AAWAA has been part of a united coalition of independent feminist organisations from across Australia to strongly criticise the Australian Government’s draft national report to the UN Universal Periodic Review (UPR), exposing serious gaps between government rhetoric and the lived experiences of women and girls. This coalition represents a significant alliance of long-standing, evidence-based advocates for women’s rights, and calls on the government to engage honestly, acknowledge regression, and significantly amend the draft report.
Government claims versus lived experience
The government’s UPR draft claims historic levels of female parliamentary representation and legal reform as evidence of robust progress on women’s rights. However, our coalition’s analysis reveals a far less optimistic story: one of exclusion, inadequate consultation, lack of legal clarity, and policies which threaten the rights and protections of women on the basis of our sex.
Across the states and territories, sex self-identification laws have been developed with little-to-no substantive input from women’s advocacy groups. Consultation processes were rushed, time windows were brief and poorly publicised, and key feminist perspectives were systematically excluded. At the federal level, the blocking of the first reading of a bill to amend the Sex Discrimination Act — without any rational explanation of its alleged harms — epitomises the exclusion of women from democratic debate on issues that directly affect us.
Erosion of legal protections and freedoms
The government and its agencies have failed to resolve conflicts between biological sex-based rights and gender identity laws, meaning women are forced into expensive litigation simply to test whether long-standing legal protections still apply. The situation has practical, harmful outcomes: legal clinics supporting women have been evicted; women’s health and community services face censure; and female prisoners must share facilities with male-born prisoners, despite prior assurances that this would not happen.
The failure to clarify the law is not just a bureaucratic lapse, but one that enables the silencing of women. Feminist academics, clinicians, volunteers, and public figures continue to be suppressed, professionally penalised, sacked, or expelled for defending female-only rights and spaces. Self-censorship is widespread, and a chilling effect pervades public debate.
Integrity of data and policymaking undermined
Self-identification laws have rendered official data on crime, service access, and sex-based discrimination unreliable. Legal and administrative changes mean it is no longer possible to track accurately violence against women or monitor health and wellbeing disparities, undermining efforts to ensure accountability or fair policy.
While nations such as Sweden, Finland, and England have responded to growing evidence by limiting medical transition in children, Australia has not followed suit, continuing to promote ‘gender affirmation’ as clinical best practice and failing to safeguard at-risk young women and girls.
Institutional conflicts and consultation failure
The submission also highlights how relationships between government departments and certain advocacy organisations now create institutional conflicts of interest. This situation is compounded by consistently inadequate consultation processes: the government has allowed minimal time for grassroots women’s groups to contribute meaningfully to reviews and decisions that materially affect their rights.
A call for urgent reform
The coalition’s submission is not merely a critique, but a constructive roadmap, containing ten detailed recommendations. These include:
- Restoring clear, statutory protection for female-only spaces and services
- Ensuring robust, genuine consultation with women’s organisations
- Restoring sex-disaggregated data collection and historic markers
- Clarity in law that sex-based rights are not to be eroded by self-identification
- Addressing institutional conflicts and failures in policymaking
- Independent review of anti-discrimination frameworks to ensure women’s advocacy is not suppressed
Conclusion: Government must act
This is not an abstract or academic debate. Women across all sectors in Australia now face real uncertainty about our most basic rights — rights previously taken for granted, and assumed protected by international and domestic law. The government’s failure to acknowledge this regression in its UPR report, and ongoing unwillingness to engage meaningfully with feminist voices, presents a profound breach of transparency and accountability.
This coalition represents a substantial, credible and united front of Australia’s feminist movement. On behalf of women and girls across the country, we now hold the government to the highest standard of human rights, and demands that the draft UPR report be corrected. Anything less will signal to women — here and internationally — that their rights can be traded away for other policy priorities.
Read the full submission, below.
