All entries on Feminist Legal Clinic’s News Digest Blog are extracts from news articles and other publications, with the source available at the link at the bottom. The content is not generated by Feminist Legal Clinic and does not necessarily reflect our views.
Across Australia, governments are enacting legislation that profoundly affects women’s rights whilst systematically excluding us from meaningful participation in consultation. This not only violates Australia’s international obligations but produces legislation that serves commercial and other interests rather than protects women and girls.
The NSW Equality Legislation Amendment (LGBTIQA+) Bill 2023 clearly exemplifies how restricted stakeholder selection predetermines outcomes. The Committee on Community Services invited selected stakeholders to make submissions on the bill, with the majority representing only one side of the debate on matters affecting women and girls.
And despite acknowledging substantial public interest in the bill, the Committee constrained feedback to an online survey (which, in the end, showed 85.13% of respondents opposed to the bill) allowing only Likert-scale responses, with no prose-based submissions — all while the bill proposed to amend 20 Acts in a single omnibus hit. Tick-a-box consultation fails to meet the democratic participation standards Australia has committed to uphold.
Excluding women from consultation on laws that affect us violates Australia’s international human rights obligations and produces harmful legislation. Women’s meaningful democratic participation requires more than tokenism or curated stakeholder lists: it demands genuine engagement with women’s advocacy groups, including those of us who scrutinise commercial interests and challenge industry narratives. Until governments honour CEDAW Article 7 and implement meaningful consultative processes with groups such as AAWAA, commercial capture will persist, harmful laws will follow, and Australia’s signature on international human rights instruments will be meaningless.
Source: Democracy in denial: How excluding women’s groups from consultation produces bad law