On February 9, the president of the Australian Human Rights Commission appeared before a Senate Estimates committee and was asked, in effect, whether caste discrimination is illegal in Australia. Hugh de Kretser's answer was careful and instructive. The Racial Discrimination Act's references to "descent" and "social origin," he said, might permit a "beneficial interpretation" capable of capturing some caste-based complaints. The law has never been tested in any Australian court. For communities that have spent years building the evidentiary record — and filing the complaints — that "might" is the whole problem.
Consider what the law's ambiguity permits. The AHRC's 2022 Scoping Report documents the case of a Nepali Dalit man renting accommodation in Brisbane. When his landlord, of higher-caste background, learned of his caste, the man was evicted. No law was broken. The eviction was not an anomaly in an otherwise protected landscape. It was lawful, routine, and representative of a broader pattern that Asang Wankhede's research has since mapped in 600 documented pages.
Wankhede, an Oxford DPhil law candidate who grew up in a slum colony in Nagpur, led Australia's first National Community Consultation on Caste Discrimination, interviewing 146 members of caste-oppressed communities across major Australian cities. The resulting study, released in 2024 and jointly commissioned by the Australian Human Rights Commission and the Federation of Ethnic Communities' Councils of Australia, documented physical assault, children treated as "untouchables" by their peers, socioeconomic boycotts of Dalit-owned businesses, and systematic exclusion in workplaces and universities. A recurring motif was concealment: participants changing surnames, abandoning cultural markers, passing as upper-caste in professional and matrimonial contexts. The geography had changed. The hierarchy had not.
This persistence is what Ambedkar predicted and what his critics refused to believe. In Annihilation of Caste, the 1936 address he prepared but was never permitted to deliver, he argued that caste was not an accident of religious tradition that education or mobility would quietly dissolve. It was a structural system — reproduced through endogamy, enforced through social violence, legitimated by appeals to purity. You could cross an ocean and it would follow, because it traveled not in temples but in habits of mind: in who you allowed your child to befriend, in who you rented to, in who you promoted. The Dalit diaspora experience across the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia has proven him right at every transit point. The IHDS-II untouchability survey found that 27 percent of Indian households admitted to practicing untouchability — a self-reported admission rate that almost certainly understates the reality. The NCRB's 2024 atrocity data recorded 55,698 cases of caste-based violence and discrimination in India alone. This is the social world that migrates. No passport control screens for it.
Other jurisdictions have drawn the obvious conclusion. In February 2023, the Seattle City Council passed the world's first municipal anti-caste ordinance, amending 22 sections of municipal code to add caste as a protected class in housing, employment, and public accommodations. A constitutional challenge followed. A federal district court rejected it in full in March 2024. What Seattle demonstrated is that Western civil rights architecture is fully capable of naming and prohibiting caste harm — that the concept is not too culturally specific, too exotic, too legally intractable to legislate. The question, then as now, is political will.
Australia's National Anti-Racism Framework, released in November 2024, reached the same conclusion. Recommendation 17 calls on the federal government to investigate explicit legal protections against caste discrimination, including potential amendments to the Racial Discrimination Act. A coalition of approximately 54 civil society organisations has since documented the government's failure to resource or implement the Framework. De Kretser told the Senate on February 9 that, in the Indian community particularly, there is "imported caste discrimination happening." The recommendation sits, advisory and unanswered.
The opposition most often raised against reform comes from organisations like the Hindu Council of Australia, which has argued that anti-caste legislation would unfairly target Hindu practitioners — a framing that borrows the language of anti-religious discrimination to insulate the caste system from legal scrutiny. The argument deserves a direct response, and Ambedkar provided one nearly ninety years ago. In Annihilation of Caste, he was explicit that the problem is not Hindu faith but the caste system as practiced — a structure that operates, as the Seattle ordinance also acknowledged, across Hindu, Christian, Muslim, and Dalit Buddhist communities and in societies far beyond South Asia. A law against caste harm does not profile religious identity; it names a social technology that causes demonstrable harm. It is worth noting that the HCA currently faces an active AHRC complaint for racial hatred, and that one of its representatives was appointed to NSW's Faith Affairs Council while that complaint remained pending — circumstances that sit uneasily with an organisation positioning itself as a neutral arbiter of community protection.
The February 9 Senate Estimates hearing marked the first time caste discrimination was examined directly on the floor of the Australian Parliament, translating years of community advocacy — PATCA's thirty-plus submissions, Wankhede's 600 pages, a complaint network stretching back to 2022 — into parliamentary record and political accountability. De Kretser's "might" is no longer merely a legal opinion. It is a government position waiting to be tested or improved. The man in Brisbane who was evicted had nowhere to turn. His successors deserve a clearer answer.