Pauline Hanson (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

The purpose of this legislation is to give parents the legal right to protect their children from indoctrination at school. Educators argue there is no need for legislation to protect children from indoctrination because schoolchildren can use their critical thinking skills. That is a cop-out, because students are no match for an adult using their positional power to instruct. Parents have the responsibility to decide how their children will be educated, provided it is in the best interests of the children. Parents want their children educated, not indoctrinated.

Firstly, the bill seeks to prevent indoctrination by placing an obligation on the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority to develop a balanced curriculum for states and territories to adopt. This is currently not the case in many subject areas, including climate. The current climate curriculum states as fact that near-surface temperatures are increasing, sea levels are rising and mountain glaciers are melting. Further, the Australian curriculum says most agree that human activity is responsible for the majority of measured global warming. Climate science is far from settled, however, with no-one knowing the climate's sensitivity to increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Secondly, the bill seeks to tie federal education funding to the existence of state and territory legislation which prohibits indoctrination in schools. Gender fluidity theory is widely taught in schools, even though it is a medical and scientific fact that inheritance from your father of a Y chromosome makes you a biological male and inheritance from your father of an X chromosome makes you a biological female. Most parents do not support the promotion of gender fluidity theory being taught in schools, and they are quite right because it is dangerous. Parents can move their children to another school or homeschool them, but they ought to have the right to challenge indoctrination when it occurs.

I am going to use climate studies and gender studies as two examples of why we need the laws proposed in this bill. In 2007, Mr Stewart Dimmock challenged the way climate studies were being taught in English secondary schools, where the government had beliefs identical to the ones now being taught to our children. The court had the power to look at Mr Dimmock's concerns because sections 406 and 407 of the UK Education Act 1996 dealt with indoctrination in schools. The case concerned teaching materials described as 'the English secondary schools climate pack', which included Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth.

Two graphs presented in the film relate to a 650,000-year time period. One graph shows increasing CO2 and the other increasing temperature. Al Gore says the two graphs provide evidence that increasing CO2 has caused increasing global temperature. The judge did not agree, and found that the two graphs simply showed increasing CO2 and increasing temperature had occurred over the same time period. The two graphs equally support the two opposing theories at the centre of the climate debate, which are, firstly, increasing CO2 is causing an increase in global temperature and, secondly, increase global temperature is causing increasing CO2. Either Al Gore made an interpretative mistake or, like the writers of the Australian curriculum, decided to support one of the theories about global warming.

Al Gore is a climate crusader with no obligation to present both sides of the debate. In the UK, teachers in schools are obliged to present verifiable facts and provide a balanced presentation of theories which explain those facts. Unfortunately, Australian teachers in schools are not under the same legal obligation. The British government gave an undertaking to the court to correct all the factual areas in the film, including Al Gore's mistake.

Three years after the An Inconvenient Truth case finished and the judgement had been written, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, owned up to a shocking scientific fraud concerning the melting of the Himalayan glaciers. If the judge had known that a media release from an activist group was the source of the scientific claim that the Himalayan glaciers were melting, it would not have relied on the IPCC documents tendered to the court as evidence. Sadly, Australian teachers in schools are still relying on IPCC reports that make claims that are not supported by science. The IPCC is a repeat victim of dodgy scientists and dodgy science, meaning that the IPCC can no longer be considered an authoritative source on climate. The Australian climate curriculum would benefit from the study of the case of An Inconvenient Truth, glacier-gate and climate-gate scandals, because students need to be open to the possibility they will be misled and lied to by scientists.

So how did teachers and teacher unions in the United Kingdom respond to the findings of the high court of England? They were outraged that the teacher guidance notes were rewritten to include references to all the errors in the film. They were further outraged that the court found teachers were not experts in climate studies and would be required to warn pupils that there were other scientific opinions on global warming and that students should not necessarily accept the views in Al Gore's film. The largest teacher's union in Wales questioned the right of any judge to say what should be taught in schools and how. I expect this attitude is widespread here in Australia, because educators feel they know better than parents.

The growing lack of quality education provided means that some students are worried about the future of planet Earth. This indoctrinated young people believe the severity of the current bushfire season is attributable to man-made global warming, but, like Al Gore, they lack the necessary critical thinking or research skills to discover the real reason. The real reason for the tragic loss of live and property in the past few months is the direct result of the government's failure to reduce fuel on the floor of national parks and the government's failure to allow landowners to clear their properties. Exaggeration about global warming comes from groups like Extinction Rebellion, who want to replace capitalism with socialism. Their environmental interests are just a means to that end.

