Extending reasonable adjustments: a renewed tool for creating inclusive workplaces?
What would our workplaces look like if equality wasn’t something granted only when someone asks for it, but something built in from the start? A new report by Professor Alysia Blackham, Melbourne Law School takes on this question directly, examining how a universal approach to workplace adjustments could shift us toward genuinely inclusive employment practices.
In Extending reasonable adjustments: a renewed tool for creating inclusive workplaces?, Professor Blackham assesses whether current legal frameworks are delivering the fairness they promise. Despite recent reforms, she finds that many obligations remain reactive and overly focused on individual requests, leaving little room for the structural change needed to support all workers.
Her work argues for a more proactive model, one that reshapes workplace norms and anticipates diverse needs rather than responding only when problems arise.
Professor Blackham has prepared a summary of her findings for our readers, and we’re pleased to share it below.
Forthcoming in the Melbourne University Law Review, Volume 49, Issue 2, 2026 | Available at SSRN: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5363022
Discrimination laws in all Australian jurisdictions require employers to make ‘reasonable adjustments’ for people with a disability. Reasonable adjustments recognise that equality is not simply about treating everyone alike; rather, there is a need to recognise and accommodate difference in the workplace. While reasonable adjustments could require a proactive approach to accommodating disability, the way they have been applied and interpreted in practice reflects a highly individualised and reactive approach to achieving change.
Even where legal provisions are framed and described as a positive duty, this is often interpreted in courts and tribunals as a reactive obligation which depends on individual requests for adjustments. This places a significant obligation on individuals to effect change. It requires individuals to know what adjustments are needed, to disclose their disability or other protected ground, and to explicitly request change. For people who can ‘mask’ or camouflage their disability (though often at great personal cost), disclosure may present a significant barrier to obtaining adjustments. This reactive framing of the duty to make adjustments is inadequate for addressing systemic issues and barriers to participation, and is unlikely to lead to transformative change.
The law, however, is changing. Discrimination laws in Victoria have required reasonable adjustments for those with parenting and caring responsibilities for many years. The Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory have now extended the duty to provide reasonable adjustments to all protected characteristics under discrimination law. In extending reasonable adjustments to grounds other than disability, adjustments become relevant to a broader group of people. It is possible that this might help to shift norms in the workplace, and to de-stigmatise requests for reasonable adjustments. Expanding reasonable adjustments to all protected grounds may therefore reflect a shift towards substantive equality in the legal framework.
In reforming duties to make reasonable adjustments, though, this article argues that there is also a need to embed a universalist approach to equality, which anticipates that all workers will have different needs, and proactively anticipates what reasonable changes need to be made to workplace structures and systems to accommodate that diversity. These two reforms – to extend the relevant grounds, and to reframe the duty as a positive means of advancing substantive equality – should therefore go hand in hand. The article argues that under a proactive, universalist duty, structures and systems should be changed proactively, to the extent those changes are reasonable, to pre-emptively ensure full participation. A proactive approach might go hand-in-hand with, and be complemented by, individual adjustments and requests. While this shift might be enabled by law reform, it also hinges on more sympathetic judicial interpretation of existing legal provisions.