The AAWAA Women’s Advocate

In this episode of The Unmoved Feminist , Martine and Liv unpack a word used everywhere and explained almost nowhere: patriarchy. Drawing on Wollstonecraft, Gilman, Frye's birdcage image, Mitchell's four structures of oppression, and Pateman's sexual contract, they trace why the analysis has never been superseded — and why its latest adaptations, from neoliberal feminism to the displac...

Emma and Sue walk through forty years of Australia’s Sex Discrimination Act, from its CEDAW roots and the creation of our sex‑based protections and rights, through to the AHRC’s growing role and the 2013 gender identity amendments, to Giggle v Tickle, the Lesbian Action Group case, and Julia Gillard’s comments on how those changes were made without women’s concerns ever being squarely put to Parli...

Former prime minister Julia Gillard has finally broken her silence on the 2013 Sex Discrimination Act amendments, telling an audience at Manchester University that “it was a different time”. In this special edition of The Women's Advocate, Emma explains why that answer is not good enough – and why women are now living with the consequences. Donate If you wish to donate to AAWAA you can do so b...

In this episode, Emma and Lucy discuss the AHRC's 'The Answer is Human Rights' seminar in Adelaide, where women affected by the Commission's decisions — including members of the Lesbian Action Group — put their questions directly to AHRC Chief Executive Leanne Smith and Age Discrimination Commissioner Robert Fitzgerald. The exchange laid bare a critical unresolved question: how doe...

In this episode of The Unmoved Feminist , Liv and Martine ask why female‑only spaces still matter for women’s safety, dignity and participation in public life, tracing how refuges, hospital wards, toilets and change rooms were won through decades of organising against male violence and how recent shifts to “all‑gender” facilities, sex self‑identification and vague equality laws are quietly eroding...

At the AHRC's Sydney 'The Answer Is Human Rights' seminar, women asked one governance question: the Federal Court has found your exemption guidelines deficient — when will you fix them? No officer offered a date, a commitment, or even an acknowledgement of the finding. Emma and Lucy unpack what was said, what wasn't, and what it means for women who depend on female-only spaces and...

At the Perth stop of the Australian Human Rights Commission's national seminar series, AAWAA Director Amber Rossi asked President Hugh de Kretser a direct question: will the Commission use its section 11 inquiry powers to recommend that Parliament restore clear sex‑based protections and rights for women and girls following the Full Federal Court's judgment in Giggle v Tickle? The answer wa...

In this episode of The Unmoved Feminist , Liv and Martine go back to basics on something that shapes what governments see and what they ignore: sex‑disaggregated data. They trace how second‑wave feminists fought to get women counted separately in crime figures, labour force surveys and time‑use data, so we could prove what women already knew from our lives: that men overwhelmingly commit the viole...

In this episode, Martine and Liv step back to map the bigger picture — tracing the feminist "waves" from Mary Wollstonecraft's demand for women's rational equality in 1792, through the suffrage campaigns, into the women's liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and on to the third, fourth and liberal feminist strands that followed. The episode is particularly interested in...

Emma and Amber look at how the Australian Government has chosen to ‘manage the mandate’ of the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, rather than engage squarely with her warnings about Tickle v Giggle , CEDAW, sex‑based protections and rights, and female‑only spaces. Drawing on FOI documents and internal briefings, they trace the pattern from ‘courtesy letters’ that never get...

When governments design mental health strategies, they focus on systems: beds, referral pathways, integration models. But what about the structural conditions actually driving women's mental distress? In this episode, Emma and Amber discuss AAWAA's five submissions to Tasmania's 'Rethink and Beyond' mental health strategy, examining the evidence on male violence, perinatal ment...

Tasmania's Department of Health is developing its next mental health strategy, 'Rethink and Beyond'. AAWAA and our state member organisations – WAAT, QWAA, NSWWAA and WAWAA – lodged five coordinated submissions arguing that women and girls must be named as a priority population, that male violence and the erosion of female-only services must be addressed, and that sex-based women's...