I now want to turn to gender theory indoctrination in schools, which involves some teachers in schools pushing the idea that a child's biological sex does not determine whether they are male or female. It is based on the theory of gender fluidity pioneered by Alfred Kinsey, who believed children were sexual from birth and that the age of consent should be lowered to seven. The fathers of transgender theory, Dr Harry Benjamin and Dr John Money, liked Dr Alfred Kinsey's theory of gender fluidity and his ideas. They ruined the lives of an unknown number of children, including the Reimer twins, but still some teachers and schools in Australia are attempting to encourage gender confusion among children. These teachers and schools have had some success, because gender confusion is increasing among young children and teenagers. Even the Australian Medical Association is worried about the dramatic increase in the number of children seeking hormone and surgical treatment for gender confusion. In Queensland it has been reported that the number of children and teenagers seeking hormone treatment has increased by 330 per cent in the past five years. The preoccupation with gender identity among some teachers and in some schools is correlated with an increase in children identifying as transgender, which is why I say these educators are transgendering our children.

How do educators create gender confusion at school? In Queensland, some teachers are reading stories like The Gender Fairy to four- and five-year-old children. The Gender Fairy shows young children that they can choose their gender because their body parts don't make them a boy or a girl. In Western Australia, some eight-year-olds are spending learning time dressing up as the opposite sex using a government supplied box of dress-up clothes. By the time these students are in year 9 they will have a new vocabulary based on gender diversity theory and they will have been taught the art of sex texting and advanced sexual techniques.

In Queensland the government has decided that parents cannot be allowed to know whether the safe schools program is being taught in a school their child attends. The Safe Schools Coalition has labelled Queensland parents homophobic and transphobic, and it says the government's decision to keep the program secret from parents is justified. Well, I don't agree. Advocates for the safe schools program say this program and others like it promote equality of opportunity and combat bullying at school. In practice, nothing could be further from the truth, because girls are being bullied into losing their rights. Students who do not show the required level of enthusiasm for the radical LGBTQI agenda, including materials like 'the genderbread person', are humiliated and embarrassed by teachers, according to reports from parents.

School policies in every state and territory are based on the belief it would be discriminatory to separate biological males from girls with whom they share the same gender identity. Transgender policies in the education system mirror policies underpinning the laws in Australia where biological sex has been redefined to include chosen gender identity. These policies provide a small number of transgender people with rights at the expense of the majority, particularly girls and women. The following recent case came before a Canadian court but could just as easily have come before the Human Rights Commission in Australia. Jessica Yaniv now identifies as a transgender woman. Jessica has also sought relationships with underage girls. In 2018, Jessica complained to the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal because several women in beauty salons had declined to provide waxing and other beautician services to Jessica's male genitals. Jessica argued that the women were guilty of transphobic discrimination. The case was lost in 2019, in part because the court found Jessica was motivated by money and revenge on South-East Asian women who held ideas hostile to LGBTQI people.

The point I want to make is that the redefinition of a person's biological sex as gender identity in law will be abused. Policymakers say they want to protect minorities. There is nothing wrong with that. But when educators protect the rights of a minority by stripping girls of their rights then something is wrong. We all see that in the decision of education bureaucrats who provide unisex toilets at the Fortitude Valley State Secondary College. I understand the school, which opened in 2020, has now changed its unisex toilet policy and returned to segregated toilets. This decision followed angry protests from parents and students. But that does not end the matter. The Queensland government needs to explain why boys and girls aged 12 and 13 had to give up their right to dignity, safety and privacy. It is to accommodate the needs of one transgender child who may attend the school. If the schools suggest that all they are doing is creating the same situation as the children have at home, I can tell them that that explanation met with outrage at another school. The decision to force children to use unisex toilets is just part of a larger plan to get children preoccupied with gender issues. Other policies which aid gender preoccupation include gender-neutral uniforms, library policies by gender theory affirming books and teachers putting gender theory stores on reading lists.

How did we get to this situation where schools are preoccupied with gender theory issues? It begins with the belief that our experience is rooted in our membership of a gender group, and that membership of that gender group makes it more likely we will suffer discrimination and oppression. These left-leaning beliefs see life as one long battle of identity groups for social justice. Identity politics causes division and undermines democracy, which is precisely what socialists and progressives want, because it undermines our democracy, which is based on common interests. We need to stop that kind of indoctrination at schools where it starts.

In 2017 President Trump rolled back the transgender rights put in place by Obama. We should do the same. Our children deserve an education that will allow them to reach their potential, and will, as the late Roger Scruton stated, 'provide society with a store of knowledge to be passed from one generation another'. We want our children educated for life, not indoctrinated so they can be controlled by others. We need laws to guarantee parents' rights to challenge indoctrination.

Australian 15-year-olds are falling behind their counterparts on global tests of literacy and numeracy. The curriculum is overcrowded. I suggest teachers in schools focus on the basics so our children don't leave school with skill levels three years behind their global counterparts. In my view, parents should be required to give their consent to their children's participation in the teaching of LGBTI+ theory. Parents do not have the right, but they can move their children to another school or homeschool them.