The private member’s bill, introduced by Libertarian MLC John Ruddick, would have made it a criminal offence to arrange, permit, perform or assist with an abortion for sex selection. Individuals, including health practitioners, could have faced up to five years in prison, a fine of 200 penalty units, or both.

NSW law already states that Parliament opposes abortion for the purpose of sex selection, while NSW Health clinical rules restrict the practice. What Ruddick’s bill would have added was criminal punishment, bringing the threat of prison back into the regulation of abortion care seven years after NSW removed abortion from the criminal law.

Supporters of the bill framed it as a women’s right issue and sex discrimination measure.

Sydney Anglican Archbishop Kanishka Raffel, who publicly supported the proposal, said, “Regardless of the broader debates about abortion itself, this Bill should unite Parliament against sex-selective abortion, which disproportionately targets unborn girls.”

Opposing the bill, Greens health spokesperson and former GP Dr Amanda Cohn said, “The agenda of those pushing this bill has been clear from the start,” labelling it an attempt to re-criminalise abortion in NSW.

Cohn argued that the prospect of severe criminal penalties would deter healthcare workers from providing abortion services.

“Today the NSW Parliament reaffirmed that abortion is legal health care, in the face of an organised campaign to erode our hard-fought rights for reproductive choice,” said Dr Cohn.

“This bill was never about protecting girls—it was a thinly veiled attempt to incrementally re-criminalise abortion and make it harder to access,” Dr Cohn said.

“This bill is not really about sex-selective abortions, which the evidence shows is not happening in NSW,” said Cohn, who is a former regional GP and abortion care provider. “Anti-abortion campaigners are lobbying politicians to incrementally erode abortion rights.”

“Health professionals have told me they will not continue to provide abortion care if the laws are successful, as the uncertainty and risks are too great. Practitioners shouldn’t be put in a position of being expected to doubt, interrogate, and police their patients.”

The vote came amid a renewed political campaign over abortion in NSW.

Hours before the bill was considered, NSW One Nation leader Mike Newman appeared alongside anti-abortion campaigner Joanna Howe at a rally outside Parliament.

During the rally, Newman told the crowd One Nation wanted to “stop abortion” before later saying he had misspoken and was referring specifically to sex-selective and later-term abortions.

“We want to support people who want to make sure that abortion rights—we want to stop them,” Newman said. “We want to make sure that same-sex … oh sorry, abortion is stopped… We want to make sure that people have the right to life and we will vote for you in favour of that.”

Newman also said that if One Nation gained power, it would put the issue back on the parliamentary agenda.

But just how prevalent is sex-selective abortion in NSW? A NSW Health review, tabled in Parliament, examined 15,973 abortions reported between October 2019 and September 2020, where just 13 were recorded as having been performed solely for sex selection—and NSW Health concluded that 10 of those were considered likely reporting errors because the terminations occurred before nine weeks, when there was no readily available and reliable way of determining fetal sex. That left three notifications in the dataset, equivalent to around 0.02 per cent of reported abortions.

Supporters of the bill have pointed instead to a 2025 study examining historical Australian birth data that identified unusually male-skewed birth ratios among some migrant populations. The researchers said the patterns could be consistent with prenatal sex selection but explicitly noted that their study did not establish causation.

The debate also revived arguments NSW Parliament confronted when abortion was finally decriminalised in 2019. Then, Labor’s Penny Sharpe warned Parliament that “criminalising abortion does not stop abortion, it just makes it unsafe.”

Seven years later, the defeated bill would have once again attached prison sentences to the provision of some abortions.

Who voted what?

The proposed legislation was the subject of a conscience vote, allowing Labor and Coalition MPs to vote independently of their parties.

Voting cut across party lines. Labor’s Anthony D’Adam, Sarah Kaine, Penny Sharpe and eight other Labor MPs also voted against the bill, while three of their caucus colleagues—Greg Donnelly, Courtney Houssos and Stephen Lawrence—voted for it.

The Coalition was similarly divided: Liberals Aileen MacDonald, Jacqui Munro and Natalie Ward voted against the bill, while six Liberal colleagues supported it. Nationals Scott Barrett and Sarah Mitchell voted against it; Wes Fang and Nichole Overall voted in favour.

