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While courts were rejecting its charity status, Equality Australia was already collecting tax-deductible donations through a workaround arrangement. Labor then made it official.

A bill before the Senate would hand Equality Australia deductible gift recipient status — overriding a regulator’s refusal, two court losses, and documents showing the group’s own agenda targets Christian schools and religious freedom.

Family First leader Lyle Shelton has urged the Senate to block the measure via a formal submission to the Senate Economics Legislation Committee. “This isn’t charity. It’s politics,” Shelton said. “Tax-deductible status is a public subsidy.”

The provision is buried in the Treasury Laws Amendment (Supporting Choice in Superannuation and Other Measures) Bill 2025, which passed the House of Representatives in November.

Queensland Senator Malcolm Roberts has also called for the bill’s defeat, warning it hands Equality Australia “a taxpayer-funded war chest to attack the rights of parents and faith-based education.”

Equality Australia applied for deductible gift recipient (DGR) status — which allows donors to claim tax deductions on contributions — through the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission in August 2020. The ACNC refused.

Equality Australia then appealed to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal and lost.

It then appealed to the Full Federal Court, and lost again.

Just twenty days after the Full Federal Court ruling, the organisation abandoned plans to seek High Court leave. It wrote directly to Assistant Charities Minister Andrew Leigh the following month.

The Albanese government subsequently announced the grant of DGR status to Equality Australia in the March 2025 federal budget. Mostyn joined Equality Australia as patron in April 2025. The Daily Declaration reported at the time that Mostyn’s patronage of the group raised questions about the Governor-General’s impartiality. Mostyn has since refused to relinquish the patronage role despite longstanding Westminster conventions requiring her office to remain above politics.

Why the Courts Said No

The legal decisions against Equality Australia were not procedural: they turned on what the organisation actually does.

The ACNC refused Equality Australia’s application on the grounds that it had “an independent, non-benevolent purpose of engaging in advocacy to agitate for law reform and social change, and this purpose did not amount to benevolent relief to people in need,” according to the ACNC’s Decision Impact Statement published in November 2023.

The Administrative Appeals Tribunal affirmed that finding in June 2023, concluding that Equality Australia was “focused on advocacy in furtherance of its goal of changing laws and social practices.”

The tribunal noted that Equality Australia’s staff — entirely legal, policy, and campaign professionals — were “clearly geared towards advocacy and policy development work.”

The tribunal concluded that Equality Australia had not established “a sufficiency of connection” between its activities and direct benevolent relief to people in distress.

The Full Federal Court upheld that finding unanimously in September 2024, confirming that the tribunal had not erred in law.

One of the Commissioner’s arguments, recorded in the judgment, went further: granting Equality Australia public benevolent institution status would require a court “to adjudicate an essentially political question — whether the law and policy changes for which Equality Australia advocates are for the public benefit.”

That question, the Commissioner argued, “is not a subject for the judgment of courts” but “properly the preserve of the legislature.”

The legislature — under Labor — looks set to answer that question in Equality Australia’s favour.

What Equality Australia Told the Minister

Documents obtained under freedom of information reveal the contents of Equality Australia’s application to Andrew Leigh, dated 22 November 2024.

The application describes Equality Australia as “the only dedicated national organisation with professional legal and communications expertise committed to improving the lives of the LGBTIQ+ community through achieving law and policy reform.”

Among its listed current work: “Reforming laws across Australia that allow religious schools, organisations and faith-based service providers to discriminate against LGBTIQ+ people.”

The government was asked to subsidise that campaign through the tax system. It agreed.

The application also confirms an international dimension.

Equality Australia lists as current work “supporting commitments to LGBTIQ+ funding [and] development of a DFAT LGBTIQ+ Human Rights Engagement Strategy” across Australia and the Asia-Pacific.

With DGR status, Equality Australia’s ancillary fund income is projected to rise from $1.278 million in FY2025 to $1.628 million by FY2029 — the largest single revenue category in the organisation’s financial projections.

Bypassing Standard Requirements

The FOI documents also reveal two further irregularities that together paint a picture of an organisation that pursued taxpayer subsidy through any channel available.

First, Equality Australia does not have a public fund — the standard Treasury requirement for DGR listing. Rather than commit to establishing one, it argued its existing arrangements were a sufficient substitute. Treasury accepted the application regardless.

Second, while its legal challenges were unresolved, Equality Australia had been collecting tax-deductible donations through an arrangement with Thorne Harbour Health, formerly the Victorian AIDS Council.

Under the arrangement, Thorne Harbour invited public donations directed to Equality Australia projects, then passed funds to Equality Australia via periodic grants. Donors then received Thorne Harbour receipts.

In effect, Equality Australia was receiving the financial benefit of DGR status it had been denied by a regulator and two courts.

The arrangement has been the subject of complaints to both the ATO and the ACNC, with one complainant questioning whether Thorne Harbour was channelling tax-deductible donations to a group whose work lay outside its own charitable remit.

Neither regulator has publicly resolved those complaints.

Among the FOI documents is an internal Treasury email from a Director in the Not-for-profits Unit — the division processing Equality Australia’s application — carrying an ‘LGBTIQ+ Ally’ badge in the official email signature. The Public Service Act 1999 requires APS employees to ‘at all times behave in a way that upholds the APS Values’ — which include that the APS ‘is apolitical.’

Religious Schools in the Crosshairs

As The Daily Declaration has reported, Family First has mounted a formal Senate challenge to the bill, arguing it politicises the charitable tax framework by granting a legislated exception to an organisation that independent regulators and courts repeatedly found ineligible.

Shelton, in his Senate committee submission, noted Equality Australia “campaigns for expanded access to puberty-suppressing drugs and hormone treatments for minors at a time when these practices are being restricted, reassessed or legally challenged overseas.”

He also pointed to Equality Australia’s involvement in the Giggle v Tickle litigation, in which the group intervened to support a biological male who successfully sued a women-only app for sex discrimination. The appeal — which will determine whether women in Australia can maintain female-only digital spaces — has not yet been decided.

Senator Roberts said Equality Australia “has waged a war against nearly 2,800 Christian, Catholic, and Independent schools across Australia” and described DGR status as a mechanism to fund that campaign with taxpayer subsidy.

Equality Australia’s own application to the minister confirms that stripping religious exemptions from anti-discrimination law remains current organisational policy.

What the Senate Decides

The bill has passed the House, while Senate crossbenchers will determine its fate.

In his submission, Shelton argued the DGR framework “exists to ensure neutrality and consistency” and that “legislative carve-outs for individual advocacy bodies risk politicising that framework.”

He also raised the Australian Christian Lobby by name: “Questions will be rightly asked as to why advocacy groups like the Australian Christian Lobby are not able to be granted DGR status.”

Roberts put the stakes plainly: “We must stop the government from using your tax system to fund political campaigns against our schools and our community standards.”

The Senate vote has not yet been scheduled.

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