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. Recent examples from New South Wales and Western Australia — as well as Queensland — show how exclusion from democratic processes doesn’t just breach process requirements: it produces objectively worse legislation.
The evidence is consistent: when women’s voices are sidelined, legislation compounds rather than resolves complex ethical and legal issues, creates artificial complexity that masks exploitation, and undermines fundamental rights for women and girls. This is not merely poor governance on the part of our legislatures; it breaches Article 7 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which guarantees women’s equal participation in policy formulation and implementation.
NSW Equality Bill: Predetermined outcomes and tick-box ‘consultation’
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.
This approach breached not only CEDAW, but also other international obligations, including citizens’ rights to participate in public affairs (ICCPR, Article 25). But even where women’s groups were given token opportunities, selection appeared designed to minimise our influence. Only one women’s advocacy group on the restricted stakeholder list shared concerns about sex self-identification included in the bill, yet that group diverges from more progressive positions on other core women’s rights issues, such as abortion. This kind of selective inclusion does not substitute for meaningful engagement across the breadth of women’s advocacy, and may even serve to present all women’s groups opposed to sex self-ID (and prostitution, pornography, and surrogacy) as conservative, when that is far from the case. We were not absent in raising concerns about this matter: NSWWAA’s urgent letter to the Premier documented how the process would produce legislation without genuine consultation or proper scrutiny, and that would be bad for women and girls; the Premier failed to reply and the bill was enacted.
Western Australia’s recent record of double-exclusion
Western Australia has demonstrated similar patterns of exclusion with that state’s Births, Deaths, and Marriages Registration Amendment (Sex or Gender Changes) Bill 2024 (WA’s sex self-ID bill, now passed into law) and the Assisted Reproductive Technology and Surrogacy Bill 2025; the latter is currently before the upper house.
In regards to the sex self-ID bill, there was no public consultation, no committee review, and a motion to refer the bill to committee was defeated 47–5. The bill was introduced on 17 April, with second reading speeches only three weeks later (on 8–9 May), and was framed as an emergency health measure with strict debate limits, despite far‑reaching implications for women’s rights. Even if this were the case — that it was an ’emergency’ health measure — women’s groups should still have been consulted under Australia’s Article 7 obligations under CEDAW. Again, we were not absent, even going so far as to lodge a special procedures request with the UN — but we were also again ignored.
But the current ART and Surrogacy Bill is a particularly egregious case of democratic failure, industry capture, and failure to uphold our international commitments to women. Women’s groups, independent experts, and feminist advocates have all been excluded from meaningful participation while fertility industry representatives and clinicians with commercial interests have instead led the process. Briefings have been limited and have not engaged women’s advocates, despite the profound impacts this bill, if passed, will have on women.
So, what’s the background, here? It appears that the bill emerged from a ministerial panel chaired by an ART clinician and supported by industry insiders — an evident conflict of interest prioritising commercial growth over careful consideration of impacts on women and the community. The process has bypassed both Law Reform Commission of WA review and full parliamentary committee scrutiny, which is not commensurate with the bill’s potential far‑reaching consequences for women’s rights.
In stepping away from best practice, the WA Government has avoided a comprehensive, independent inquiry and open stakeholder engagement, further undermining compliance with Australia’s obligations under CEDAW and the ICCPR, with a significant pattern of failures being conspicuous.
Queensland’s tokenistic engagement model
Queensland has likewise demonstrated significant failures. Closed consultations with LGBT groups on that state’s Births, Deaths, and Marriages Bill began in 2018 — but women’s groups were engaged only in 2022, and only under public pressure and then only for a single information session. The public consultation ran over five weeks spanning the Christmas and New Year holiday period, which the Queensland Law Society considered inadequate for meaningful engagement. Again, women’s groups — including AAWAA — were not silent on this matter, and again we were benched.
Bad law as the predictable consequence of exclusion
Excluding women from our binding international obligation for consultation produces legislation marked both by regulatory capture and by failures to protect those most at risk. This is particularly evident in the bundling of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) and surrogacy into a single framework, as has happened with the current WA ARTs and surrogacy bill, as well as with a current inquiry being undertaken by the NSW Legislative Council Select Committee on Fertility Support and Assisted Reproductive Treatment.
Bundling ARTs and surrogacy like this masks their profound differences: ART typically affects those unable to conceive and their families, whereas surrogacy raises far‑reaching questions of consent, coercion, exploitation, and the rights of surrogate mothers, intended parents, and children. Legislative conflation serves industry interests by limiting scrutiny. It reduces examination of surrogacy’s unique harms by framing it as merely another medical technology rather than a practice engaging complex contractual, ethical, and human rights issues concerning the use of a woman’s body.
In particular, the WA bill illustrates regulatory capture: streamlining approvals and reducing regulatory burden for clinics, building an industry‑enabling framework rather than protective regulation, and shifting power from central oversight to clinic‑level decision‑making. The bill and its explanatory materials adopt consumerist language that frames ART and surrogacy as being about ‘access’ rights for commissioning parents while erasing concerns about the exploitation and commodification of — as well as harm to — women. Crucially, this framing reflects industry‑controlled consultation that excludes women’s voices and our independent analysis.
International evidence systematically ignored
Exclusionary processes do more than sideline women: they additionally ensure that substantial evidence of harm is overlooked. International and domestic evidence comprehensively documents women’s exploitation and abuse in surrogacy arrangements. The UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls recognises surrogacy as a form of violence against women, and Australian data show the growth of overseas commercial surrogacy used by Australians. Yet this evidence has been omitted in WA because expert women’s advocates have been excluded from having a voice in the formulation of government policy: in other words, exclusionary processes ensure this expertise cannot inform Australian legislation.
Legal uncertainty, rights erosion, and a pattern of international law violations
The legal implications are considerable, as targetted consultations that have excluded women’s voices have helped generate legal uncertainty about women’s fundamental rights in Australia. The interaction between women’s sex-based protections and rights and gender identity provisions in the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth) has, for example, been the subject of active litigation and judicial clarification; this is reflected in the Sex Discrimination Commissioner’s amicus submissions to the Federal Court. We see here that laws and policies developed without women’s meaningful consultation about this very such interaction have repeatedly failed to protect those of us who are most vulnerable: disabled and elderly women, culturally and racially marginalised women, Aboriginal women, women in prisons, women in crisis, and women escaping male violence.
There is, then, a clear pattern of systematic violations (CEDAW Article 7, women’s equal participation; ICCPR Article 19, freedom to seek, receive, and impart information; and ICCPR Article 25, citizens’ participation in public affairs) across jurisdictions and these, too, are part of a broader erosion of protections for women and girls, especially for those of us at greatest risk.
The imperative for genuine democratic participation
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.
These case studies show fundamentally that poor consultation produces poor law. Legal uncertainty and failures to protect women are predictable outcomes. Genuine consultation that includes women’s voices, on the other hand, yields better law that respects our foundational rights and evidence‑based policy. Australia’s obligations require ensuring women’s meaningful participation in policy formation: the systematic exclusion documented here demands urgent remedy through inclusive, good‑faith consultation that respects women’s expertise and our right to participate in decisions affecting our lives.
