The Australian Capital Territory spent March and early April 2026 asking a practical question: should sex work still be governed by a special statute that singles it out, or should it fall under the same employment, safety, planning and public-health rules that apply to every other business? The consultation is closed. The options on the table are clearer than the politics that usually surrounds the subject.
This reporting is part of the Sex Worker Visibility Project: coverage of the systems — legal, financial and institutional — that shape whether people can do this work with ordinary dignity and safety. If that work is useful to you, support it on Patreon or Buy Me a Coffee.
Under the Sex Work Act 1992, commercial brothels and escort agencies must register with Access Canberra. Brothels are restricted to two industrial suburbs, Fyshwick and Mitchell. Independent workers can operate without registration, but only if they work alone. Industry-specific offences still sit on the books — including rules around soliciting and certain public-health requirements — even though police more often reach for the general criminal law when something goes wrong. As of late 2025 the territory had only a handful of registered commercial operators.
The government’s consultation paper framed the problem in labour and safety terms rather than moral ones. Special rules reinforce stigma. They make it harder for workers to report violence or access health and legal services without revealing a status that carries official suspicion. Requiring independents to work alone, the paper noted, can increase isolation and reduce practical safety. Other Australian jurisdictions have already moved. New South Wales has operated under a largely decriminalised model for decades. Victoria repealed its Sex Work Act and licensing system. Queensland followed in 2024. The Northern Territory has also reduced industry-specific regulation. The ACT paper itself observed that the territory is not keeping pace.
The changes under consideration are concrete. Remove the registration requirement for brothels and escort agencies. Bring sex-work businesses under ordinary business law by stripping out industry-specific regulations and offences. Allow independent workers to operate in small groups instead of alone. Lift the Fyshwick and Mitchell location lock, while still subjecting premises to normal planning and zoning rules. Serious offences involving children or coercion would be moved into the general criminal code so they remain enforceable after any repeal of the special Act.
What would remain is ordinary law: employment rules, work health and safety, planning controls, public-order offences, general public-health provisions, and advertising standards. The government was explicit that the proposal is not deregulation in the sense of a free-for-all. It is a shift from a parallel legal track to the same track every other occupation already uses.
Advocacy groups that made submissions, including Touching Base, largely supported the direction. They argued against any residual licensing or probity regime for operators and pressed for a clear commencement date rather than an open-ended review cycle. Workers quoted in local coverage emphasised the safety gain of being allowed to work with others without triggering a criminal or regulatory risk. The stigma, several noted, is not erased by a statute change alone — but keeping a special criminal and registration framework actively sustains it.
The consultation closed on 1 April 2026. No final bill has yet been tabled. The process matters because it is one of the few Australian jurisdictions still operating a registration-plus-location model while its neighbours have already tested the alternative. The evidence cited in the paper is consistent with the broader Australian experience: removing industry-specific criminalisation and registration has not produced the public-health or amenity collapse that opponents routinely predict. It has, according to the jurisdictions that made the change, improved the conditions under which workers can report harm and access ordinary protections.
For the Sex Worker Visibility Project, the ACT process is useful precisely because it is bureaucratic rather than theatrical. The question is not whether the work should exist. The question is whether the people already doing it should be forced to operate under a separate, more fragile set of rules. Canberra has put that question on the official record. The next step is whether the territory writes the answer into law.