That cross-party opposition echoed Health Minister Ryan Park’s position before the vote. Park had argued there was no evidence of widespread sex-selective abortion in NSW and said abortion should not be returned to the criminal law.

NSW Greens health spokesperson Dr Amanda Cohn welcomed Wednesday’s result, saying Parliament had reaffirmed that “abortion is legal health care.”

Cohn and other opponents argued the threat of criminal penalties could deter doctors and other health professionals from providing abortions, particularly in regional communities where services are already limited.

Five MPs did not vote, including Legalise Cannabis MP Jeremy Buckingham, Shooters, Fishers and Farmers MP Robert Borsak, Independent Tania Mihailuk and Labor Treasurer Daniel Mookhey. Nationals MP Ben Franklin was chairing proceedings and therefore unable to vote.

The final vote—21 to 16—left NSW’s existing abortion laws unchanged.

Attention turns to abortion access

With the proposed criminal restrictions defeated, the Greens are now calling for the NSW Government to expand access to abortion through the public health system.

Cohn said abortion services were still not reliably available through public hospitals across NSW and called for more hospitals to provide abortion care, alongside greater support for GPs providing early medical abortions.

Access has remained a significant issue despite abortion being decriminalised in NSW in 2019.

NSW Health’s current guidance confirms abortion is legal health care in the state. For pregnancies of 22 weeks or less, the decision to have an abortion rests with the pregnant person. Abortions after 22 weeks require involvement from a specialist medical practitioner under the legislation.

The state’s framework has also recently expanded the health professionals who can provide early medical abortion care, with appropriately qualified nurse practitioners and endorsed midwives able to provide medical abortions up to nine weeks within their scope of practice.

The NSW Government has acknowledged barriers to abortion care, particularly for people experiencing geographical or financial disadvantage. A recent NSW Health grant program sought providers to deliver additional low- or no-cost medical and surgical abortion services for women facing barriers to timely care.

For the Greens, Wednesday’s vote therefore settles only one part of the abortion debate.

“The best way to safeguard access to abortion from further attempts to restrict it,” Cohn said, “is to embed abortion care within the public health system.”

The Jezebel Report is an independent feminist publication investigating faith, power, purity culture and church accountability.

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It is the line from James Howe, husband of leading Australian anti-abortion campaigner Joanna Howe, that has attracted headlines this week. It is the kind of sentence that sounds almost too extraordinary to survive context, except the context actually makes it worse.

During a September 9 episode of The Dr Jo Show, James and his wife, prominent anti-abortion campaigner Professor Joanna Howe, repeatedly rejected consent as a framework for sexual relationships, presenting marriage as the only alternative. They also mocked the idea of consent education for boys and dismissed sexual pressure as not constituting rape.

The episode, titled The RADICAL Feminist Behind Albanese’s Social Media Crackdown, was principally an attack on Teach Us Consent founder Chanel Contos, and her advocacy on consent education and social-media algorithms.

The 9 September podcast also opened with Joanna Howe promoting an anti-abortion rally outside NSW Parliament, scheduled for September 15.

Around half an hour later, the conversation turned from feminism and Contos to sex, marriage and consent.

Joanna Howe describes her own ‘rules’ for when she and James were dating. “Stay public, stay vertical. It’s like, not much can go wrong and, and you know… [Contos] makes it sound like men are just like, waiting to rape you. But if you get really drunk and you go into dark spaces where you’re alone and you don’t know the man very well because you met him on Tinder, you know, or like it’s just—”

Before she could finish, James interrupted, “Consent is just not a freaking thing. Like for me, like I just—I just don’t—I don’t do consent. I don’t like—we don’t do consent.”

Joanna immediately recognised how the comment would sound, saying through laughter, “They’re going to clip that up online and you’re going to sound really bad.”

In response, Howe said, “But I don’t give a fuck.”

Howe then doubled down. “I do marriage, man. Like I don’t—I don’t do consent!” He mocks in a feminised voice, “Ah, consent! Do you consent?” And later again: “We don’t do consent. We just—we’re just married. Like this is my wife.”

While these comments have since received wider media attention, the full podcast shows the couple went considerably further than the line that has dominated coverage.

‘Consent is not the answer’

Immediately after saying he “doesn’t do consent”, James connected consent education to what he described as the failures of feminism and “free love”.

