The AAWAA Women’s Advocate

In this episode, Emma and Lucy discuss AAWAA's submission to the UN Human Rights Committee on its draft General Comment on freedom of association. They cover why women's associations depend on organising around biological sex rather than a generic identity category, the gap in the draft's membership test that leaves sex-based criteria exposed to being labelled discriminatory, and the risk that ordinary advocacy for sex-based protections gets read as hostile discourse. They close with the Lesbian Action Group and Giggle v Tickle cases, two Australian rulings that show what happens when the law has no settled basis for recognising this right, and the narrow, specific fixes AAWAA has asked the Committee to make.

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Donate

If you wish to donate to AAWAA you can do so by making a direct deposit or bank transfer to:

• Account name: Affiliation of Australian Women’s Advocacy Alliances
• Account number: 04201471
• BSB: 325-185

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Disclosure statement

Voices in this podcast are AI-generated clones of real, named AAWAA members, created and used with their informed consent to help amplify women's words and stories. All scripts and spoken content are written by AAWAA women, and all editorial judgement, fact-checking, and production decisions remain entirely human. AI is used only to voice this content: never to generate, alter, or invent what is said. Learn more at womensadvocacy.net.

This podcast provides general information and opinion only and does not constitute legal advice. Listeners should seek independent, professional legal advice before acting on any matters discussed. The hosts and AAWAA accept no liability for decisions made based on this content.

In this episode, Emma and Lucy discuss two recent submissions on family violence, one to the Tasmanian Government, one to the federal Second Action Plan consultation, both built on the same argument: sex-neutral language like "people who use violence" obscures who is harmed and who does the harm. They cover misidentification of women as perpetrators, the case for female-only refuges and crisis services, and why official communications avoid naming men as responsible, before looking at the one place the submissions take different approaches, and why that reflects two levers of government rather than a real disagreement.

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Donate

If you wish to donate to AAWAA you can do so by making a direct deposit or bank transfer to:

• Account name: Affiliation of Australian Women’s Advocacy Alliances
• Account number: 04201471
• BSB: 325-185

__

Disclosure statement

Voices in this podcast are AI-generated clones of real, named AAWAA members, created and used with their informed consent to help amplify women's words and stories. All scripts and spoken content are written by AAWAA women, and all editorial judgement, fact-checking, and production decisions remain entirely human. AI is used only to voice this content: never to generate, alter, or invent what is said. Learn more at womensadvocacy.net.

This podcast provides general information and opinion only and does not constitute legal advice. Listeners should seek independent, professional legal advice before acting on any matters discussed. The hosts and AAWAA accept no liability for decisions made based on this content.

In this episode of The Unmoved Feminist, Martine and Liv take apart the idea that 'be kind' is a harmless, universal instruction. Drawing on Robin Lakoff, Dale Spender and Sandra Lee Bartky, they trace how women and girls are trained from childhood into a softened, hedging register, and how 'be kind' is used to police tone rather than engage with substance whenever women raise male violence, discrimination or the erosion of sex-based protections. This is part one of two: a second episode will look at how the same instruction escalates from policing how women speak to compelling what we're required to say.

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Donate

If you wish to donate to AAWAA you can do so by making a direct deposit or bank transfer to:

• Account name: Affiliation of Australian Women’s Advocacy Alliances
• Account number: 04201471
• BSB: 325-185

__

Disclosure statement

Voices in this podcast are AI-generated clones of real, named AAWAA members, created and used with their informed consent to help amplify women's words and stories. All scripts and spoken content are written by AAWAA women, and all editorial judgement, fact-checking, and production decisions remain entirely human. AI is used only to voice this content: never to generate, alter, or invent what is said. Learn more at womensadvocacy.net.

This podcast provides general information and opinion only and does not constitute legal advice. Listeners should seek independent, professional legal advice before acting on any matters discussed. The hosts and AAWAA accept no liability for decisions made based on this content.

Emma and Lucy unpack a gap in the Digital Duty of Care Bill: harms from pornography and misogynist material are fixed directly into law for children, but for adult women, the same harms are left to a minister's discretion, with no requirement they're ever addressed. They discuss what that gap reveals about how Parliament treats women as a class, and why structural harm can't be judged by individual lived experience alone.

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Donate

If you wish to donate to AAWAA you can do so by making a direct deposit or bank transfer to:

• Account name: Affiliation of Australian Women’s Advocacy Alliances
• Account number: 04201471
• BSB: 325-185

__

Disclosure statement

Voices in this podcast are AI-generated clones of real, named AAWAA members, created and used with their informed consent to help amplify women's words and stories. All scripts and spoken content are written by AAWAA women, and all editorial judgement, fact-checking, and production decisions remain entirely human. AI is used only to voice this content: never to generate, alter, or invent what is said. Learn more at womensadvocacy.net.

This podcast provides general information and opinion only and does not constitute legal advice. Listeners should seek independent, professional legal advice before acting on any matters discussed. The hosts and AAWAA accept no liability for decisions made based on this content.

Emma and Amber unpack a newly released Freedom of Information document showing how the Attorney-General's Department and the Australian Law Reform Commission negotiated the terms of reference for the ALRC's surrogacy law review, before those terms were ever made public. They cover what the correspondence confirms, what's been withheld under the FOI Act's deliberative process exemption, the ALRC's undisclosed request for a reporting extension, and the case for why a recommendation to prohibit surrogacy sits squarely within the ALRC's own terms of reference.

