Annual Report 2025-2026
Overview of the Commission's activities and achievements for 2025-26
Summary
Access the Commission's Annual Report 2025-2026
Complaint statistics
2025-2026
Access statistics on the enquiries and complaints received by the Commission from 2025 to 2026.
President’s message: The year in review
The horrific antisemitic terror attack at Bondi brought immense loss and grief. It shook our nation. It was followed by an alleged terror attack against an Aboriginal protest in Perth and an alleged foiled terror plot against mosques in Western Australia. These events underscore the dangers of failing to address hatred and prejudice. Everyone in Australia should be able to live safely, free from discrimination and proud of their culture, religion and identity. Yet rising racism and prejudice in Australia continues to fracture our society.
The Australian Human Rights Commission has played a leading role in efforts to address racism in our country. In 2022, the Australian Government had the foresight to fund us to develop the National Anti-Racism Framework. The Framework, launched in November 2024, provides a roadmap for addressing racism through 63 recommendations for reform. Over the past year we advocated with the Australian Government to set up a dedicated mechanism to implement priority recommendations.
We also completed two significant projects to address racism: our Racism@Uni study and Seen and Heard project. The Racism@Uni study national online survey received more than 76,000 survey responses from students and staff from 42 universities across the country. The survey findings highlight widespread racism experienced by students and staff and our survey report outlines recommendations to create safer, more inclusive campus environments.
Our Seen and Heard project involved consultations with Australia’s Jewish, Muslim, Palestinian, Arab and Israeli communities who were experiencing increased racism after the 7 October 2023 attack and the war in Gaza. Our team worked with community organisations to convene consultations and meetings across the country. The feedback we received and documented in our report provides a crucial evidence base to drive reforms to eliminate racism and respond better to the local impacts of violence overseas.
We provided expert feedback to a range of inquiries into racism, including the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion. We also responded to a significant increase in complaints of antisemitic racial discrimination and racial vilification.
Ensuring access to justice for people who experience discrimination
One of our core functions is our free public service receiving, investigating and, where appropriate, conciliating discrimination and human rights complaints. The vast majority of complaints do not proceed into the federal court system.
Over the past year, we implemented a range of innovations to boost the number of complaints we finalised. These measures included expanded delegations of powers to staff, increased use of pre-inquiry complaint termination powers and greater operational flexibility. These innovations were successful. We finalised 30% more complaints compared with 2024–25 and 15% more than our 7-year average.
Despite this success, our complaint backlog remains significant; at the end of the financial year we had approximately 2,531 open complaints, including complaints being actioned and complaints awaiting allocation. This is because complaint numbers continue to grow. They are 30% higher than pre-COVID levels and increased by 6% compared with 2024–25. This trend is making our service less timely and accessible. Only 52% of our complaints this year were finalised in under 12 months and conciliation success rates continue to fall. Short-term funding to address our complaint backlog ended this year. Without a significant increase in funding, this trend is likely to continue.
Preventing discrimination and human rights breaches
The Commission is the regulator of the positive duty in the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth) that requires employers and others to address workplace sexual harassment, sex discrimination, sexist conduct, and related victimisation. This relatively new duty shifts the focus towards prevention instead of responding after the damage is done and relying on individual people complaining to change unfair policies and practices.
We continue to focus on retail and hospitality workplaces, where workers experience a higher risk of sexual harassment. Across the year we opened 111 positive duty matters and closed 55. This included commencing 3 formal inquiries into large organisations, closing one inquiry and progressing 3 inquiries from the previous year.
Our education and guidance materials helping employers to comply with the positive duty were widely viewed and we launched proactive work engaging with large retail employers in collaboration with Safe Work Australia. The statutory review of the Respect@Work reforms including the positive duty will be a significant focus in 2026–27.
We have urged the Government to bring the same focus on prevention by inserting a positive duty into the other discrimination laws – the Disability Discrimination Act, the Racial Discrimination Act, and the Age Discrimination Act. The Disability Royal Commission recommended a positive duty and a range of other improvements to the Disability Discrimination Act. The Australian Government has undertaken extensive consultation on reforming the Disability Discrimination Act in response to the recommendations of the Disability Royal Commission and is currently analysing the feedback received.
