Opinion: If the Government can end the silence in Defence, it can end it everywhere.

by Yvette Cehtel (CEO, Women’s Legal Service Tasmania) and Kelsey Paske

The federal government has acknowledged something it has spent decades denying: that non-disclosure agreements in sexual violence matters are tools of cover-up, not settlement. If that logic holds in Defence, it must hold in every Australian workplace. The question is whether our parliament has the will to say so.

Julia Delaforce served in the Australian military. She spent years trying to find a resolution after being, as Nine Networks reported in 2025, trapped in a room with a machete-wielding corporal who demanded oral sex. The resolution she was eventually offered was a settlement agreement that required her silence. She signed it. And for years, that silence was enforced.

This week, Veterans Minister Matt Keogh wrote to survivors like Julia to confirm that the federal government will not seek to enforce any non-disclosure agreements against ADF members giving evidence to the upcoming inquiry into military sexual violence — an inquiry recommended by the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide. The letter confirmed Defence no longer issues NDAs for sexual harassment and sexual violence matters at all. They are, instead, now the subject of a restorative engagement process.

Julia Delaforce said the government's decision should lead to a permanent ban on NDAs in these cases. The Human Rights Law Centre's Regina Featherstone said, simply, that the era of cover-up and silencing women must end.

We agree. Both of them are right. But we need to name something important: what has changed this week is not the facts. The facts have always been the same. What changed is that the government chose to stop using legal instruments to suppress them.

The federal government just conceded, in writing, that NDAs in sexual violence matters serve to conceal rather than resolve. That is the whole argument for reform. It has just been made by the government itself.

At Women's Legal Service Tasmania, we provide free legal services to women and non-binary people across this state. We see the consequences of non-disclosure agreements every week — not in Defence, but in hospitality kitchens, retail stockrooms, construction sites, government departments, and corporate offices.

The pattern is almost always the same. A woman is harassed. Sometimes seriously. She makes a complaint — to HR, to a union, to a lawyer. At some point in that process, usually the settlement stage, an NDA is placed in front of her. She is told it is standard. She is usually not told she can refuse. She does not have independent legal advice. She signs, because the alternative — continued unpaid leave, no compensation, ongoing conflict with a former employer — is worse.

She cannot then tell her doctor fully what happened. She cannot warn the woman she knows is about to start work with the same man. She cannot support a colleague going through the same experience with the same perpetrator. She cannot participate in a parliamentary inquiry, if one is ever held.

Last August, the Federal Court of Australia handed down its decision in Magar v Khan — the largest damages award in an Australian sexual harassment case, $305,000 to a 21-year-old woman harassed by her employer at a Sydney fast-food franchise. What is notable for this discussion is not just the damages. It is what the respondent did when she complained: he sent legal letters through his lawyers, accusing her of defamation and demanding she retract her statements. The Court found those letters were designed to intimidate her and constituted victimisation. He threatened her with defamation for telling the truth.

That combination — the NDA that silences before speaking, and the defamation threat that silences after — is the architecture of institutional cover-up in Australian workplaces. It is not confined to the military. It is how settlements are routinely structured across every industry in this country.

NDAs and defamation threats are not two separate issues. Together they form a system that makes speaking the truth about workplace sexual harassment legally and financially dangerous for the person who was harmed. Magar v Khan shows what happens when that system fails. For every Magar, there are thousands of women whose cases we will never read about because the NDA held.

Victoria has moved. The Restricting Non-Disclosure Agreements (Sexual Harassment at Work) Act 2025 was passed by the Victorian Parliament in December 2025 and is due to commence on 1 July 2026 — less than four weeks from now — making Victoria the first Australian jurisdiction to legislate that NDAs in sexual harassment matters are only enforceable if the survivor wants one. The model exists. It is not radical. It simply restores the principle that a legal agreement requires genuine consent.

The Australian Human Rights Commission's Speaking from Experience report, published in June 2025, recommends that the federal government amend the Sex Discrimination Act to restrict the use of NDAs nationally. The commission found that 75 per cent of legal practitioners in this space had never settled a sexual harassment matter without a strict NDA — and that only one in four survivors said they had chosen it.

The ADF decision this week proves what the Human Rights Law Centre said: the era of cover-up must end. But it will only end for military survivors. The secretary sitting across the table from her employer's lawyer next month still has no such protection. The warehouse worker. The junior doctor. The hospitality worker on a casual contract with no union and no leave entitlements is left.

In Tasmania, the small scale of our workforce and legal profession makes the misuse of NDAs particularly damaging. When a perpetrator is protected by an NDA in a small industry, the woman who cannot warn others is not just silenced — she is made complicit in what happens next, through no fault of her own. That is its own kind of harm.

We are calling on the Tasmanian Parliament and on Tasmania's federal representatives to do what this week's decision demonstrates is possible: to choose, clearly, that legal instruments used to conceal workplace sexual violence are unacceptable. To support the amendment of the Sex Discrimination Act at the federal level. And to ensure that Tasmania, like Victoria, moves to protect our workers from being subjected to silence as a condition of resolution.

Julia Delaforce spent years campaigning for the right to speak. She has it now — for one specific inquiry, on government grace. That is not the same as a legal right. Every woman who has been harmed at work deserves the same protection — not as a policy concession, but as a matter of law.

Yvette is CEO of Women's Legal Service Tasmania. WLST provides free legal and social work services to women and non-binary people across Tasmania. WLST is a member of Working Women's Centre Australia and is participating in the 'Our Silence is Not for Sale' national NDA reform campaign. wlst.org.au. Kelsey Paske is a lived experience advocate and independent consultant who focuses on the prevention of gendered violence and workplace cultural change.