In an extended monologue, he moved from premarital sex to contraception, abortion and sexual assault: “This is what these feminists have always done, man. They’re like, ‘Free love. Free love. It’s so amazing. Free love. We can have sex with whoever we want.’”

He then mocked the development of contraception: “‘Oh shit, you’re getting pregnant. Oh crap. Well that didn’t work very well. Here, let’s take the pill. Yay! Free love. Free love. Oh shit, we’ve all got diseases. That’s not working. Here, here’s a condom.’”

Howe’s monologue then moved to abortion and rape: “‘Free love. Free love. Oh no. We feel like we’re getting raped. Even if—even if it’s not rape, but we just feel like we’re getting raped because we, you know, we’re getting pressured or whatever. Oh, now we need consent in schools.’”

James concluded: “None of it freaking works. Like none of—have you not figured that out yet? Consent is not the answer. It’s just another—it’s just another fake solution waiting to fail.”

Joanna Howe responded, “that’s right.”

She then argued that when people have sex within marriage and have “chosen [partners] wisely”, then: “you don’t need to talk about consent because you have a good marriage... it’s the only consent that works.”

Marriage is not automatic consent

The comments are notable given Howe’s professional background: she is a Professor of Law at Adelaide University and holds a doctorate in law from the University of Oxford—and yet the discussion bears an uncanny resemblance to one of the oldest legal justifications for marital rape immunity.

For centuries, English common law treated a woman’s marriage as a kind of permanent sexual consent. The doctrine generally associated with English jurist Sir Matthew Hale held that a wife could not withdraw the sexual consent supposedly given through marriage. That principle travelled into Australian law, where for much of our history a man generally could not be prosecuted for raping his wife.

Australian jurisdictions dismantled that immunity through reforms throughout the 1970s to the early 90s.

In South Australia, where the Howes live, the law could hardly be clearer.

Consent is defined through law as freely and voluntarily agreeing to sexual activity, and a person is not presumed to have consented to sexual intercourse simply because they are married to the other person. Rape law also expressly recognises that consent can be withdrawn after sexual activity has begun.

The Howes’ discussion about consent and marriage also points to a broader problem: sexual violence in Australia is not happening primarily between strangers.

ABS data shows that in women’s most recent sexual assault by a male, 53 per cent identified the perpetrator as an intimate partner, and 69 per cent said the assault occurred in a home. Separately, around 618,500 Australian women reported having experienced sexual violence by a cohabiting partner since the age of 15.

Consent is still extremely important inside intimate relationships, and sexual violence does not stop at the front door of a marriage.

The Howes’ anti-abortion and anti-feminist politics

Joanna Howe has gained notoriety as one of Australia’s most prominent anti-abortion campaigners.

She has campaigned for legislative restrictions on abortion in multiple states, organised anti-abortion rallies and spent heavily promoting her campaigns on social media. The ABC reported in July that Howe had spent more than half a million dollars on Facebook and Instagram advertising her anti-abortion agenda since 2020.

Her husband, James Howe, is also actively involved in that campaigning, and their hostility to contemporary feminism is similarly explicit.

In the September 9 podcast, while discussing Contos’s comments about relationships and women’s careers, Joanna tells her husband: “By that metric, I should be completely screwed because you think feminism is the root of all evil… I used to be, you know, a good little feminist before I met you.”

James responds by criticising the idea that women should judge their success through their careers, and says, “Woke men are honestly the most undesirable, unattractive men.”

This is the ideological framework in which the couple’s later comments about consent sit: sex is presented as properly belonging only within marriage; contemporary feminism is blamed for encouraging women to prioritise career and sexual autonomy; and contraception, abortion and consent education are presented as successive attempts to manage the consequences of sex outside that model.

The Howes’ comments also sit within a field of research examining how religious beliefs, traditional gender roles and “purity culture” can shape attitudes towards sexual violence.

Joanna Howe has publicly identified as a practising Catholic, while she and her husband have both participated in Catholic and Christian events and advocacy.

Several studies have identified associations between particular forms of conservative religious belief and what researchers call ‘rape-myth acceptance’—false or stereotyped beliefs that can minimise sexual violence, blame victims or make coercive experiences less likely to be recognised as rape.

A US study involving 653 university students found participants identifying as Roman Catholic or Protestant reported greater rape-myth acceptance than atheist and agnostic participants. Religiosity was also positively associated with rape-myth acceptance after researchers controlled for conservative political ideology.

