Brett Whiteley (Braddon, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Allowing children to grow and thrive socially and academically in a safe school environment is a fundamental requirement of every school in this country. We all want safer schools. Yet the incongruence between the title and objectives of the Safe Schools Coalition program and what is actually taught and, importantly, how it is taught is remarkable and confronting.

In partnership with groups like minusl8, the so-called safe schools program encourages schools to do away with boys and girls uniforms, remove boys and girls toilets, remove gendered personal pronouns from the classroom and even teaches girls how to bind their chests and boys how to tuck their genitalia. This is state sanctioned and state funded social engineering at its worst.

Rather than creating safer schools, the safe schools program potentially creates damaging confusion of gender among children as young as 12, at a time when preteens and teenagers are developing physically, emotionally and psychologically. This is not done in order to deal with bullying or to stamp out gender inequality but to stamp out gender entirely, to create confusion and doubt in children's minds about their gender and to take the power and responsibility of educating children about these important social issues from parents.

This is an extraordinarily dangerous program. It has little to do with what its name suggests. It does not create safer schools.