Women are the key stakeholders in the issues Australia’s CSW delegates represent — yet AAWAA, writing on women’s behalf, has received no response to the concerns we raised with those delegates in March. Since then, the pattern we warned about has only deepened, as our latest communication to the CSW, ahead of CSW71, now sets out in detail.
During the 70th session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in March this year, AAWAA wrote directly to members of the Australian government delegation, including Executive Director of the Office for Women Ms Padma Raman, Sex Discrimination Commissioner Dr Anna Cody, and Ambassador for Gender Equality Ms Michelle O’Byrne. As a national body representing women’s organisations across Australia, and as a key stakeholder in the issues those delegates were charged with representing at the UN, we set out our concerns about Australia’s trajectory on women’s rights, attached our full submission from July 2025, and asked that our evidence be considered as part of Australia’s engagement at CSW70 and in their ongoing work. We also said we would welcome the opportunity to discuss how Australia could restore a clear, sex-based analysis within its gender equality framework, while upholding universal human rights.
We encourage individuals and groups to use our work to inform their own submissions to the CSW, ahead of the 1 August deadline.
The officials in question
These are not peripheral figures. Ms Raman is Executive Director of the Office for Women, the Australian Government body responsible for leading gender equality policy and coordinating Australia’s engagement on women’s rights internationally, including at the CSW. Dr Cody, as Sex Discrimination Commissioner, is the officeholder specifically responsible for administering the Sex Discrimination Act. And Ms O’Byrne, as Ambassador for Gender Equality, sits within the same senior leadership network on sex and gender equality policy that shapes how Australia presents itself at the UN through DFAT. Between them, they hold influence over whether concerns raised by Australian women’s organisations are ever meaningfully addressed at the CSW.
Our March communication to them warned that recent policy and law reform in Australia increasingly treat sex and gender identity as interchangeable, with consequences for sex-disaggregated data, women-only services, and women’s ability to speak clearly about male violence and offending patterns. We attached our 2025 submission.
No new territory in our latest communication to the CSW
Our latest communication to the CSW, ahead of CSW71, gives that warning a great deal of specific, documented substance: two Federal Court decisions, handed down within a month of each other, have now confirmed from the bench that the Sex Discrimination Act no longer gives women’s rights, as a sex class, the pre-eminence it once did — and that the Australian Human Rights Commission’s own exemption guidelines are, in the Court’s own word, deficient. At an AHRC public seminar, AHRC President Hugh de Kretser confirmed on the record that the Commission has “no plans for an inquiry into those things that you talked about with those organisations”, despite AAWAA and others having raised the same concern directly with Commission leadership at a meeting on 18 February, and since.
We have also documented in our CSW71 submission that sex self-identification laws are now in force in six of eight Australian jurisdictions, with New South Wales — the only jurisdiction for which we have figures — recording 1,035 men who have changed their legal sex to female since the laws took effect last July, alongside 505 women who have changed to male and 80 children who have applied to do so. We raised Western Australia’s new surrogacy legislation, passed with no genuine consultation with women’s organisations, and a parallel national law reform review through the ALRC whose advisory committee includes no abolitionist women’s group at all. We additionally set out how older women fall between every national plan addressing violence and elder abuse, and how a five-billion-dollar pension payment error has never once been broken down by sex. And we documented the continuing legal and professional consequences facing individual women who speak on these issues, alongside new regulatory proposals that quietly redefine ‘woman’ out of clinical and building-code language altogether.
None of this should be new territory for Ms Raman and Dr Cody. It is, in substance, exactly what our communication set out during CSW70. The difference is that it has now grown more detailed, more evidenced, and — because none of it has been addressed — more urgent. Ms Raman, moreover, was present at Dr Cody’s National Press Club address in September last year, at which we directly questioned Dr Cody on Australia’s apparent retrospective reinterpretation of CEDAW; these concerns were already on the record, independently of our letter, well before we wrote.
Why we keep a record regardless
We have heard nothing back from any of the three officials, then or since. We’re not asserting that our concerns were rejected or dismissed — we simply don’t know, because nobody has told us anything at all. What we can say with certainty is that Australia’s senior gender equality leadership was given detailed, specific evidence while they attended an international session at which Australia’s own record was under discussion, and have not responded, either to that communication or to the pattern it warned about continuing to unfold in the months since.
This is precisely why we use the CSW’s communications procedure alongside direct correspondence. A letter to individual officials can be ignored without consequence. A formal communication to the Commission itself creates a different kind of record: one that exists independently of whether any single person chooses to reply, and one that will now be reviewed by the Commission’s Working Group ahead of CSW71.
Read our full submission, below, which provides evidence for our claims.