Another study of predominantly Christian university students found rigid religious fundamentalism was indirectly associated with greater rape-myth acceptance, while a form of religiosity characterised by questioning and exploration was associated with lower acceptance.

Another study into religious purity culture, in which researchers surveyed Christian men and women, found stronger endorsement of purity-culture beliefs was associated with greater rape-myth acceptance, and a greater likelihood of incorrectly identifying scenarios involving marital rape and acquaintance rape as consensual sex.

The Howes’ attack on consent education

As mentioned earlier, the podcast episode was ostensibly an attack on 2023 NSW Young Australian of the Year nominee Chanel Contos, founder of Teach Us Consent, whom the Howes accuse of promoting an inappropriate model of sex education.

Full disclosure: The editor of The Jezebel Report fully supports the work of Teach Us Consent.

The organisation emerged after Contos collected thousands of testimonies from young Australians describing sexual assault and harassment during their school years. Her petition for earlier, age-appropriate consent education attracted around 50,000 signatures and became part of a wider national reckoning over what young people were (and were not) being taught about sex, boundaries and respectful relationships.

In their podcast, the Howes played a clip of Contos discussing the kind of direct language young people can use to establish sexual consent.

“Can I take your top off? Can I kiss you? Can I touch you here?” Contos said. “It’s just so simple. And that is actually exactly how it goes. And I think those conversations need to be explicitly said in classrooms to give children, like, language to be able to use.”

The Howes immediately characterised the comments as a proposal for teachers to conduct sexual role-plays with young children.

“She literally [is] proposing that teachers should be doing this in classrooms,” James said.

The pair then acted out an imaginary lesson involving what James described as “a little boy” and “a little girl in the bathroom”.

“Okay, kids. So, uh, when you, you know, a little boy is talking to a little girl in the bathroom and he says to her, ‘Can I take your top off?’ You know, that’s consent. So, we might practice that.”.

Howe continued the imagined classroom exercise: “So, little boy, can you please say to little Sandy here, ‘Can I take your top off?’ … Okay, Peter, can you please talk to Wendy and say, um, ‘Can I touch you here?’”

The excerpt of Contos played by the Howes did not say teachers should instruct young children to proposition one another, remove clothing or role-play sexual activity. That scenario was introduced by the Howes themselves after the clip ended.

It also bears little resemblance to how age-appropriate consent education is described in Australia’s national framework.

The National Respectful Relationships Education Framework, released in March, requires consent and respectful relationships education to be both age and developmentally appropriate and evidence-based. It specifically states that learning should build progressively as children mature.

For the youngest students, that begins with bodily autonomy and boundaries. The framework says younger cohorts may learn emotional awareness and regulation, while older students progress to subjects including sexual health, relationships and sexual consent.

Mainstream Australian parenting guidance takes the same approach. For younger children, the Raising Children Network recommends teaching simple consent concepts such as: “It’s OK if you don’t want to kiss Aunty Su. Do you want to give her a high-five instead?”

In other words, early consent education does exist—but it does not mean teaching six-year-olds how to negotiate sexual intercourse.

That distinction is particularly relevant because the Howes repeatedly present direct language used with adolescents as though it is being directed at very young children, and describe Contos as a “freak.”

During the episode, Joanna said Contos was contributing to “leftist brainwashing programs” in schools, while the pair referred to consent education as “indoctrination”.

The Howes also made a more specific claim about Teach Us Consent’s government funding.

Joanna said the organisation’s federal funding was “part of rolling out Teach Us Consent across all schools across the entire Australian curriculum”.

Despite the Howes claiming Teach Us Consent received $3.5 million to effectively march into classrooms and deliver this material, the Commonwealth’s funding announcement says the $3.5 million grant was designed to develop and distribute social media resources on consent, particularly for young people aged 16 and over.

The Commonwealth also records the program separately from school-based consent and respectful relationships education measures.

The federal government’s actual school-based Consent and Respectful Relationships Education program is funded separately, with $77.6 million provided to states, territories and non-government school sectors to support schools delivering age-appropriate programs tailored to their communities.

The Howes’ broader argument relies heavily on the idea that Contos has been personally handed millions of dollars to determine what teachers say to children in Australian classrooms. The government’s own documents do not support that characterisation.

