It Was Legal in Victoria Until 2022. Here Is Exactly How Legal.

Not a court case. Not a scandal. A statutory officeholder said on the record that no law in Australia banned it, and then it took three years and nine months.

Told by Paige Turner · 1 September 2026

They banned that ages ago, didn't they. That is the sentence. I have heard it in a pub, in a comments section, and once from somebody who works in policy, and it is wrong in a specific and useful way, so let us do the dates.

In Victoria, the criminal offences for subjecting a person to conversion practices commenced on 17 February 2022. Four and a half years ago. That is not ancient history, that is a lease. Before that date, the practice was not prohibited by any Victorian law written for the purpose.

The question, then. When was it last legal here, and what actually ended it?

Not a court case. Not a scandal. A regulator with the wrong powers wrote a report saying she did not have the right ones, and then it took three years and nine months.

What legal actually meant

I need to be careful about the word legal, because it is doing a lot of work and the sloppy version helps nobody.

Before 2021, Victoria had no law that named conversion or suppression practices and prohibited them. What it had was the Health Complaints Act 2016, which created the Health Complaints Commissioner and a general code of conduct for health service providers, including unregistered ones. The Victorian Parliamentary Library's own research note on the Bill records that scholars considered the 2016 Act to have been drafted with such practices in mind, though it did not mention them.

Alongside it sat the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law, requiring registered practitioners to provide competent, professional, evidence-based and non-discriminatory services. A psychologist attempting to change a patient's sexual orientation was already in trouble. That much was true before 2021 and it is why the ban-it-already argument was resisted for as long as it was.

Here is the hole, and the Parliamentary Library states it flatly. Those frameworks did not capture religious counsellors, unregistered practitioners, or practices carried out within faith communities.

Which is where it was happening.

So the honest description of the pre-2021 position is not that conversion practices were legal in the sense that anybody had voted for them. It is that Victoria had built a regulatory fence around the health system and the practice was taking place in the paddock next door, and everybody involved knew it, and it stayed that way.

The Commissioner's own sentence

The single best receipt in this entire file is one line from the Victorian Health Complaints Commissioner, Karen Cusack, given while her own inquiry was under way.

There is currently no legislation in Australia that bans conversion therapy or ex-gay ideology.

That is not an activist saying it. That is not a survivor saying it. That is the statutory officeholder responsible for health complaints in the state of Victoria, on the record, confirming that the instrument did not exist anywhere in the country.

Keep that sentence. It is the answer to anyone who tells you the law had it covered.

What ended it, in order

The Minister for Health referred the matter to the Commissioner on 15 May 2018. The inquiry commenced on 17 May 2018, under section 103 of the Health Complaints Act 2016.

The inquiry asked what the practice actually involved and who was carrying it out. It found, among survivors who came forward, acute distress and ongoing mental health problems including severe anxiety and depression, persistent guilt and shame about sexuality, and the reinforcement of homosexuality as brokenness. Cusack noted in the course of it that the trauma suffered by people subjected to the practice can be deep and all-consuming, even many years after ceasing the treatment.

Her recommendation was legislation, plus funded support services for survivors.

One detail about that inquiry is worth pulling out, because it tells you how carefully it was run. The Commissioner recorded that the inquiry had not been concerned with religious freedoms, and was concerned with counselling and therapy practices and treatment. That is a regulator drawing her own jurisdictional line in advance and staying inside it, which is exactly what you would want, and it did not stop anybody claiming afterwards that the eventual Act was an attack on faith.

Running in parallel, on 27 October 2018, La Trobe University, the Human Rights Law Centre and Gay and Lesbian Health Victoria published Preventing Harm, Promoting Justice: Responding to LGBT conversion therapy in Australia, by Tim Jones, Anna Brown, Lee Carnie, Gillian Fletcher and Liam Leonard. Fifteen people gave accounts of what had been done to them. The report's central finding was not complicated. Telling someone they are broken or sick because of who they are is profoundly psychologically damaging.

Then the legislative timetable, which is where the years go.

The Change or Suppression (Conversion) Practices Prohibition Bill was introduced in the Legislative Assembly on 25 November 2020. Second reading 26 November. Passed the Assembly on 10 December 2020. Passed the Parliament on 4 February 2021. It became Act number 3 of 2021. The criminal provisions commenced on 17 February 2022.

From the referral to the offence commencing, three years and nine months.

What the Act actually does

Four criminal offences, and the maxima matter because people quote the ten years without saying what it attaches to.

Intentionally engaging in a change or suppression practice that causes injury carries up to five years. Where it causes serious injury, up to ten. Taking a person out of Victoria for practices causing injury carries up to two years. Advertising carries a fine, around ten thousand dollars for an individual on the values in the research note, with substantially higher figures for corporations across all of them.

Note the structure. The offences are built on injury. Not on the practice alone. A criminal prosecution requires physical harm or damage to mental health, proved, which is a genuinely high bar and is the reason the civil side exists.

That civil side sits with the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission, which can take reports from any person and can investigate serious or systemic practices. It is deliberately not a punishment scheme. The Commission's stated approach is survivor-informed and education-led, on the reasoning that a purely punitive model drives the practice underground.

