Anne Tonkin lives and works in Adelaide, South Australia. By day she teaches Marketing, Business Risk, and Sustainability at TAFE SA, and it was in the margins of a life spent caring for her husband that she authored the Tonkin 10/10 Bill, introducing the world’s first measurable community inclusion standards for people with disabilities. In 2025, the Bill earned Anne international recognition including the Women Changing the World Award for APAC in Disability Inclusion and the Global Women of Influence Award, but none of that, she is quick to say, is the point, because for Anne, the goal is a law.

Born from pain, powered by purpose

Anne calls herself the “accidental advocate”: she didn’t set out to disrupt a global sector, but simply to take her husband to a basketball game.

When her husband was diagnosed with myotonic dystrophy in 2008, a progressive neuromuscular condition, the couple worked hard to stay connected to the things they loved, especially sport. What they encountered instead was a world built for someone else: venues with less than one per cent of seats accessible to wheelchair users, accessible taxis that didn’t come, and ticketing systems that couldn’t be navigated outside business hours. The couple once found themselves stranded after a festival in Norwood, with no accessible cab in sight, leaving Anne to push a wheelchair nearly five kilometres through the dark to reach the train station.

As a lecturer who had spent years teaching students to connect global frameworks to local realities, she recognised the pattern: the barriers weren’t accidental oversights but the product of a system without any standard to follow, with no community inclusion metrics, no benchmark, and no measure.

From the classroom to a global framework

Anne’s path to advocacy runs directly through her vocation. In her Sustainability classes she worked with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. In Business Risk, she taught students that threats become opportunities when they are named, measured, and managed. In Marketing, she pressed students to understand that different communities have different needs and that serving a target market means understanding it precisely, and those disciplines together gave her the scaffolding to build something the world hadn’t seen.

The Tonkin 10/10 Bill draws directly on population data: 21 per cent of Australians have a disability, encompassing both wheelchair users and those with mobile or hidden disabilities. The Bill proposes a 10/10 standard, being 10 per cent of accessible infrastructure for wheelchair users and 10 per cent for mobile and hidden disabilities, to be applied across carparks, venue seating, transport systems, and toilet facilities, and she also advocates for a new “D” symbol on accessible signage to represent the full diversity of disability beyond the wheelchair graphic.

“Lecturing gave me global vision,” she says. “Lived experience gave me practical clarity. Without both, the Tonkin 10/10 Bill would not exist.”

What leadership looks like

“A leader is someone with genuine intent to help others, someone who embodies empathy, kindness, and a commitment to seeing people thrive,” she says. “They question the status quo, think differently, and lead confidently into the unknown.”

She has lived that definition across decades of relentless effort, beginning with three hours of lecturing a week alongside a newborn and a toddler at home, studying continuously and accumulating qualifications up to Masters level, all while caring for her husband and raising two sons.

The change she is building toward

Anne is energised by the traction the Bill is generating, not just in Australia but internationally. A Canadian influencer from the disability sector has said that once one Australian state legislates the standard, countries around the world will follow, and a Melbourne based company asked for a petition, to help ignite the passion for community inclusion metrics. She is also establishing a foundation to promote legislative change and develop educational resources for schools and the vocational sector.

She is clear that change doesn’t require waiting for legislation: carparks could be reallocated tomorrow, ticketing systems updated this week, and venues could review their access seating before their next event, because the framework requires no massive infrastructure overhauls but simply the will to treat inclusion as a baseline. “Access to the community is a basic human right,” she says. “Supporting five and a half million Australians with disabilities means supporting their families and carers too.”

In January 2026, Anne’s husband passed away, the man who had been at the heart of her advocacy from the very beginning, whose diagnosis had set her on this path and whose daily experience of exclusion had given the Bill its urgency. Anne has spoken openly about her grief, and equally openly about what follows: his passing has not diminished her commitment but deepened it, and the fight she began alongside him is one she intends to finish.

She returns to the TAFE SA classroom each semester and keeps pushing, methodically and relentlessly, toward the moment she can celebrate from Adelaide.