The other fight: social media algorithms

At the same time the Howes campaign against abortion and consent education, they are also opposing proposed regulation of the online systems that researchers say are exposing boys to misogynistic content.

Joanna Howe has described Labor’s proposed Digital Duty of Care as a “censorship regime” and accused supporters of manufacturing a “misogyny crisis” to justify government control. Her podcast has specifically attacked Contos’s Fix Our Feeds campaign.

However, the research on what boys are encountering online is becoming extremely difficult to ignore.

Australian eSafety research found that algorithm recommender systems often push harmful material towards young men, and that misogynistic communities and creators attract young men by offering belonging, validation, advice and certainty.

Among Australian children aged 10 to 17, almost half have encountered offensive, sexist or hurtful material about girls or women online. More than one in ten have encountered violent sexual imagery.

A major Monash University survey released just weeks ago found 78 per cent of more than 2,600 teachers had observed or experienced sexism or misogyny in schools. Half reported an increase in gendered violence among students. Seventy per cent had noticed manosphere ideas influencing student attitudes or behaviour in the previous year.

One of the most confronting experimental studies comes from Dublin City University’s Anti-Bullying Centre, where researchers created accounts resembling teenage boys on TikTok and YouTube Shorts. All were served toxic material within 23 minutes, including accounts that had not gone looking for manosphere content. Once the accounts engaged with that material, the recommendations rapidly intensified; after a few hours, around three-quarters of recommended content in the final stage was classified as problematic or toxic.

This is what Chanel Contos is talking about—not banning boys from having opinions or hypnotising them into feminism. She has advocated for making personalised recommendation algorithms opt-in, so that a 16-year-old arriving on social media is not automatically placed inside an engagement machine that learns what makes him angry and serves him more of it.

The Albanese government’s draft does not perfectly replicate Contos’ proposal, but its “My Feed, My Way” model would require platforms to give users over 16 a choice between personalised algorithmic recommendations and a feed based on the accounts they actually chose to follow. The broader Digital Duty of Care would also require platforms to take reasonable steps to protect children from specified serious harms.

This raises a significant question for the Howes: If you are genuinely worried about children learning unhealthy ideas about sex, why would you reserve so much fury for consent educators, and comparatively little for billion-dollar platforms algorithmically feeding boys violent pornography, misogyny and male-supremacist content?

The Howes’ worldview seems to be one that places extraordinary faith in the institution of marriage, while treating many of the tools designed to protect women’s autonomy outside it—contraception, abortion, feminism and consent education—with suspicion or contempt.

The Howes’ worldview places extraordinary faith in the institution of marriage, while treating many of the tools designed to protect women’s autonomy outside it—contraception, abortion, feminism and consent education—with suspicion or contempt.

A wife is not the property of her husband, and marriage does not amount to ongoing consent to sex. A woman retains the right to refuse sexual activity, withdraw consent and make decisions about her own body after marriage just as she did before it.

As a professor of law, Howe would be well aware that modern consent laws do not treat marriage, relationships or previous sexual activity as blanket permission for future sex. Consent must exist at the time of the sexual activity in question, no matter the relationship status—and it can be withdrawn.

There is a straight line running through all of these debates—abortion, purity, sex education, feminism, marriage and consent. At its centre is the same question: who gets the final say over a woman’s body?

For feminists, that question has been fought over for generations. The answer is the same one that reshaped laws around marital rape and sexual consent: the woman herself.

The Jezebel Report contacted Joanna and James Howe for comment. Neither responded by publication.

Reported and written by Samantha Blok for The Jezebel Report.

The Jezebel Report is an independent feminist publication investigating faith, power, purity culture and church accountability.

Have information, documents or experiences relevant to this investigation? You can contact Samantha confidentially.

Follow The Jezebel Report on Instagram @thejezebelreport and on Facebook

Follow Samantha Blok on Instagram @samanthablok_ and on Facebook

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If you or someone you know is experiencing, or at risk of experiencing, domestic, family or sexual violence, contact 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732, text 0458 737 732, or access online chat at 1800RESPECT. Services are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If you are in immediate danger, call 000.

The High Court confirmed her death on Sunday, describing her contribution to the court over 16 years as “profound” and acknowledging her role in advancing women within the legal profession and judiciary.

