Greenwich “Equality” Bill

On the evening of October 16th, a heavily changed version of Alex Greenwich’s “Equality” Bill was passed by the Legislative Assembly

What is in the final Bill?
The good news is that the vast majority of the Bill has been removed. This includes:

• All changes to the anti-discrimination act that 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 laws

Some controversial issues remain in the Bill. The most significant is the “sex self-ID” section, which allows a person to change their sex on their birth certificate.

However, even this part of the Bill has been improved from its initial version:

• The age to be able to make a change easily has been raised from 16 to 18
• The process for under 18s has been made more rigorous – it is harder to bypass parents, requires support from a qualified counsellor, and requires the District Court to make the final ruling.

Most significantly, the Bill now states:

“Nothing in this part changes access to toilets, change rooms, sport, allocation in correctional facilities, women’s refuges or any other place.”

Time will tell how effective these protections are. Religious institutions and faith-based schools will still be able to treat people according to their biological sex, because the exemptions to the Anti-Discrimination Act still remain.

Background

The Equality Bill was introduced in 2023 by Sydney state MP Alex Greenwich. The bill is massive: 50 pages long, making over 80 changes to 20 pieces of legislation. If it is passed, this bill will:

• slash religious protections for churches and schools
• allow people to change their sex on their birth certificate at any time
• allow children bypass their parents to get medical treatment and surgery
• and legalise commercial surrogacy

Normally any one of these changes would require a whole bill to itself, but this bill blends all these issues together and it is almost impossible to split them out from each other. It is impossible to take bits and leave bits. The bill needs to be treated as a whole, and rejected as a whole.

Our Response

When the “Equality” Bill was introduced in 2023, most commentators expected it to be passed quickly without any changes.

Freedom For Faith launched a Contact Your MP campaign, encouraging people of faith to write to their MP about this issue. We also helped faith leaders meet with their MPs, and we spent a long time talking with MPs on all sides. And they got the message! Throughout the campaign we heard from MPs who commented on how many letters they were getting from concerned constituents. In many cases, this is the issue they got the most letters about.

Because of the hard work of people of faith, the Bill was delayed by over a year, and in the end most of it was deleted.

While we are frustrated by the parts that remain, we can celebrate what we have achieved together by removing most of the Bill, when no-one thought it could be done.