. You should take a look at that’,” he recalls.

Baird, then a marketing executive at Virgin Airlines, took her advice and, after a lot of reading, discovered just how prevalent modern slavery had become. “It is hard to look away from once you become aware of it.”

For many years, he had volunteered his Friday nights to help Sydney’s homeless behind St Mary’s Cathedral in the city. While he got to know many of the blokes well â€" some even helped him work up his marriage proposal â€" he was saddened to see the same people coming back, week after week, seemingly unable to break the cycle of poverty. International Justice Mission, or IJM, however, had broken the chains of modern slavery for 70,000 people around the world, getting them out of bondage.

We are meeting for a lockdown lunch via Zoom on Baird’s one-year anniversary as IJM’s chief executive officer. A virtual office backdrop surrounds him on the computer screen, cloaking any glimpse of the Blue Mountains home he shares with his wife, three young sons, eight chickens and two dogs â€" a spoodle and a cavoodle.

The owner of Kickaboom, a Glenbrook cafe, has delivered Baird’s meal: a salad with pecans and pepitas ... and fried chicken. “One offsets the other,” he says, smiling.

Kickaboom cafe delivers a meal to Steve Baird at his Glenbrook home.Credit:Wolter Peeters

But there is no pretence about his dessert: a Portuguese tart and a butterscotch latte. “They do a homemade butterscotch sauce; the butterscotch latte has a cult following,” he says.“It’s good for the good times and the bad times.”

The veggie grain bowl with fried chicken, butterscotch latte, and Portuguese tart from Kickaboom café in Glenbrook.Credit:Steve Baird

I’ve picked up a takeaway meal of red salmon curry with Asian greens and rice from Barzura in Coogee, with just the right amount of kick.

The salmon red curry from Barzura café in Coogee.Credit:Anna Patty

After we compare our menu choices, and Baird noted my lack of dessert, he tells me how COVID-19 clinched his decision to leave the corporate sector.

Like many who have re-evaluated their work during the pandemic, Baird says it “accelerated” a shift he had been considering. Virgin Airlines had given him a good career but was facing voluntary administration.

“It was just a good chance to step back and think: what do I want to do?” he says. “I could see there was a high degree of integrity in what IJM was doing.”

With a marketing man’s nous, Baird also knew that IJM needs to constantly raise awareness of modern slavery if its campaign to get the state government to enact its tough anti-slavery legislation is to succeed.

For more than three years, the NSW Modern Slavery Act has been in limbo. In 2018, it passed parliament with the support of all parties. Premier Gladys Berejiklian backed it strongly. Britain’s former anti-slavery commissioner Kevin Hyland even called it “world-leading”.

The NSW law goes further than similar Commonwealth legislation by establishing an anti-slavery commissioner and criminal penalties of up to $1.1 million if companies with an annual turnover of more than $50 million fail to report, or provide false information on, the risk of slavery in their supply chains. The threshold under the Commonwealth Act is higher at $100 million, limiting its scope and power.

But at the 2019 election, the architect and champion of the bill â€" Christian Democrat MP Paul Green â€" was not re-elected, and big business interests started pushing back. The historic legislation was effectively put on ice, shunted to a committee for review, so it aligns with the Commonwealth law. “The Commonwealth legislation is a step in the right direction, but there are no penalties,” says Baird.

“What we desperately need is some people who are saying this is a huge issue, and we need some people on the inside rattling the can. We cannot accept that our supply chains could have people in slavery helping to make goods. We need more people to stand up and say this is completely unacceptable.”

“We cannot accept that our supply chains could have people in slavery helping to make goods... this is completely unacceptable.”

Steve Baird

Baird says the forced-labour industry generates an estimated $US150 billion ($AUS205 billion) in illegal profits each year. Slavery is not only rampant in business supply chains. Australia is the third highest consumer in the world of online sexual exploitation of children. “The online sexual exploitation of children has trended upwards during the COVID-19 pandemic,” he says. “This is not child pornography. This is the live sexual abuse of children sometimes as young as two years old. It is one of the most abhorrent forms of slavery.”

Of the estimated 40 million people in modern slavery, 10 million are children.

One of Baird’s IJM colleagues in India, Raja Ebenezer, was trapped in slavery and working 18-hour days at the age of 12. After his parents were tricked into bonded labor at a brick factory to pay for their daughter’s wedding, Ebenezer and his younger brother went looking for them and ended up getting caught. He was rescued by IJM and later trained to become a lawyer. He now works for the organisation and helps other children in similar situations.

Baird’s Christian faith and family upbringing help explain why he is at odds with the political party that his family served for many decades. His brother, Mike, was NSW treasurer, then premier, and his father, Bruce, was the NSW minister who helped win the 2000 Olympics for Sydney and later served in the federal parliament. Both are considered men of principle: the classic combination of hard head and soft heart. But Steve Baird fears the Liberals have caved to corporate interests on this crucial moral issue.