The definition, in section 5, covers conduct directed at a person on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity for the purpose of changing or suppressing it. It expressly does not capture sermons, opinion pieces, or supportive practices including assistance with gender transition.

The injury bar, and why it matters more than the ten years

Everybody quotes the ten years. Almost nobody quotes what you have to prove to get there.

Under this Act the criminal offence is not engaging in a conversion practice. The criminal offence is engaging in one that causes injury, where injury means physical harm or damage to a person's mental health, or serious injury, meaning substantial and protracted harm or harm that endangers life. So a prosecution has to establish the practice, establish the harm, and establish the causal link between them, in a person who in most cases was a teenager at the time, years or decades ago, inside a private setting with no records and no witnesses who are willing.

That is a real bar and it was chosen deliberately. It is the price of a law that reaches into churches at all, and I am not going to pretend it is a flaw somebody overlooked.

But it does mean the headline number is doing public relations rather than enforcement. The provision most likely to affect anybody's behaviour is not the ten years. It is the civil pathway, where the Commission can take a report from any person, respond in a way directed by what the affected person actually wants, and investigate where the practice is serious or systemic. That is a slower and much less satisfying instrument than a prosecution.

It is also the one that exists.

Victoria was not first, it was broadest

This gets misreported constantly and the correction is worth having.

Queensland's prohibition commenced on 20 August 2020, ahead of Victoria. It applies only to health service providers, and only in relation to children and people with impaired capacity. Informal arrangements are not captured.

The Australian Capital Territory's Act commenced on 4 March 2021. It covers protected persons, meaning children and people with impaired decision-making, and unlike Queensland it is not limited to health providers.

Victoria's is the one that applies to adults, in any setting, including a church hall, and that is the whole reason it produced the fight it produced.

There was, at the time the Victorian Bill was before Parliament, no Commonwealth law on this at all. The federal position, as recorded in the Parliamentary Library's note, was that it was a matter for the states. New South Wales, South Australia, Tasmania, Western Australia and the Northern Territory had nothing on the books.

So the accurate sentence about Victoria in February 2022 is not that it caught up. It is that it went further than anywhere else in the country had gone, into settings no other Australian jurisdiction had been willing to name, and it did that four and a half years ago, and there are still Australians for whom the honest answer to is it legal where you live is that nobody has got round to it.

The fight, quoted rather than characterised

The Australian Christian Lobby said the Bill was built on lies and described it as the worst and most flagrant attack on basic freedom, arguing it would ban the teaching of Scripture and friends praying for each other. The Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne said the Bill targets prayer and represented a dramatic over-reach of the state into family life, private matters and pastoral contexts. The Victorian Opposition sought further consultation, citing concerns about children's rights and protections for faith organisations.

Those are their positions in their own words, taken from the Parliamentary Library's research note.

Now my opinion, and it is sitting directly on top of that material and on the section above it. Section 5 excludes sermons. It excludes opinion pieces. The offences require proved injury. An organisation reading that and telling its members the state has criminalised praying with a friend has either not read it, or has read it and decided that the version that frightens people is the more useful one. I do not know which, and I am not going to pretend to. The two documents are both public and anyone can put them side by side.

The Bill was supported by survivor groups, LGBTQ organisations, the Australian Psychological Society, the Australian Medical Association and the Jewish Community Council of Victoria, which is a coalition worth noticing precisely because it is not a coalition of the usual people.

The five things, separated

Established fact. No Victorian law specifically prohibited these practices before 2021. The Health Complaints Act 2016 covered health service providers and did not reach faith settings or unregistered providers. The inquiry ran from 17 May 2018 under section 103. The HCC recommended legislation. Preventing Harm, Promoting Justice published 27 October 2018 with fifteen accounts. Bill introduced 25 November 2020, passed 4 February 2021, Act 3 of 2021, offences commenced 17 February 2022. Four offences with maxima of five years, ten years, two years and a fine. Civil scheme with the Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission. Queensland commenced 20 August 2020, the ACT on 4 March 2021.

Reported and consistent, but assembled from secondary sources rather than a gazette notice I could open. The 17 February 2022 commencement date. Two independent sources agree and neither is the other's source, which is why it is here at all.

Institutional positions, quoted not characterised. Everything in the section above.

Historical interpretation. That the HCC inquiry is the proximate cause of the Act. Strongly supported by the sequence and by the Commissioner's own welcome of the laws afterwards.

My interpretation. The regulator did the thing regulators almost never do, which is to say in public that her own powers were insufficient and that Parliament needed to act. Everything after May 2018 follows from that. It took three years and nine months anyway, because it always does.

Unknown. How many people were subjected to these practices in Victoria before 2022. Nobody has a number and nobody ever will, because the practice did not keep records and the people it happened to had every reason not to file anything.

What now

The law exists. The offences are four and a half years old. Prosecutions under an injury-based offence are hard by design, which means the civil pathway and the Commission's reporting line are doing most of the actual work.

The practical point for a reader in Victoria today is that the Commission's reporting line takes reports from any person, not only the person it happened to. That is unusual and it is deliberate.

And the sentence to keep, out of all of it, is the Commissioner's. There is currently no legislation in Australia that bans conversion therapy. She said that in 2018, about the whole country, from inside the office responsible.

She was right. That is what it looked like from the inside of the system, eight years ago, in this state.