Her death has also prompted renewed attention to the ideas that shaped her career—on equality, power, representation and the limits of symbolic progress—many of which remain strikingly relevant today. Gaudron’s career and legacy stretch far beyond the fact she was Australia’s first female High Court judge.

Before the High Court came equal pay

Gaudron was born in Moree, regional New South Wales, in 1943, the daughter of a railway worker.

Her path to the most powerful court in Australia was hardly predetermined. As a young woman, she was reportedly advised by a local solicitor that she was aiming too high: girls didn’t do law; perhaps she should consider working at the telephone exchange instead.

She did not take his advice. Instead, Gaudron attended the University of Sydney on a scholarship, graduating with first-class honours and the University Medal in Law. She was called to the NSW Bar in 1968.

Former High Court Justice Michael McHugh recalled selling his chambers to Gaudron when she was a young lawyer, only for the other barristers on the floor to refuse to accept her as a member. McHugh later wrote that the male barrister eventually accepted in her place was capable, but “was not in Mary Gaudron’s class”.

In 1972, four years after she was called to the Bar, Gaudron became the first woman appointed to the NSW Bar Council.

That same year, aged 29, she became the first woman to represent the Commonwealth in a national wage case, helping dismantle one of the most fundamental mechanisms of women’s economic inequality.

The issue before the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission went to the heart of one of feminism’s longest-running economic battles: what does “equal pay” actually mean when work traditionally performed by women has historically been valued less?

Gaudron argued for ‘equal pay for work of equal value’, helping establish a principle that went beyond simply paying a woman and man the same wage for an identical job.

It is difficult to overstate the significance of this case for women. The gender pay gap did not disappear in 1972, of course, but the decision challenged the premise that female-dominated work could simply be considered less valuable than male-dominated work.

A voice for women in the workforce

Two years later, Gaudron was appointed deputy president of the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission. While there, she sat on another case that materially changed women’s working lives: the 1979 Maternity Leave Case.

The decision established a standard entitlement of up to 52 weeks of unpaid maternity leave for eligible permanent workers, including job protection on return. The entitlement was subsequently extended across federal and state awards covering a large proportion of the Australian workforce.

Today, the idea that a woman should not automatically lose her job because she has a baby sounds fairly basic, but until that point, it wasn’t.

Gaudron went on to become NSW Solicitor-General in 1981—the first woman to hold the equivalent office in any Australian state—and NSW’s first female Queen’s Counsel. In 1987, at 44 years old, Mary Gaudron became the first woman appointed to the High Court of Australia. For her entire 16 years until retirement, she was the only woman sitting on the Court.

In 1989, two years after she became the first woman on the High Court, Gaudron told her male judicial colleagues she was going to speak to a gathering of women lawyers. According to her, they reacted as though she had announced she was going to start “dancing the Can-Can,” arguing there was no discrimination in law and no need for women to have their own professional organisations. They claimed Gaudron was “being discriminatory” herself against men for even attending.

“Their attitude was short-lived,” said Gaudron, “not because of anything I did but because they discovered on their arrival in Perth that the judicial protocols, which had been observed with respect to the High Court sittings in Perth since 1903, simply could not accommodate a woman Justice of the High Court.”

Equality for one means equality for all

Gaudron’s fight for equality extended well beyond women’s rights. Across her career, she was a strong advocate for human rights and for a legal system that recognised the experiences of people historically excluded from it.

In 1992, Gaudron was one of the High Court justices in the majority in the landmark Mabo decision that overturned the legal fiction of terra nullius and recognised that the native title rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples could survive British colonisation.

In a joint judgment with Justice William Deane, Gaudron confronted the brutality behind the legal doctrine in direct terms, describing the dispossession of Aboriginal peoples as “the darkest aspect of the history of this nation.”

For Gaudron, equality was never simply about treating everybody identically. She argued that justice required the law to recognise people’s different histories, circumstances and experiences; something she also spoke about explicitly when discussing women, race and disadvantage.

“Equality is not blind to differences,” she said. “Equality involves the recognition of genuine difference and, where it exists, different treatment adapted to that difference.”

Being the first isn’t the same thing as achieving equality

After her death, tributes have understandably focused on Gaudron’s long list of firsts. First woman on the NSW Bar Council; first female NSW Solicitor-General; first female NSW QC; first female High Court judge. But Gaudron herself was suspicious of treating those milestones as evidence that equality had arrived.

