History of Decriminalization in Australia

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In 1995, New South Wales, Australia became the first jurisdiction in the world to fully decriminalize sex work. Long before New Zealand’s 2003 reforms and long before most current decrim campaigns in the U.S., sex workers in Sydney and across NSW were taking on police corruption, Victorian-era morality laws, and the HIV/AIDS crisis – and winning.

This two-part series from The Oldest Profession Podcast tells that story: how decriminalization happened, what it changed, how it spread across Australia, and why sex workers are still on the frontlines of a new fight over online surveillance and platform crackdowns.

Part 1 – How New South Wales Became the First to Decriminalize Sex Work

Host Kaytlin Bailey begins by grounding us in the long history of sex work in Australia. Sex workers didn’t just appear when lawmakers and tabloids decided to notice them. From the earliest days of colonization:

• Sex workers were overrepresented among the first white arrivals.
  

• They ran venues, organized major social events, raised funds for “forgotten families,” and shaped the social life of early settler communities.
  

At the same time, colonization brought tight control over women’s sexuality and the violent oppression of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. As Elena Jeffreys, a cis white sex worker and advocacy lead at Scarlet Alliance (the Australian Sex Workers Association), explains, Australia’s sex work laws were imported from Victorian England and used to police both sex workers and Indigenous communities. Scarlet Alliance now includes leadership from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sex workers through ATSISWAG, a dedicated advisory group.

Early feminists, “victimless crimes,” and street decrim

By the 1970s, a coalition of left-wing feminists, harm reduction advocates, and sex workers were organizing against so-called “victimless crimes.” One of those was street-based sex work.

Transgender sex worker, sociologist, and organizer Roberta Perkins was at the center of this effort. Working in Sydney’s Kings Cross in flamboyant trans-led shows and brothels, she saw firsthand how criminalization harmed sex workers. Roberta joined forces with feminists pushing to repeal laws that criminalized “victimless acts,” and persuaded them to include harsh street soliciting laws in their campaigns.

In 1979, those efforts paid off: the Summary Offences Act was repealed and street-based sex work was decriminalized in New South Wales. Brothels and other “business aspects” of sex work remained criminalized, but street workers could no longer be arrested simply for working.

Longtime activist Julie Bates describes how that change transformed the landscape: workers left brothels for the street, where they had more control over their hours, money, and safety. Street-based workers also became early leaders in enforcing condom use, while condoms in brothels were still treated as evidence of a crime.

Police violence, internalized stigma, and the Australian Prostitutes Collective

Julie’s path into advocacy ran through both the legal system and the street. As a young law clerk in a criminal practice, she took statements from clients who were systematically brutalized by police – sex workers, trans workers, brothel owners, drug users and dealers. She watched officers deny that people were in custody while they were being beaten just a few meters away.

Later, as a street-based worker in Sydney, she experienced the same policing from the other side. A low, rainy winter night, when she turned away a Salvation Army offer of “cold tea and sympathy,” became the moment she realized she needed a peer – someone who understood sex work from the inside – and that “there was no me here” in Sydney.

Looking for that missing peer advocate led her to a tiny flyer about a study on “prostitutes and this new thing called AIDS.” Within 24 hours she was writing submissions to government alongside Roberta Perkins, helping to found what became the Australian Prostitutes Collective.

With early government funding, the Collective opened a drop-in center in Kings Cross, hired staff, wrote work plans, and became a credible, professional, peer-led organization. Media coverage followed, giving sex workers a platform to say, plainly, that sex work is real work and to spread life-saving information about HIV and condoms.

HIV/AIDS and the politics of condoms

By the early 1980s, sex workers, gay men, and people who inject drugs in Sydney were already seeing the effects of HIV. Even before all the science was settled, the sex worker community was “putting two and two together” and insisting on condoms.

Street-based workers in Kings Cross led the way. Julie recalls walking into the office of a brothel owner closely tied to organized crime and crooked cops and pitching a radical idea: make condoms non-negotiable and publicly say so. The industry was “in the toilet,” blamed for the spread of HIV, and pelted with eggs and rotten tomatoes. Something had to change.

The pitch worked. One by one, brothels committed to safe sex policies: any client who refused a condom would be turned away. Sex worker organizations across the country ran parallel campaigns, and Australia’s sex workers became global leaders in HIV prevention.

Zoning tricks, “disorderly houses,” and the Wood Royal Commission

Decriminalizing street-based work did not end hostility from the state or neighbors.