On 26 May 2026, at Senate Estimates, Senator Henderson asked the Australian Human Rights Commission whether it had sought costs against the Lesbian Action Group. This episode sets out the documentary record, from the LAG's exemption application in August 2023 to the Federal Court judgment of 15 April 2026, and the events that followed. Senate Estimates audio is used in accordance with the cond...

No country in the world has a dedicated national plan on violence against older women. Not one. In this episode, Emma and Megan unpack why, covering the way older women get absorbed into sex-neutral policy categories, who is actually perpetrating violence against them (husbands, partners, and adult sons), the critical gaps in Australia's evidence base, and what a real national plan would need...

In this episode, Emma talks with Lucy about what NSWWAA saw inside DCJ’s stakeholder roundtable on the sexual consent reforms review. They walk through the structural gap between the domestic‑abuse laws and the consent provisions, why the current ‘reasonable steps’ test lets men wear women down, and how the fraud provision is at risk of being narrowed in ways that ignore serious deception about wh...

On 15 May 2026, the Full Federal Court handed down its decision in  Giggle for Girls Pty Ltd v Tickle  — and buried inside the legal reasoning is an acknowledgment that women's advocates have been waiting years to see in writing. The Court found that the Sex Discrimination Act no longer gives pre-eminence to the rights of women, and that its current form may actually  limit  the pursuit of wom...

Emma is joined by Suzi and Luci to unpack CEDAW’s Draft General Recommendation 41 on ‘gender stereotypes’ and why AAWAA decided to intervene. They walk through how the draft quietly shifts from sex to gender identity, how this risks reinforcing the very stereotypes it claims to dismantle, and what that means for female‑only spaces, sex‑based data, and surrogacy. The episode also explains AAWAA’s k...

In this episode, Martine and Liv look at prostitution through a second-wave, materialist feminist lens — and at why the shift to "sex work" language matters more than it might first appear. Drawing on Kathleen Barry, Carole Pateman and Andrea Dworkin, they trace the argument that prostitution is not a marginal issue but part of the basic infrastructure of patriarchy: a system through which...

In this bonus episode, we share some of the audio of our appearance before the NSW Legislative Council’s inquiry into fertility support and assisted reproductive treatment. Presented under public interest, this recording lets you hear directly how we argued that surrogacy cannot be treated as routine ‘fertility support’, why Parliament’s first duty is to protect women from exploitation, and how ML...

Last week the President of the Australian Human Rights Commission addressed the National Press Club. We were there — and we asked him why Parliament should extend the Commission's enforcement powers over women's organisations in the contested space of sex and gender, given that a Federal Court judgment just found legal error in how the Commission exercised its existing powers against the L...

Before the NSW Legislative Council even asked its first question, we made a deliberate choice: to shift the entire frame of the hearing. In this short episode, Emma and Megan discuss the opening statement we delivered to the inquiry, and the political philosophy driving it. They explore what it means to say that parliamentarians hold power but not rights against the citizens they represent; why gu...

Emma and Megan unpack their recent evidence to the NSW Legislative Council inquiry on ‘fertility support’ and surrogacy. Drawing on AAWAA’s anchoring arguments, they explain why Parliament’s role is to guard women and children, not steward a fertility market; why surrogacy is structurally exploitative even when framed as ‘helping families’; and why lived experience alone cannot decide questions of...

When a woman dies, her superannuation doesn't automatically go to her estate — it goes to whoever her super fund trustee decides, within rules that can force payment to a violent or controlling man. Emma and Lucy walk through AAWAA's submission to Treasury's consultation on stopping male perpetrators from inheriting women's super death benefits, and what reform actually needs to lo...

Emma and Luci unpack AAWAA’s new submission to the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, focusing on how violence against older women is made invisible in Australia. They explore economic and administrative violence in the age pension and homelessness systems, abuse and sexual assault in residential aged care, the erasure of male perpetrators in language and data, and why sex-...

In this first episode of The Unmoved Feminist, Martine and Liv dig into one of the most consequential shifts of the past two decades: the gradual displacement of sex by gender identity in law, policy and public debate. Drawing on the foundational work of Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone and Christine Delphy, they trace the second-wave concept of women as a sex class — where it came from, what it...