Throughout her life, she remained an outspoken advocate for women’s equality within a profession she believed remained structurally stacked against them.

Speaking at the launch of Australian Women Lawyers in 1997, she reflected that women of her generation assumed progress would follow achievement.

“The trouble with the women of my generation,” she said, “is that we thought if we knocked the doors down, success would be inevitable: the trouble with the men of your generation is that so many still think that, if they hold the doors open, we will be forever grateful.”

Equality, equal justice and equality of opportunity are complex ideas,” she said, and were not achieved simply because “the doors are open”.

At the time, women had been graduating from Australian law schools in significant numbers for decades, yet they remained badly underrepresented among senior barristers, partners and judges.

Gaudron’s response to the familiar claim that it was simply a matter of waiting for the pipeline to catch up was wonderfully direct. “It has been said for many, many years that it is only a matter of time until women are properly represented... Well, how much time?”

Five years later, at the Women Lawyers Association of NSW’s 50th anniversary dinner in 2002, Gaudron was even more direct. She called the argument that women of merit would inevitably rise to silk ‘dishonest’.” She then explicitly argued that the men defining merit had benefited from not competing with women on equal terms.

She was also critical of the way women had been expected to succeed in law by adapting themselves to institutions built around men. “Very many of us became honorary men,” she said in 1997 at the launch of Australian Women Lawyers. “We thought that was equality.”

Gaudron argued that women had often been forced to choose between conforming to established workplace culture or being treated as less serious, less capable or less suited to the profession. She also challenged whether the structure of the Bar itself had been designed in ways that made it harder for women to succeed

“Could it be that the work practices at the Bar are not congenial to women?” Gaudron said. “Could it be that the system of patronage... is inimical to women? Could it be that the environment that men have created is hostile?”

Nearly 30 years later, women are still disappearing on the way to the top

There has unquestionably been progress. Gaudron was once the sole woman on the High Court. Today, three of its seven justices—Michelle Gordon, Jacqueline Gleeson and Jayne Jagot—are women.

But look further down the legal hierarchy and Gaudron’s “how much time?” question starts to sound surprisingly current.

Australian data published this year found women now make up 58 per cent of lawyers across participating organisations. At senior levels, that falls to 45 per cent. At barristers’ chambers, women represented just 23 per cent of barristers and 14 per cent of Senior Counsel in the organisations surveyed.

NSW Bar Association figures tell a similar story. In 2024, women made up about 26 per cent of practising NSW barristers, but less than 16 per cent of silks, and while the Law Council announced this year that its equitable briefing targets had finally been reached for the first time, the targets themselves were modest: women receiving 30 per cent of briefs and 30 per cent of briefing fees. Women ultimately received 32 per cent of briefs and 31 per cent of fees.

That is progress, but it is also a fairly extraordinary statistic to be celebrating in a profession in which women now make up the majority of lawyers.

Mary’s Gaurdon’s lasting legacy

Gaudron retired from the High Court in 2003 and later served on the International Labour Organization’s Administrative Tribunal. She died at 83, more than five decades after first forcing her way into a profession that had repeatedly made clear how little space it intended to give women.

Mary Gaudron’s legacy deserves to be reported because she was the first woman to sit on Australia’s High Court, but the more interesting legacy is what she did with the power she accumulated once she got there. She had a hand in changing how Australia valued women’s work; she helped secure maternity leave and job protection for working mothers; she sat on the court that recognised native title in Mabo; and she spent decades openly challenging a legal profession that congratulated itself for allowing women through the door while continuing to concentrate its greatest power in male hands.

Gaudron’s career was full of firsts, but she never treated firsts as the finish line. For her, equality meant changing the institutions themselves, not simply allowing women into them.

“Go to it!” was Mary Gaudron’s call to women. “Go be yourselves!”

Reported and written by Samantha Blok for The Jezebel Report.

The Jezebel Report is an independent feminist publication investigating faith, power, purity culture and church accountability.

Have information, documents or experiences relevant to this investigation? You can contact Samantha confidentially.

Follow The Jezebel Report on Instagram @thejezebelreport and on Facebook

Follow Samantha Blok on Instagram @samanthablok_ and on Facebook

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