Bruce and Judith Baird with their three children Mike, Julia and Steve, who is the youngest.

Baird was seven years old when, in the early 1980s, his father â€" who had been Australia’s trade commissioner in New York and an executive with Esso â€" gathered the family to explain how their lives were going to change. “‘Guys, guess what’,” Steve recalls his father saying. “‘I’m going into politics, and we think this is a great way to live a life of faith and make a difference in the community. And as part of that my pay is going to halve. It just means our holidays will be a little less fancy, but this is an important thing to do.’”

“Wow, this is a bit exciting,” Baird thought at the time. His father’s decision made him realise “there was more to life than boats and cars, and you can actually make some calls that go against the grain to make a difference”.

Steve Baird chats online from his Blue Mountains home with a virtual office backdrop behind him.Credit:Anna Patty

It must have lodged in the back of his mind for more than 35 years because Baird made a similar speech to his children last year, upon accepting the job at IJM. Expecting a rousing response, the eldest of his three sons instead asked him to “talk us through what that means day-to-day” before coming around to the decision.

After Bruce Baird moved from state to federal politics at the 1998 election, he didn’t enjoy the same success, partly because he gained a reputation as a rebel on John Howard’s backbench. He publicly opposed the government’s harsh approach to the mandatory detention of asylum seekers. Befriending a future Labor prime minister â€" Kevin Rudd â€" through the Parliamentary Christian Fellowship probably didn’t help, either. But Steve was particularly impressed that his father’s prayer group included people “from right across politics”.

Mike Baird took on politics cautiously, and only after a long wait. He initially studied theology at Regent College in Canada, with plans to become a church minister. Instead, he became a banking executive, finally entering NSW politics in 2007.

For Steve, the choices are not as stark as politics, business or the church. It comes down to approaching any secular job with integrity. “That can look like business, it can look like politics.”

Steve Baird with his older brother Mike.

Having won the 2015 state election, Mike shocked the public by retiring from politics in early 2017, returning briefly to banking as an NAB executive, before taking on the leadership of Christian welfare provider HammondCare. Mike â€" who admired William Wilberforce, the English politician who led an effort to abolish slavery in Britain in the early 1800s â€" was particularly keen for his younger brother to take on the IJM job.

“The ironic thing was I’d seen Amazing Grace, the movie about William Wilberforce, and it is compelling and a great story, but the problem for me was that I walked out thinking, ‘isn’t it great that slavery is dealt with?’ And yet, there is more of it than ever now,” Steve says.

At 43, Steve is the youngest member of the family, and “unless the Archangel Gabriel wakes me in the night” to tell him otherwise, he has no desire to enter politics. He seems to like the low profile, brought home to him in May at the funeral of his mother Judith, when former Prime Minister John Howard greeted him as “the Baird I haven’t met”.

Baird had an evangelical Anglican upbringing in Wahroonga and was active in an Anglican youth group at St Ives. Wife Annemaree is Catholic and, yet, the couple feel equally comfortable at Catholic, Anglican and Pentecostal services. ”I can speak the language of all of them. I have lots of friends I’ll happily pray with from a variety of backgrounds.”

His late mother, who worked in prisons and as a counsellor with police who had experienced trauma, occasionally attended a Catholic prayer retreat, which for some strict Anglicans was a bit “controversial”. “In Egypt, she’d worked with people in mud slums,” Baird recalls. “Mum was very good at getting beside people in tough situations. She had this huge influence on people around her.” Particularly him.

While Steve’s childhood was not one of great wealth, the Bairds were solidly upper middle class. Mike went to the Kings School in Parramatta, sister Julia â€" the Sydney Morning Herald columnist, co-host of ABC’s The Drum and award-winning authorâ€" attended Ravenswood School for Girls, and Steve attended Knox Grammar, with its world-class sporting, athletic and music facilities. “Being at a school like that, there is a lot of wealth around you. Mum and Dad were always conscious of that. They would always foster us to think of other people.”

When he visits Wahroonga these days, he is taken aback by the grandeur of the houses. He and Annemaree moved to the Blue Mountains 12 years ago, scared like so many by the weight of a Sydney mortgage. In the end, it also made his decision to take a big pay cut, for a job that is enriching in so many other ways, a lot easier.

THE BILL PLEASE

Kickaboom, Shop 1/6 Ross St, Glenbrook, 0247 048 158, admin@kickaboom.com.au.

Open 7am-3pm Monday to Friday, 7.30pm-3pm Saturday and Sunday

Barzura Cafe & Ristorante, 62 Carr St, Coogee. 9665 5546.

Open 7 days, 7am-7pm

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Anna Patty is a Senior Writer for The Sydney Morning Herald with a focus on higher education. She is a former Workplace Editor, Education Editor, State Political Reporter and Health Reporter.Connect via Twitter, Facebook or email.

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