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Donate

If you wish to donate to AAWAA you can do so by making a direct deposit or bank transfer to:

• Account name: Affiliation of Australian Women’s Advocacy Alliances
• Account number: 04201471
• BSB: 325-185

__

Disclosure statement

Voices in this podcast are AI-generated clones of real, named AAWAA members, created and used with their informed consent to help amplify women's words and stories. All scripts and spoken content are written by AAWAA women, and all editorial judgement, fact-checking, and production decisions remain entirely human. AI is used only to voice this content: never to generate, alter, or invent what is said. Learn more at womensadvocacy.net.

This podcast provides general information and opinion only and does not constitute legal advice. Listeners should seek independent, professional legal advice before acting on any matters discussed. The hosts and AAWAA accept no liability for decisions made based on this content.

As the Australian Law Reform Commission prepares to provide its report on surrogacy laws, Megan and Amber read the Melbourne Declaration to Abolish Surrogacy in full. The Declaration emerged from the National Conference on Surrogacy, ‘In the Name of the Child’, held in Melbourne in August 2026. It calls on Australian governments to abolish all forms of surrogacy and to protect the rights of those already affected without using those protections to justify future arrangements.

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Donate

If you wish to donate to AAWAA you can do so by making a direct deposit or bank transfer to:

• Account name: Affiliation of Australian Women’s Advocacy Alliances
• Account number: 04201471
• BSB: 325-185

__

Disclosure statement

Voices in this podcast are AI-generated clones of real, named AAWAA members, created and used with their informed consent to help amplify women's words and stories. All scripts and spoken content are written by AAWAA women, and all editorial judgement, fact-checking, and production decisions remain entirely human. AI is used only to voice this content: never to generate, alter, or invent what is said. Learn more at womensadvocacy.net.

This podcast provides general information and opinion only and does not constitute legal advice. Listeners should seek independent, professional legal advice before acting on any matters discussed. The hosts and AAWAA accept no liability for decisions made based on this content.

Amber speaks with Ms Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, about her mandate, CEDAW and sex in international law, women’s sex-based protections and rights, pornography, surrogacy, violence against girls, and the changing forms of violence against women and girls.

This podcast provides general information and opinion only and does not constitute legal advice. Listeners should seek independent, professional legal advice before acting on any matters discussed. The hosts and AAWAA accept no liability for decisions made based on this content.

Emma is joined by Suzi to examine how the exemption process under the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 is coming to function as the default pathway for female-only services, rather than the narrow, temporary safeguard it was designed to be.

They discuss the Lesbian Action Group's three-year dispute with the Australian Human Rights Commission, the practical cost of an exemption-dependent framework for refuges, sporting bodies and small volunteer-run women's groups, and the options available to Parliament for restoring clear, workable protection for female-only provision.

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Donate

If you wish to donate to AAWAA you can do so by making a direct deposit or bank transfer to:

• Account name: Affiliation of Australian Women’s Advocacy Alliances
• Account number: 04201471
• BSB: 325-185

__

Disclosure statement

Voices in this podcast are AI-generated clones of real, named AAWAA members, created and used with their informed consent to help amplify women's words and stories. All scripts and spoken content are written by AAWAA women, and all editorial judgement, fact-checking, and production decisions remain entirely human. AI is used only to voice this content: never to generate, alter, or invent what is said. Learn more at womensadvocacy.net.

This podcast provides general information and opinion only and does not constitute legal advice. Listeners should seek independent, professional legal advice before acting on any matters discussed. The hosts and AAWAA accept no liability for decisions made based on this content.

In this episode of The Women's Advocate, Emma and Meg discuss the keynote address delivered by Reem Alsalem, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, at the ARMS national conference on surrogacy in Melbourne. They walk through the claims she examined, from consent and payment to bodily autonomy and the best interests of the child, and the international developments she referred to, including a push for a global moratorium on surrogacy.

This podcast provides general information and opinion only and does not constitute legal advice. Listeners should seek independent, professional legal advice before acting on any matters discussed. The hosts and AAWAA accept no liability for decisions made based on this content.

Dr Megan Blake is co-counsel for the Lesbian Action Group in its case against the Australian Human Rights Commission, and a member of Sall Grover's legal team in the High Court application in Giggle v Tickle. In this interview with The Women's Advocate, she sets out what each case says about the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 and what, in her assessment, Parliament would need to consider in any reform. 

Dr Blake explains why the Act has never defined 'sex', how that gap underlies both the Giggle case and the Lesbian Action Group's application for an exemption, and why she considers the exemption process an insufficient basis for female-only provision such as refuges and women's sport. She also addresses the interaction between federal and state law on identity documents, and discusses the extent to which courts will continue to interpret the Act regardless of what Parliament does.

Donate

If you wish to donate to AAWAA you can do so by making a direct deposit or bank transfer to:

• Account name: Affiliation of Australian Women’s Advocacy Alliances
• Account number: 04201471
• BSB: 325-185

This podcast provides general information and opinion only and does not constitute legal advice. Listeners should seek independent, professional legal advice before acting on any matters discussed. The hosts and AAWAA accept no liability for decisions made based on this content.