Australia Will Apologise to LGBTQ+ Veterans. Advocates Say an Apology Alone Isn't Redress

The Australian federal government has confirmed it will issue a formal apology to LGBTQ+ veterans and service personnel who were discharged, investigated or otherwise punished because of their sexual orientation or gender identity — a commitment that follows a Senate inquiry and lands decades after the policies in question were abandoned.

The decision came out of a Senate debate on military justice legislation on 17 September. Alongside the apology, affected former service members are to receive a Certificate of Honourable Service. What they will not receive, for the second time this year, is money: the Senate again declined to endorse a financial redress scheme, having passed on the question in August.

What was actually done to these veterans

Australia lifted its ban on gay and lesbian service on 23 November 1992, under the Keating government — earlier than the United Kingdom, which waited until 2000, and nearly two decades before the United States repealed “don’t ask, don’t tell.” In 2010 the Australian Defence Force repealed the instruction that had effectively barred transgender people from serving, and trans personnel have been able to serve openly and transition with ADF support since.

Before those dates, the machinery was thorough. Personnel were investigated, interrogated about their private lives, pressured to resign, formally discharged, and in some cases stripped of entitlements they had earned. The harm was not uniform, and that unevenness turned out to be the central issue before the inquiry.

David Gibson, chair of GRAI (GLBTI Rights in Ageing Inc) and himself a former Army officer discharged for being homosexual, told the Star Observer that earlier reparations conversations had centred on people who acquired criminal convictions — which would have left out everyone dealt with administratively.

“When GRAI appeared before the Senate inquiry, our concern was pretty simple,” Gibson said. “If we recognised the convictions but not the people dealt with administratively, we risked creating another group of forgotten veterans.”

“That distinction matters. Some people were convicted. Some were discharged. Some were pressured to leave. Whatever the mechanism, the message they received was the same: there was no place for them in the Defence Force because of who they were.”

Gibson wants the apology delivered by the Prime Minister personally. “It needs to say plainly: you served Australia, what was done to you was wrong, and we are sorry.”

The redress argument

The response from advocacy groups has been broadly the same: welcome, overdue, and incomplete.

“We welcome an apology as an important step towards healing the wounds of the past,” Just.Equal Australia spokesperson Rodney Croome told the Star Observer, “but financial redress is also required for those who suffered discrimination and dishonourable discharge because of who they were.” Croome pointed to lost employment, income and in some cases housing, alongside damage to confidence and mental health.

Greens LGBTIQA+ spokesperson Senator Nick McKim made the same argument and named the precedents. “Canada and the United Kingdom have redress schemes for LGBTIQA+ former service personnel, and Australia should follow their lead,” he said, calling for an inquiry to determine an appropriate amount and mechanism. “Financial redress cannot undo that harm, but it would provide a tangible acknowledgement of the injustices that were inflicted.”

There is a practical dimension here that sits underneath the symbolism. Many of the people this apology addresses are now in their sixties, seventies and eighties. A discharge in 1985 does not simply end a career; it removes superannuation accrual, service entitlements and, for some, the pension that would have followed. Those are compounding losses, and they are still compounding.

The same week, a reminder that this is not only history

It is worth setting the apology beside something that happened on the same day and in the same country.

The NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal ordered that a transgender health worker be paid A$35,000 after finding that a recruitment requirement indirectly discriminated against him by forcing him to disclose the names he was given at birth.

The man began working for the state health service in 2020, years after transitioning and changing his name. When he applied internally for a new role in 2023, a “Former Name Check Condition” in the Northern NSW Local Health District’s process required him to confirm his previous legal names to a colleague — outing him in the course of an ordinary job application. He complied, then reported the matter to the NSW Ombudsman and Anti-Discrimination NSW.

The tribunal, after a four-day hearing, found that a substantial portion of transgender people would be unable to comply with the condition and that it amounted to indirect discrimination. It recorded that the man “has endured panic attacks, rapid breathing, and from time to time can only manage two to four hours of sleep when he is required to engage with [the health district] about the matter,” and that he described “feeling sick to his stomach when considering he could be outed, a fact he is reminded of daily.” He also said the condition deterred him from applying for better-paid roles. The award was A$25,000 in compensation plus A$10,000 in aggravated damages, Star Observer reported.

A 2025 committee review had the chance to amend the condition and did not take it.

What to watch

The government has said it will apologise “at the appropriate time,” which is not a date. The questions now are who delivers it, whether the wording extends clearly to everyone harmed administratively rather than only those convicted, and whether the redress argument survives past the news cycle. Canada and the UK both arrived at compensation schemes only after sustained pressure following their own apologies, which suggests this is a beginning rather than a conclusion — and that the veterans who spent thirty years asking for acknowledgement will need to keep asking for a little longer.