WA Will Rewrite Laws To Protect LGBT Students And Staff In Religious Schools

Western Australia has unveiled plans to rewrite the state’s outdated Equal Opportunity Act and introduce law reforms to protect LGBTQI students and staff from discrimination in religious schools. 

Western Australian Attorney General, John Quigley on Wednesday tabled the Law Reform Commission’s review of the Equal Opportunity Act in the Western Australian Parliament. Quigley had asked the commission to undertake the review in 2019.  

WA Premier Mark McGowan said that the Commission had made 163 recommendations. “We broadly accept most of them.”

“Every Western Australian deserves to live their life free from unlawful discrimination. No matter who you are, where you come from, how you identify or who you love,” said McGowan in a post on social media. 

LGBTQI advocacy organisations welcomed the announcement and said they hoped that it was “the beginning of government action to address the unfinished business of ensuring equality for our communities.”

Common Sense Law Reforms

The state’s Equal Opportunity Act was enacted by the then Labor government in 1984 and outlawed discrimination on the basis of “sex, marital status, pregnancy, family responsibility or family status, race, religion, impairment, and age.”

“These laws were passed nearly 40 years ago. Australian values and community expectations have progressed a fair bit since the 80’s. Other jurisdictions have passed legislation since then, and now it’s fair to say WA’s anti-discrimination laws are frankly outdated,” admitted the Premier, adding, “I think most Western Australians would agree these are reasonable, common sense reforms.”

Among the reforms that the Premier McGowan led Labor government have agreed to, include, “strengthening protections for LGBTQI staff and students in religious schools; protecting family and domestic violence victims from discrimination, new anti-vilifications laws, removing outdated “disadvantage test” for sexual harassment complaints; providing anti-discrimination protections to trans, gender-diverse and non-binary Western Australians without requiring them to undergo a surgical or medical procedure and extending the prohibition against sexual and racial harassment to members of Parliament and Parliament staff, judicial officers and court staff, local government councillors and staff, and unpaid or volunteer workers.”

Gold-Standard Anti-Discrimination Laws

Equality Australia CEO Anna Brown said that the law reforms would ensure that LGBTQI Western Australians “are protected equally, by gold-standard anti-discrimination laws”.

Brown welcomed the WA government agreeing to undertake reforms to narrow exceptions to ant-discrimination laws so that religious schools and organisations are not able to discriminate against LGBTQI students and staff as they are presently empowered to do. 

“It is encouraging to see the McGowan government committing to plug the many gaps in protection for LGBTIQA+ people in Western Australia. Hopefully this will be the beginning of government action to address the unfinished business of ensuring equality for our communities,” Misty Farquhar, Convener of Rainbow Futures WA, said in a statement. 

According to Hunter Gurevich, Chair of TransFolkWA, the WA government should now work “to make it easier for trans and gender diverse Western Australians to access ID documents that reflect their gender.”

Michelle McGrath, Western Australian intersex advocate, welcomed the proposal to protect intersex people from discrimination, but urged the government to go further and “ensure intersex people are also protected from unnecessary surgical and hormonal medical interventions that modify sex characteristics without their personal informed consent, unless necessary to avoid serious, urgent and irreparable harm to the concern person.”