Alison Penfold (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

In my first speech to this parliament, I said that I was just an ordinary woman with an extraordinary privilege of doing an extraordinary job.

Those words mean even more to me today, because I still stand here as an ordinary woman—but today I stand carrying the voices of millions of Australian women who no longer believe the law of this country protects them, women who increasingly feel that when they raise concerns about privacy, safety, dignity or fairness, the message from too many in politics, in the media and in public institutions is simple: 'Suck it up princess, we don't care.' Well I do care.

And millions of Australian women and men care too.

The Federal Court ruling in Giggle v Tickle that sex is changeable exposed what many Australians already knew was a serious and growing problem in our law—women's sex based protections are no longer clearly guaranteed.

When the law cannot clearly preserve women-only spaces, women lose confidence that their rights to privacy, dignity, safety and choice remain secure.

That is not a criticism of the court.

The court interpreted the law that this parliament wrote.

The fault lies here.

The parliament created ambiguity in 2013 when it amended the Sex Discrimination Act to insert gender identity protections without properly defining what should happen when they come into conflict with sex based rights.

And for years this parliament hoped the problem would somehow disappear, that institutions such as sporting codes would quietly 'manage' the issue, that women would simply adapt and accept—accept that they can no longer say no to men invading their space—that Australians would stop noticing. Well, we didn't.

Before speaking to the specifics of this bill, I want to acknowledge the Australians who refused to stay silent while this parliament looked away, women whose lives were turned upside down because they spoke publicly about women's sex based rights, women of immense courage such as Sall Grover, Dr Jessica Spencer, Louise Elliott, Jasmine Sussex and my own constituent Kirralie Smith.

These women did not seek fame.

Many paid a significant personal and professional price for speaking out.

Yet they persisted because they believed women and girls should not be forced to stay silent.

I acknowledge the parliamentarians who previously attempted to confront these issues, including Senator Chandler, Senator Hanson, Senator Antic and Senator Canavan.

I also acknowledge Michelle Pearse from the Australian Christian Lobby and John Steenhof from the Human Rights Law Alliance for working with me over the past couple of months to develop this legislation.

For years Australians from different political traditions have warned that the law was becoming detached from biological reality and increasingly incapable of balancing competing sex and gender identity rights created by the parliament.

The ruling in Giggle v Tickle has proved them right.

My bill seeks to restore clarity, certainty and common sense to the law.

It starts from a very simple proposition: the law must recognise and favour biological reality, because laws only function properly when they are grounded in objective facts that can be consistently understood and applied.

Biological sex is not a social construct created by parliament.

It is not a matter of personal opinion.

The role of the law is not to deny reality.

It is to responsibly govern within it.

Biological sex matters—particularly in sport, health, privacy, safety and women's services.

If the law loses the ability to distinguish biological sex where it is relevant, then sex based protections become impossible to apply consistently and fairly.

That does not mean transgender Australians should be treated without dignity or respect.

It does not mean they should face harassment or blanket discrimination.

The law must be capable of distinguishing between sex and gender when those distinctions carry practical consequences.

Australians are practical people, and they do not like being told the law says something that goes against plain common sense: that a man can become a woman for all legal purposes; that biological differences are irrelevant; that sex itself is fluid; and, as Sall Grover has so eloquently put it, 'That women should ignore their own boundaries, their own discomfort and their own safety in order to avoid offending men.'

These words alone should trouble every member of this parliament.

Australians know instinctively that men and women are equal in dignity and worth—but they also know that biological sex still matters in some circumstances.

And recognising that reality should not be controversial.

The Sex Discrimination Amendment (Sex-Based Rights) Bill 2026 restores commonsense legal language to the Sex Discrimination Act.

It reinstates definitions of 'man' and 'woman' removed in 2013.

It restores references to 'opposite sex' rather than 'different sex' and makes other definitional change to secure sex as binary.

And critically, it inserts explicit protections for women-only spaces, services and activities, including those online.

This bill provides the legal clarity that this parliament failed to provide 13 years ago.

And importantly, it does so while retaining protections for transgender Australians against unfair discrimination where there is no conflict with a person's sex.

That is important because there will inevitably be those who seek to falsely portray this bill as an attack on transgender Australians.

It is not.

This bill is about grounding the law in the reality and safety of biology, making discrimination protections practically workable and legally clear.

The current Sex Discrimination Act has imposed confusion and chaos on many Australians.

Women are prosecuted for denying biological men lessons in breastfeeding.

Girls are forced to play with and against biological boys despite the threats to their physical safety or forced to share changerooms and toilets, denying them their privacy.

Women's prisons and domestic violence shelters must harbour the very perpetrators they fear.

Our language is defeminised. We now must chest feed. We are a birth parent, a pregnant person or a lactating parent. We are now people who menstruate and cervix havers. We have a front hole instead of a vagina.

What are normally articulate politicians now stumble with word salads to describe what a woman is.

Our institutions are making decisions not because the law is clear but because they fear litigation and public backlash.

That is not good lawmaking.

A liberal democracy cannot function properly when ordinary people become afraid to speak plainly.

Nor can it function when parliament refuses to confront difficult issues honestly.

With this bill, we could fix the Sex Discrimination Act and return women's rights within weeks.

That decision is in the hands of the Prime Minister.

Like women under the Sex Discrimination Act, this bill is silenced at the end of my speech.

As a private member's bill, it is not treated with the same respect as government legislation.

That is not by law but by convention. But the Prime Minister and his government can choose to take a different path. He can support this bill. He can support women. He can support fixing the legislation he voted for in 2013.

The Prime Minister cannot run away from this in 2026.

If the PM won't support my bill, then I am gracious enough to give him another option.

He can support the establishment of a joint select committee into sex based rights by both houses of the parliament to examine the operation of the Sex Discrimination Act and review the provisions of this bill.

Let women and girls, sporting organisations, schools, hospitals, service providers, legal experts, faith communities, the LGBTQIA+ communities, employers, families and politicians from across the country have their say.

Let this parliament do what it was elected to do—listen, scrutinise, debate and fix legislation that has become unclear, unbalanced and harmful to the lives of ordinary Australians.

This will take more time, but it will provide a pathway to reconcile the law that is failing Australian men and women.

If he won't listen to me, perhaps he will listen to Sall Grover who kindly provided some of her own words for me to share:

In a free society, people can believe whatever they want. If you want to believe men can be women or you're a man who wants to call himself a woman, that is your business. What you cannot do in a free society is force anyone else to accept it. What is at stake here is the ability to lawfully acknowledge reality.

If you care so much about 'trans rights', you can work out a way to get them without destroying the category of women in law, female spaces, sport, services, the entire reality of lesbianism, and punishing citizens for acknowledging reality. The fact that you haven't even tried makes it appear that destroying the rights of women is the goal.

Any politician who will look an Australian in the eye and tell them that a man can be a woman is admitting that they will lie about anything and everything because the most obvious lie has already been told.

If no one in this room can acknowledge reality and fix an obvious problem, you are either malicious or incompetent. The days of dismissing this issue are over. This is not a culture war. It's reality.

With that, I commend the bill to the House.

Scott Buchholz (Wright, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the motion seconded?

Llew O'Brien (Wide Bay, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm very happy to second this motion and reserve my right to speak.

Scott Buchholz (Wright, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The time allotted for this debate has expired. The debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.