Supporters call them targeted reforms. Opponents call them ‘gateway bills’ – small changes that can open the door to far larger debates.

In NSW, rights debates are rarely fought through sweeping legislative change. More often they arrive through technical amendments, private members’ bills and narrowly targeted reforms that can have implications well beyond their immediate purpose.

This year, two seemingly unrelated pieces of legislation have attracted the attention of health professionals, legal experts and advocacy groups alike. While both are presented as modest reforms, critics say their impact could reach well beyond the specific issues they seek to address. What’s certain is that these small, technical bills often precipitate the next political seachange by acclimating everyone to new or familiar controversies – which then accumulate into tectonic shifts, shaking the foundation of our everyday rights.

The trick lies not in what each bill changes for us immediately, but in the precedents they set for what might come next.

The first is the Crown Land Management Amendment (Statutory Review) Bill of 2026, and the second is the Abortion Law Reform Amendment (Sex Selection Prohibition) Bill of 2025. One targets Aboriginal land claims, the other stimies access to abortion. Both are to politics what tobacco is to narcotics – prime examples of ‘gateway bills’.

Land Rights: “An attack by stealth”

Steve Kamper, Minister for Lands and Property, says that the Aboriginal land claims system is broken and his bill will fix it. “It’s a very small number of edge cases that became claimable due to technical non-compliance,” Kamper told SBS.

Introduced in March, the bill was about technical tweaks to some 43,000 unresolved claims – not about eroding land rights.

The NSW Aboriginal Land Council (NSWALC) disputes that characterisation, arguing the proposed changes could have much broader implications for Aboriginal land rights. “It could mean substantial [parcels] of Crown Land could be removed from the register,” rights advocate Raymond Kelly told NITV.

The bill drew blanket opposition from Land Councils, sparked a May rally outside NSW Parliament and saw the NSWALC quit Closing the Gap forums in protest. The NSWNMA also joined other Unions NSW affiliates in meeting with Kamper to express support for the NSWALC and raise concerns about the proposed changes.

NSW Law Society President Ronan MacSweeney believes the bill “fundamentally alters what has been long understood” regarding the Aboriginal Land Rights Act (1983).

This gifts government ‘broad, retrospective powers’ to end land claims without involving impacted Councils. “We are the canary in the coal mine,” according to NSWALC’s Leeanne Hampton.

Both agree the Trojan legislation could nullify ‘tens of thousands’ of claims by establishing a precedent for retrospective law-making.

While MacSweeney still fears “further potential injustice(s) to NSW Aboriginal communities”, the pushback delivered another fortnight (until July 31) of consultation on the legislation.

Abortion: reopening old wounds

Abortion in NSW was only decriminalised in 2019 – thanks to a long and relentless campaign backed by health bodies including the NSWNMA.

Barely six years later, the Libertarian MLC John Ruddick is suddenly compelled to table his Abortion Law Reform Amendment (Sex Selection Prohibition) bill, making sex-selected abortions a criminal offence.

Penalties would target practitioners with prison time.

That got the blood up for One Nation’s newly minted Barnaby Joyce and the ever-alert anti-abortion advocate Dr Joanna Howe.

Speaking at a June rally outside NSW Parliament, the former deputy PM argued that reigniting the pro-life cause could shift the political landscape in One Nation’s favour, memorably calling on the crowd to “keep that fire burning for those people who can’t stand up for themselves… and I call them people. They’re not foetuses, they are people.”

Joyce later posted on social media that “this law in NSW must be passed or otherwise we all accept that sex selection is appropriate. Girls are not as good as boys.”

What has energised Joyce, Howe and other supporters of the Ruddick bill is research out of Edith Cowan University (ECU) that Ruddick described in Catholic Weekly as “the rolled gold Olympic champion of studies”. Using data gathered over 21 years (1995-2016) from some 2.1 million registered births in WA and NSW, the ECU concluded that there’s ‘indirect evidence’ of a sex ratio skew at birth among Aussie migrant populations, specifically calling out Indian and Chinese immigrants as preferring boys to girls.

Critics are incensed. NSW Health Minister Ryan Park says sex selection is not happening in NSW and that he won’t support moves to sneak abortion back into the criminal code. RANZCOG has crticised the bill for relying on ‘unsubstantiated claims rather than clinical evidence’.

Meanwhile, the Human Rights Law Centre thinks such a ban is “likely to result in the stigmatisation and racial profiling of People of Colour”.

Greens MP and general practitioner Dr Amanda Cohn MLC called the bill “a thinly-veiled attempt to incrementally recriminalise abortion” and accused its supporters of “an organised campaign to wind back access to abortion”, a la the United States.

Bedside matters

For nurses and midwives, this isn’t just a parable in parliamentary procedure. Reproductive healthcare is frontline healthcare. Legislative uncertainty can make clinicians more cautious about caring, leading to mistrust and impediments to access, particularly in regional areas already under the pump. Recognising these concerns, the NSWNMA has been actively lobbying members of Parliament to oppose the Abortion Law Reform Amendment (Sex Selection Prohibition) Bill.

Self-determination and connection to Country are established social determinants for Aboriginal communities and their health outcomes. They cannot be separated without cost.

The argument over precedent

Supporters call them modest and targeted: a deterrent in one case, a backlog fix in the other.

Opponents argue that the real significance lies not in the immediate impact of either bill, but in what they make politically possible in the future.

Rights are rarely removed all at once. More often they are narrowed incrementally – one amendment, one exemption and one ‘common sense reform’ at a time.

Whether these bills represent sensible policy or the beginning of a broader shift remains fiercely contested. What is beyond dispute is that nurses and midwives understand better than most that the health of communities cannot be separated from rights, access and self-determination.