The Australian Law Reform Commission told stakeholders in late July that its review of surrogacy laws was nearly complete. But only a few days earlier, the Attorney-General had agreed to give it six more weeks, and neither will say why. This is not the first time direct questions to the ALRC about how this review is being conducted have gone unanswered, delegated or deflected.
The ALRC’s ‘In Brief’ update, describing the review as nearly complete, was published on 21 July 2026. But the Attorney-General’s Department has since confirmed to The Women’s Advocate that the Attorney-General agreed to extend the reporting deadline on 17 July – four days before that update was sent.
We asked both the ALRC and the Attorney-General’s Department why the extension was needed. The ALRC declined to say. The Attorney-General’s Department said only that it would help the Commission “complete its two ongoing reviews”, a statement that does not explain why an inquiry the ALRC described as nearly finished required six more weeks.
The new deadline is 11 September 2026, and the ALRC states that once its report is tabled in parliament, the latest possible public release date is 18 November 2026. That date has one notable consequence: it falls well after a national conference on surrogacy is due to be held in Melbourne on 21 and 22 August 2026. The conference is being organised by the Association of Relinquishing Mothers (ARMS), and the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, Reem Alsalem, will argue there that surrogacy should be recognised as a system of violence and exploitation against women, and abolished.
A pattern, not an isolated incident
Six months earlier, at a roundtable consultation with a coalition of feminist organisations on 18 December 2025, ALRC President Justice Mordecai Bromberg declined to discuss governance and process concerns in the room, despite AAWAA seeking to raise them explicitly – concerns we had already set out publicly six days before the roundtable took place. Instead, Justice Bromberg instructed coalition organisations to raise those concerns with him – separately and individually – in writing. Before leaving the meeting, he also asked participants to explain, in their letters, how a recommendation to prohibit surrogacy could fall within the ALRC’s terms of reference.
Taking Justice Bromberg at his word, AAWAA wrote directly to him five days later on the composition and balance of the Advisory Committee, the absence of any visible process for identifying and managing conflicts of interest for Committee members and the Assistant Commissioner, and the effect of directing collective governance concerns into individual, private correspondence. We asked the ALRC to pause the review and reconstitute the Committee.
We also set out, as invited, why we believe prohibition is not only open to the Commission under its terms of reference, but required by its statutory obligation to ensure recommendations are consistent with Australia’s international obligations, including under CEDAW, the ICCPR and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. We wrote to the Attorney-General on the same day, raising the same matters and suggesting she consider forming an independent expert panel to provide balanced advice.
Despite asking us to write to him directly, Justice Bromberg did not respond personally. In late January, the ALRC’s Executive Director, Ruth Barson, instead replied on his behalf, rejecting our concerns as resting on “incorrect premises” and stating that our request for a pause “fundamentally misunderstands the ALRC’s independence”. Rather than reply to the ED, in early February we wrote again to Justice Bromberg, correcting several points her letter attributed to us that we did not, in fact, make. We again received no response from the President.
The Attorney-General’s Department replied separately on 19 February 2026, stating the AG was unable to meet due to “heavy portfolio and electoral commitments,” and that the ALRC “is responsible for its own operation and management” of its inquiries. It did not engage with the substance of our concerns.
The full text of this correspondence is published below.
The extension, and who will explain it
When the extension came to light, The Women’s Advocate put a series of direct questions to the ALRC’s Communications team, relating to when the amendment was made, who had initiated it, what reasons had been given, and whether or not a formal amended referral instrument exists. The ALRC’s Director of Communications and Engagement confirmed the amendment was made by the Attorney-General on 17 July 2026, and that the deadline change was the only amendment made to the terms of reference. When we followed-up on the questions of who initiated the change and why, the ALRC said it had “no additional information to share beyond what [has been] sent through previously and what the ALRC has shared publicly”.
We then put the same questions to the Attorney-General’s Department. A departmental spokesperson confirmed that “the Attorney-General agreed to the Australian Law Reform Commission’s request for a six-week extension to the reporting date”, and that the extension would “support the ALRC to complete its two ongoing reviews”, meaning this surrogacy review, and a separate review of human tissue laws.
So it was the ALRC that sought the additional time. And it was the Attorney-General’s Department, not the ALRC itself, that was prepared to say so.
Reading the episodes together
Taken separately, these episodes might be put down to the ordinary delays that attend any large institutional inquiry; taken together, however, a pattern is harder to avoid. On the question of who sits on the Advisory Committee and how conflicts of interest are managed, the ALRC directed us to a private channel. On the question of who sought a six-week extension and why, the ALRC said it had nothing further to add – so we asked the Attorney-General’s Department instead.
An institution conducting a review of this significance, into a practice that the ALRC’s own Discussion Paper records as generating submissions reflecting deep moral and ethical division, owes the public more than a confirmation that a change was made. It owes an account of why. No such account has been given. The closest either institution has come is a single generic sentence from the Attorney-General’s Department about workload, and the ALRC itself has offered nothing at all.
One further observation
Some might read the timing against the ARMS conference and suspect the extension was designed to put distance between the report and Ms Alsalem’s remarks. But the report was never going to be public before the event in any case: even under the original deadline, the ALRC’s own tabling rules meant release could have been withheld until as late as 17 September 2026, already three weeks after the Special Rapporteur addresses the conference. What the extension changes is how much further that gap can now be stretched: the latest possible release date has moved from 17 September to 18 November 2026, extending the distance between Ms Alsalem’s comments and the report’s appearance from around three weeks to nearly three months. Neither the ALRC nor the Attorney-General’s Department has offered a reason for that shift beyond a passing reference to workload.
The correspondence referred to above (our letters to Justice Bromberg and the Attorney-General of 23 December 2025, the response from ALRC Executive Director Ruth Barson of 30 January 2026, our follow-up letter of 2 February 2026, and the Attorney-General’s Department’s response of 19 February 2026) is published in full below.