Eurydice Aroney, who lived and worked in Sydney’s inner-city red light district, describes an area packed with sex workers, clients, and tourists – and a growing residential backlash. Police and councils responded with familiar tools:

• Vague bans on soliciting “near” or “within sight of” residences. In a high-rise suburb, that meant there were almost no legal places left to stand.
  

• Reviving old statutes like the Disorderly Houses Act to shut down small, women-run brothels that had operated peacefully for decades.
  

• Aggressively enforcing “living off the earnings” offences against receptionists, drivers, landlords, and even family members.
  

At the same time, police corruption flourished. As Julie notes, where there is prohibition there is corruption: sex work “still exists,” but now it becomes a tool for cops to extract bribes and wield power.

Ultimately, a broad inquiry into corruption – the Wood Royal Commission – exposed the extent to which criminalized sex work had become a vehicle for bribery, extortion, and abuse. A front-page photo of a 75-year-old madam being dragged out of a cottage by two young officers crystallized public disgust. Many people who had always felt uneasy about “victimless crimes” now had a concrete image of state overreach.

Research, representation, and the 1995 decriminalization

While the commission dug into police misconduct, Roberta and her colleagues were building an evidence base. Sex workers were hired to collect data; Roberta, working with doctors and social workers, produced more than twenty research papers documenting the realities of sex work in NSW. Sex workers were no longer invisible subjects; they were recognized as experts.

A large, bipartisan parliamentary committee, the NSW Select Committee Upon Prostitution (1983–1986), traveled, met sex workers, and examined global approaches. Its major recommendation: decriminalize all forms of sex work and fund sex worker organizations focused on health and safety.

By 1995, the political moment and the research lined up. New South Wales passed full decriminalization with comfortable majorities in both houses and support from both major parties. As Elena puts it, the vote wasn’t just about one state’s law – it proved that decriminalization is possible and gave sex workers everywhere a new benchmark.

Part 2 – Life Under Decrim, the Spread Across Australia, and the Online Frontline

Part 2 of the series picks up at that historic vote and asks: What changed after decrim? How did the model spread? And why are sex workers still fighting new forms of criminalization online?

How decriminalization changed everyday life

For sex workers in New South Wales, the shift was immediate and profound.

Elena describes the difference in her own work life, having worked in a fully criminalized setting (Perth, Western Australia), a licensed/legal model (Queensland), and then under decrim in NSW. Under decrim, an entire layer of constant stress vanished. The fear of raids, arrest, and criminal records no longer defined every decision.

Eurydice notes that in a decriminalized environment, it became normal for sex workers to report abuse, violence, or exploitation to the police and expect some level of protection. That is a radical reversal from the era when police were the primary predators and extortionists.

The warning about councils—and how right it was

The day before the decrim law took effect, the attorney general called Roberta Perkins in to show her the final package. Roberta immediately saw the flaw: the law handed responsibility for managing a “very difficult industry” to local councils without giving them clear planning rules, resources, or guidance.

To this day, local councils are often the biggest obstacle to sex workers in NSW.

As Elena explains:

• No coherent planning regulations were established at the start. Councils had enormous discretion over brothel approvals and enforcement.
  

• Decision-making is personality-driven, electoral, and opaque.
  

• Enforcement is highly racialized, falling hardest on Asian and migrant-run workplaces (particularly massage parlors) and on Asian migrant sex workers.
  

More privileged sex workers – often white, housed, and working indoors or privately – can sometimes sidestep the sharpest edge of that regulation. Migrant and Asian workers are pushed to the front lines of anti-sex work sentiment and policing, often under the banner of “anti-trafficking.”

What decrim looks like in a neighborhood

Eurydice offers an on-the-ground view of life under decrim. In her inner-city suburb, about ten kilometers from central Sydney, brothels sit unobtrusively above a row of ordinary shops – delicatessens, dry cleaners, pubs. There are no neon signs, no “seedy” street scene.

When she interviews passersby on the sidewalk, almost no one realizes they’re standing under a brothel, even after years of living and shopping there. Shop owners aren’t perturbed. There’s “nothing happening” on the street: no visible crime wave, no chaos. Just a normal, “happy little shopping center.”

Decrim, she argues, has helped create a lack of hysteria about sex work. When sex work is no longer framed as an emergency or a crime scene, communities can see that it’s just another kind of work happening quietly in the background.

Decrim vs licensing: the rest of Australia catches up

While NSW embraced decrim, other Australian jurisdictions tried licensing and tight regulation instead—even when their own inquiries had recommended decriminalization.

Elena maps the landscape:

• Victoria and Queensland initially adopted licensing/legalization models. By multiple measures, these regimes have failed: they leave many workers outside the licensed system, push people underground, and often produce worse outcomes than straightforward criminalization.
  

