WWDA welcomes the framing of the Issues Paper 1 which recognises the significant time, energy and emotional toll that people with disability have invested in repeatedly advocating for reform. This acknowledgment reflects a shared understanding that meaningful progress depends on building on previous inquiries rather than requiring people with disability to relive the trauma of restating the same harms. WWDA’s submission continues this work, centring the lived experience of women, girls and gender-diverse people with disability to inform practical, rights-based reform of the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (Cth)2 (DDA).
The DDA is an important but currently imperfect tool for addressing the needs of people with disability, especially women, girls and gender-diverse people. It is important to be clear that the DDA does not actually confer or ensure the full human right to freedom from discrimination. Instead, the DDA provides a legal right of action for people with disability who have experienced an infringement of their right to freedom from discrimination, but only in limited circumstances, and subject to complex exceptions and analytic criteria.
WWDA’s submission argues that to fulfil its purpose, the DDA must evolve from a reactive, complaints-based mechanism into a proactive, systemic framework that prevents discrimination before it occurs. Reform should embed equality across all areas of public life, shift responsibility from individuals to duty holders, and make rights practically realisable rather than theoretically available.
A cornerstone of this reform is the introduction of a positive duty to eliminate discrimination, applying across government, education, employment, health, and other publicly funded services. To be effective, this duty must integrate the lessons of the Sex Discrimination Act (SDA), where under-resourcing has limited enforcement and impact. The DDA’s model must therefore be well-resourced, transparent, enforceable and co-designed with people with disability and their representative organisations.
The submission also calls for a stand-alone duty to provide adjustments, a reformed definition of disability, and modernised tests for direct and indirect discrimination that focus on real disadvantage rather than abstract comparisons.
A major focus of the submission is the section on intersectionality, which WWDA identifies as foundational to understanding and addressing the structural nature of discrimination. The current DDA treats attributes such as gender, race and disability as separate categories, making it difficult to capture compounded or overlapping forms of exclusion. WWDA proposes amending the Act to expressly recognise intersectional discrimination (both across protected attributes and through broader contextual factors such as economic status, caring roles and rurality), and harmonising anti-discrimination frameworks. This would allow the law to reflect how disadvantage operates in practice for women and gender-diverse people with disability and to ensure that systemic barriers are visible and actionable.
Further recommendations include reforming the unjustifiable hardship defence to prevent misuse, requiring consultation and documentation in employment decisions about inherent requirements, and future-proofing the Act to address discrimination in artificial intelligence (AI) and emerging technologies, ensuring transparency, accessibility and human oversight in digital systems.
The submission also calls for strengthened regulatory powers and transparency, limits on the use of non-disclosure agreements, and support for a federal Human Rights Act to embed positive human rights obligations and create coherence across Commonwealth equality laws.
Read the full submission in Word (.docx) or PDF format.