President's message | August 2026

Discrimination complaints can deliver positive social change as well as redress for individuals 

As Australians filled out the national census on Tuesday, for the first time we completed questions about sexual orientation and gender identity. The inclusion of these questions came about because of the advocacy of the LGBTIQA+ community and allies – and a discrimination complaint to the Australian Human Rights Commission.

We often think about discrimination complaints as being something that delivers justice to individual people who have suffered harm. It’s important to also recognise the positive social change that complaints can also deliver.

The census is a critical tool for governments, business and community organisations to get the demographic information to shape services and allocate funding. However, despite requests from the LGBTIQA+ community over many years to be properly counted, no meaningful questions had ever been asked about them.

Following the 2021 Census, Newcastle resident April Long and LGBTIQA+ advocacy organisation Equality Australia complained to the Commission about this issue. They said the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Australian Government were breaching the Sex Discrimination Act by failing to ask questions about sexual orientation, gender diversity and variations in sex characteristics (intersex status) in the census. In response, we set up a conciliation process with the parties to explore an agreement to settle the complaint.

The agreed outcome was a step forward for LGBTIQA+ inclusion. The ABS agreed to establish an expert advisory committee with LGBTQIA+ representatives for advice on topics and questions for the 2026 census. It also issued a statement of regret, acknowledging the distress some members of the LGBTIQA+ community felt when completing the census.

The path from here wasn’t straight forward. The Australian Government agreed to include questions in the 2026 census but at one stage looked like it wouldn’t act on this commitment. But after more advocacy, it did. The result is a much more inclusive 2026 census – and April Long’s complaint played a key role in this.

There’s still work to do. People with innate variations of sex characteristics (intersex people) have still not been included and as Giri Sivaraman has written, we need to do better on ethnicity.

April Long has spoken about why they made the complaint, the personal cost involved and the importance of the win. They told The Guardian, ‘From the moment you wake up in the morning, to the moment you go to sleep, you are using services that are informed by the census.’ Their son has two mums and they said, ‘When my son started school, I wanted him to be able to grow up and know there are families like ours, and that we are part of the country’s story.’

Another good example showing how discrimination and human rights complaints can bring about positive social change is the complaint made to the Commission by young teenager Connor McLeod. Connor who is blind, complained to us that vision impaired people had no way to tell the difference between Australia's banknotes. His complaint helped to prompt the Australian Government to develop tactile features on our banknotes, an outcome that has improved dignity, autonomy and safety for thousands of Australians. As Connor has said ‘It was amazing. I was very relieved, not just for myself. It was other people like me who were born blind. It was people who had lost their vision…it was the elderly. It was the people who were yet to come who would be affected if this didn’t change.’

But while complaints can bring about positive social change, they often come at great personal cost. We shouldn’t put the burden of changing unfair laws, systems and policies on the people who suffer harm from them.  This is why the Commission advocated for reforms to discrimination laws to create a positive duty to eliminate discrimination – shifting the focus from responding after the harm is done to proactive prevention. Because of the Respect@Work reforms, we now have a positive duty to prevent sexual harassment, sex discrimination, sexist conduct and related victimisation in workplaces. We need it expanded including to cover disability, race and age discrimination.