• In 2020, after years of campaigning, the Northern Territory adopted decriminalization, including clearer planning rules and stronger work health and safety protections than NSW had in the 1990s.
  

• In 2022, Victoria passed decriminalization via a two-stage process. That structure let state government set extremely clear, black-and-white rules for local councils, reducing opportunities for local opposition to twist or stall implementation.
  

• In Queensland, a seven-year campaign led to the passage of decrim legislation, with implementation beginning in August 2024.
  

Taken together, Northern Territory, Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria now have some form of decrim. Other jurisdictions remain under older models. Across these experiments, the lesson is consistent: licensing fails, decrim works.

The new frontline: online laws, age verification, and digital rights

Even in places where sex work is decriminalized offline, sex workers still face a wave of new control online.

Sex worker and technologist Eliza Sorensen, co-founder of Assembly Four, Switter, and Tryst.link, walks us through Australia’s Online Safety Act and the rapid expansion of age verification and platform liability:

• The Online Safety Act imposes “basic expectations” on every platform, regardless of size, pushing them to over-censor sexual content and ban sex workers outright.
  

• Age verification schemes, rushed through parliament “to protect young people,” force users to prove their age to access sexual, queer, or reproductive health content—creating massive data trails about some of the most sensitive aspects of their lives.
  

• Implementing age verification is expensive. For independent sex workers running their own sites or smaller community platforms, the cost per verification attempt can be ruinous.
  

For queer people, young people seeking information, and anyone in hostile political climates (including parts of the U.S. where gender and reproductive rights are under attack), these systems make the internet more dangerous, not safer. As Eliza points out, being forced to hand over ID to visit a porn site, a queer youth resource, or an abortion information page creates a record that can be weaponized.

Sex workers know this better than most. They already face intense scrutiny from banks, payment processors, and platforms, many of which deny them basic services or deplatform them without recourse.

Switter, Tryst, and building our own infrastructure

Assembly Four grew out of a simple idea: build tools that make sex workers’ lives easier, without the predatory pricing and exploitation common in the adult industry.

• Switter was a sex worker-run instance of the open-source Mastodon software, offering a social media space by and for sex workers. At its peak, Switter had more than 400,000 users.
  

• In response to FOSTA-SESTA and global platform bans, Switter became a critical refuge—but also a target. Infrastructure providers like Cloudflare kicked the project off their services, forcing Switter’s team into constant firefighting.
  

• To support Switter and build something fit-for-purpose, Assembly Four launched Tryst.link, a sex worker advertising platform that treats sex workers as clients, not liabilities.
  

Tryst is built around privacy-conscious design: IDs are deleted after verification, only minimal audit stubs are kept, and any law enforcement access must be backed by a valid, narrowly targeted judicial subpoena. Most of the rare subpoenas they receive involve serious crimes, and Tryst has also supported sex workers pursuing justice when they’ve been harmed.

Crucially, Eliza emphasizes that Assembly Four and Tryst are not “neutral tech companies.” They are projects built by sex workers and activists who believe sex workers deserve access to platforms without stigma or discrimination—and that digital rights and sex workers’ rights are inseparable.

Lessons from Australia: Power, Vigilance, and Shared Freedom

Across both episodes, a few themes stand out:

• Decriminalization works. It improves safety, health, and autonomy for sex workers, reduces police abuse, and lowers community panic.
  

• Wins are fragile. Racist and xenophobic enforcement, local planning powers, and online surveillance can chip away at decrim even when the law looks good on paper.
  

• Sex workers are experts in harm reduction. From early HIV condom campaigns to digital safety practices, sex workers’ strategies for keeping each other safe are a blueprint for broader movements.
  

• Everyone has a stake in these fights. You don’t have to buy or sell sex to need privacy, access to information, and freedom from constant monitoring and punishment.
  

As Kaytlin notes in her closing reflection, the story of decriminalization in New South Wales is ultimately a story about community power. Sex workers across Australia built strong peer networks, organized with feminists, unions, and public health allies, and forced their way into decision-making spaces. They won historic legal change—and they continue to push back as the battleground shifts to local councils, banking, and the internet itself.

Sex workers know how to keep each other safe. In an age of growing surveillance and censorship, the rest of the world has a lot to learn from them.

🎧 Listen to both episodes of “Decriminalization in New South Wales Australia” on The Oldest Profession Podcast, and sign up for our weekly newsletter at oldprosonline.org for ongoing coverage of sex worker rights around the world.