Anthony Albanese has made a “huge mistake” by dismissing concerns about the Sex Discrimination Act’s “Orwellian” definition of a woman, a Liberal senator has declared.
Prime Minister Albanese was asked whether the Sex Discrimination Act should be amended so that it was clear “woman” was defined as a member of the female sex during an appearance on the ABC’s Afternoon Briefing on Thursday.
Controversy has erupted over the issue following the landmark Giggle vs Tickle judgment, with many women’s rights advocates raising concerns that biological men who identify as women cannot be excluded from women’s-only spaces.
But Mr Albanese dismissed the issue, telling ABC host Patricia Karvelas he was “not engaging in culture wars here”.
When pressed on the issue, the Prime Minister said that he was “concerned about issues that Australians are concerned about”.
Responding to the comments on Sky News Australia, Liberal senator Leah Blyth said Mr Albanese’s response was a “huge mistake”.
“He’s essentially said to every single woman and young girl that he doesn’t care about them. He thinks that their rights are just a fringe issue, a culture war, and they don’t matter,” she told Sky News host Rowan Dean.
“And I think from the Coalition’s perspective. It is just so important that we can define and put that biological reality into the Sex Discrimination Act, because as we’ve seen with the fight that Sall Grover has been having, that the law is no longer fit for purpose.
“And it is women and young girls who are paying the ultimate price for that.”
Australia’s Sex Discrimination Act previously included an interpretative provision stating that “woman means a member of the female sex irrespective of age”.
However this was stripped out of the Act by Julia Gillard in 2013, and an amendment was passed to extend discrimination protections to sexual orientation, gender identity, and intersex status.
The explanatory memorandum outlining the reasons for the change states the definition was removed so the provisions also covered trans women.
“These definitions are repealed in order to ensure that ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are not interpreted so narrowly as to exclude, for example, a transgender woman from accessing protections from discrimination on the basis of other attributes contained in the SDA,” it states.
“To the extent these terms appear in the Act, they will take their ordinary meaning.”
Senator Blyth noted the irony that Australia’s first female prime minister was the one “who’s basically stripped away the rights of 50 per cent of our population”.
The Prime Minister’s ABC interview came just days after a bizarre exchange between Liberal Senator Michaelia Cash and Australia’s Sex Discrimination Commissioner Anna Cody, who told Senate Estimates trans women were covered by laws prohibiting pregnancy discrimination.
When Senator Cash pointed out biological men “can’t become pregnant”, Ms Cody responded that this did not matter, because the law “includes potential pregnancy as well as pregnancy”.
“If someone applies for a job, for example, and is a trans woman… she may be asked whether or not she intends to have children,” Ms Cody said.
“If she replies, yes, I do, and then doesn’t get the job … Then she may have been subjected to unlawful discrimination on the basis of potential pregnancy.”
Senator Blyth said the position was “absurd”, but it was “difficult to criticise” the commissioner.
“It just goes to show how ridiculous the legislation is… what she is describing is exactly what the act sets out,” the Senator said.
The South Australian Senator described the position people were being asked to accept as “Orwellian”.
“It is a little bit like people saying two plus one equals four and you must believe me… that’s the point that we’ve got to now in our Sex Discrimination Act,” Senator Blyth said, in a reference to George Orwell’s 1984.