Anti-Discrimination Acts, Bills, laws and legislation

Civil and legal rights groups say New South Wales Labor's amendments to the Anti-Discrimination Act are too broad and could harm other fundamental rights. Rachel Evans reports.

More than 100 people rallied at Hyde Park to demand the nationwide decriminalisation of sex work. Wei Thai-Haynes reports.

‘Fuck the patriarchy’ — protesters at a Sydney International Women’s Day march in March, 2020

The Labor government has introduced new bills aiming to eliminate gender-based violence and sexual harassment in the workplace.

While the church hierarchy enjoys access to influence the federal government on its Religious Freedom Bill, those wanting to stay democratic and secular, are left out in the cold. Suzanne James reports.

As people were fleeing their burning homes and volunteer firefighters were crowdfunding basic supplies in December, Australia’s Pentecostal Prime Minister was busy working on safeguarding the rights of a handful of bigoted institutions to discriminate, writes Chris Jenkins.

Paul Gregoire writes that Mardi Gras season is a good time to reflect on the religious freedom bills that, if passed, would undermine the rights of LGBTIQ people.

Below is an abridged version of a speech delivered by socialist unionist Robynne Murphy to this year’s ACTU Congress. Murphy spoke alongside three women from the Electrical Trades Union, who had formed the “Sparkettes”, a network to support other women in their union.

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I worked at the steelworks in Port Kembla for 30 years, during which time I was involved in a long campaign with mainly migrant women for the right for women to have secure and well-paid jobs.

As a lesbian feminist in the early 1970s, I worked in coalition with gay men to bring about change, not only to gain equal rights but to change the world views on institutions that supported male privilege and men having more power than women.

The decision by the Australian Football League (AFL) to refuse to allow transgender woman Hannah Mouncey to nominate for the Australian Football League Women (AFLW) draft has drawn widespread criticism as a reflection of the AFL’s lack of real commitment to inclusion.

While the marriage equality campaign is currently focused on maximising a Yes response in the national survey, supporters of marriage equality and of LGBTI rights more generally need to look beyond the horizon of the survey itself.

This is because a majority Yes in the survey will not definitively resolve the question of marriage equality and because there are many other challenges facing the LGBTI community, particularly around legal rights.

International Women’s Day (IWD) — originally called International Working Women’s Day — was first proposed in 1910 as an initiative of the socialist women’s movement. The following year, on March 19, 1911, IWD was marked for the first time, by over a million people in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland.