Australian Human Rights Commission President Gillian Triggs has exposed the business and corporate world as the country's main culprit for human rights complaints.
Prof Triggs told a conference in Brisbane the sector was "overwhelmingly" the biggest cause of complaints to the commission, amounting for about two-thirds of the total.
"Overwhelmingly, human rights in Australia are breached in the context of employment and the delivery of goods and services," she said on Tuesday.
"It is the employment, business and corporate world where human rights are for the most part being breached."
The outspoken Prof Triggs - who opened her wide-ranging address by conceding it has been a "rather rocky" few years in the role - said 80 per cent of complaints referring to the Sex Discrimination Act relate to employment issues.
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However, she said most formal complaints were conciliated through the commission.
"That is why we are now, as a priority of the human rights commission, working with the business community," she said.
"Because they're not only the cause of the problem in many respects - they're also the solution."
Prof Triggs told the Global Integrity Summit large companies generally grasped this well, but small and medium enterprises were less receptive.
Stamping out discrimination in employment - especially on the basis of age - would be increasingly important to stop Australians slipping into poverty, she stressed.
This was an exciting, not daunting, prospect that she "deeply" believed could be achieved by working alongside businesses to reform their practices.