We continue to call for an Australian Human Rights Act. An Australian Human Rights Act would protect people’s rights in Australian law. It would foster understanding of rights, build a culture of preventing rights violations and give people the power to take action if their rights are breached. An Australian Human Rights Act is a long overdue missing part of our democracy that would improve social cohesion.
A new strategic plan to respond to a complex and challenging environment
We launched our new strategic plan for the next 5 years in January 2026. The plan responds to a complex and challenging environment. There are significant threats to people’s rights in Australia including rising racism, increased polarisation and division, rapid technological change, climate change, persistent inequality, cost of living pressures and continued disadvantage in rural and regional areas compared to the cities.
The Plan has a strong focus on human rights education to improve understanding and acceptance of human rights and to address declining understanding of Australia’s democracy, institutions and civic responsibilities. It has a focus on systemic reforms to better protect people’s rights. It also places a greater emphasis on collaboration across the Commission, recognising that many human rights issues are interconnected. Our work is stronger through improved collaboration internally and externally.
Better protecting people’s rights in laws and policies
Over the year our Commissioners led a range of advocacy work to improve Australian laws and policies to better protect people’s rights including:
- Commissioner Katie Kiss launched her inaugural Social Justice Report, A Fair and Just Future for First Peoples. Drawing on the voices of more than 1,600 First Peoples from across Australia, the report outlines a vision for shifting Australia’s rhetoric on rights into action including by implementing the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
- Our report We’re talking about stopping violence before it begins: Supporting Quality Engagement with Children drew on the insights of more than 300 children and young people from across Australia. It offered evidence-based recommendations for building respectful, safe, and supportive relationships and preventing violence before it starts.
- We completed our On Your Terms: Youth Survey on Consent and Sex Education which received over 8,500 survey responses from young people across Australia. We are reporting on the survey in late 2026.
- We launched reports on financial elder abuse and ageism in the workplace. Commissioner Robert Fitzgerald engaged with the Australian Government to progress the development of a new UN Convention on the Rights of Older Persons.
- We launched our Equal Identities report outlining the key human rights issues for transgender and gender diverse people.
- We continued our Speaking from experience project which involved national consultations with people who experienced workplace sexual harassment. We advocated for implementation of
the project’s recommendations and undertook a public education campaign on addressing sexual harassment. - We commenced work to implement key recommendations of the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide including on preventing sexual misconduct in the military.
- We are entering the final phase of our Equality at Work project, which is supporting employers to create fairer, more accessible pathways for people with disability to obtain and retain meaningful work.
- We released reports on climate change, neurotechnology, solitary confinement and national emergency management frameworks in light of the COVID experience.
In April, we launched our first Australian Human Rights Assessment, including an assessment report card, evaluating how well Australia is protecting people’s human rights. The assessment drew on our engagement with 2 major UN reviews of Australia’s human rights performance during the year, the Universal Periodic Review and the review by the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Both reviews identified a range of human rights challenges in Australia. The Australian Government response to the UN reviews was disappointing.
Our partnerships with the Australian Defence Force, the Australian Federal Police and Australian Border Force continue to build their human rights capability. The Australian Border Force partnership will end in 2026–27. We continued our work, funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, to strengthen the capacity of regional neighbours through ASEAN, in the Pacific and with Vietnam and Laos.
During the year, we farewelled National Children’s Commissioner Anne Hollonds and welcomed Deb Tsorbaris to the role.
2026 marks 40 years since the establishment of the Commission. To celebrate this milestone, we launched a program featuring a national seminar series in partnership with state and territory commissions, and digital and video content telling the story of the Commission’s impact over the past 4 decades. The program will culminate in a special edition of our human rights awards in December.
I thank our dedicated Commissioners and staff and the many partners who we worked alongside over the past year to protect people’s rights. Human rights are the key to living well. Societies that protect human rights are stronger, healthier, safer, and more prosperous. It’s in everyone’s interest to protect people’s rights.
Hugh de Kretser
President
