NSW ‘Equality Bill’ scaled back after community pushback

Serious concerns remain about Independent MP Alex Greenwich’s contentious Equality Legislation Amendment (LGBTIQA+) Bill 2023 (‘the Bill’), recently passed by the NSW Parliament.

Particularly concerning are the removal of protections for women, children, and families, and the potential impacts on freedom of speech.

However, in an encouraging example of the significant impact constituents can have by engaging with their elected representatives, it was a greatly scaled-back version that was passed after a concerted push back from concerned stakeholders about the original bill.

The original Bill, introduced in 2023, would have amended 20 different laws and removed the protections that currently allow faith-based schools and institutions to teach traditional Christian beliefs on topics like marriage and sexuality, among numerous other changes.

Over the past twelve months, many organisations and individuals have engaged in a process to contact their MPs and express their opposition to, and concerns surrounding, the Bill.

Freedom for Faith, an organisation that represents people of faith, led a campaign encouraging constituents to contact their MPs and the organisation itself also held discussions with MPs across the political spectrum. As a result, a number of the bill’s most controversial elements were removed.

As Freedom for Faith has explained, “Thanks to the hard work of people of faith, the Bill was delayed by over a year, and in the end, most of its provisions were deleted.”

In a briefing about the revised Bill, Freedom for Faith said:

“The good news is that the vast majority of the Bill has been removed. This includes:

- All changes to the anti-discrimination act which would have stopped faith organisations and schools from requiring staff to live according to their faith in matters of sexuality and gender.
- Provisions allowing children to bypass their parents to get medical treatment – including puberty blockers.
- Changes to definitions of sex and sexuality throughout the law.
- Most of the changes to prostitution law”.

However, serious concerns about the reach of the Bill continue.

The Bill includes the “sex self-ID” provisions, which allow individuals to change their sex on their birth certificate without undergoing any surgery. While the Bill explicitly states that these changes will not affect access to sex-segregated spaces, including toilets, change rooms, sports teams, and women’s refuges, women’s groups have raised concerns about how well these protections will operate in practice.

In addition, as the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) has highlighted, the Bill decriminalises activities that enable the exploitation of vulnerable women and girls by pimps and could encourage child trafficking through easier parentage orders for overseas commercial surrogacy. It also criminalises questioning biological sex, potentially penalising those who voice concerns about female-only spaces.

As Joshua Rowe, from the ACL, said:

“I struggle to find words for the absurdity of these laws. Women across NSW have just lost the safety of their own spaces, as sex self-identification on birth certificates puts the privacy and security of areas like change rooms, domestic violence shelters, and bathrooms at risk.”

After months of persistent lobbying and public campaigning, the final version of the bill is markedly different from its original form. Although the threats to women and children and the impacts on freedom of speech remain, the changes to some of the more objectionable aspects of the Bill represent a partial win, and will provide some encouragement to those fighting to preserve and protect fundamental freedoms in New South Wales.