The Social Services and Community Committee is
considering the Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man)
Amendment Bill – a member’s bill in the name of Jenny
Marcroft. The bill is due to be reported to the House by 20
November 2026, after the House is expected to
dissolve.
Submitters have made more than 40,000
submissions on this bill, and the committee has received
more than 1,500 requests to make oral submissions. We
appreciate there is public interest in the publication of
submissions. However, this is a large volume of submissions
and we are taking time to work through them. Written
submissions will only be published after they have been
reviewed and accepted by the committee. If there are
problems with any submission, committee staff will contact
that submitter to discuss.
Returned
submissions
When a select committee receives
submissions, it must review those and may return any that
contain procedural or natural justice issues. Two common
reasons that we have returned submissions on this bill are
because they share personal information about third parties,
and because they are effectively anonymous.
Decisions
to return submissions containing personal information about
third parties
The committee has decided to return
some submissions that contain sensitive, private, or
personal information about identifiable parties. We consider
that someone is “identifiable” if they are named or if
the submitter has a close familial relationship with them.
This usually means people sharing information about their
children or close family members.
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Many submissions
have opted to include this sort of information. We
appreciate that people want to share information about their
own lives, and how their lived experiences have informed
their views about the bill. We do not wish to prevent people
from sharing their own experiences. However, we must be
careful when submissions include sensitive personal
information about third parties. Submissions are publicly
available and will remain online permanently and we cannot
be sure that the third party knows and has agreed to this
information being shared. We need to consider whether
publishing a submission might risk harm to a person, or
frustrate their reasonable expectations of
privacy.
This is of particular concern when it comes
to children, who, depending on their age, may not be able to
meaningfully consent to their private information being
shared. Other select committees have considered it
inappropriate to publish detailed accounts of a child’s
mental health challenges, on the basis that doing so without
the child’s consent was unconscionable.
We have
asked committee staff to work with submitters whose
submissions are returned on this basis to update their
submissions to address our concerns.
Effectively
anonymous submissions
In the interest of
transparency, committees generally do not accept anonymous
submissions, or submissions that are effectively anonymous
(for example submissions with someone’s initials, or made
under a pseudonym). We will consider requests for anonymity
on a case by case basis, and will return any anonymous
submissions that have not explained why they require
anonymity.
Oral submissions
A large number of
people have requested to participate in our hearings for
this bill. We are still deciding a process to allocate any
available hearing time, given the very limited meeting time
remaining in this
Parliament.
