Claire Chandler (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you. I might start again. Australians were shocked to see our first female prime minister, Julia Gillard, dodging the question 'What is a woman?' when asked recently by a member of the Women's Rights Network Australia at an event about women's advancement. Ms Gillard described this question as a 'gotcha parlour game', but it is no game. The reason people ask leaders this question is that women's single-sex spaces and sports depend on it. A woman is an adult human female. Only those who are happy to let males into women's spaces or who are too scared of abusive activists to answer the question truthfully have any difficulty saying that.

The reason it was particularly pertinent to ask Ms Gillard 'What is a woman?' is that it was the Gillard government in 2013 that removed the definition of 'woman' from the Sex Discrimination Act, and it was that decision which led directly to some of the most perverse policy decisions Australia has ever witnessed. It is the failure of leaders to answer the question 'What is a woman?' that covers up the horrific impacts of this policy failure.

In 2014, an Australian man was found guilty of repeatedly sexually abusing his own six-year-old daughter during access visits. This man, after being released from prison, repeatedly breached his sex offender reporting obligations. He then committed a serious sexual assault on a woman and was convicted yet again, but the second time he was convicted and sentenced the Australian media and the court which sentenced him called him a woman and placed him in a women's prison. Is this disgusting, vile man who raped his own six-year-old daughter a woman, Ms Gillard?

Two weeks ago, Gymnastics Australia was forced to join the National Redress Scheme for institutionalised child sexual abuse. The majority of gymnastics participants in Australia are young girls. Last week, though, under the cover of the referendum date announcement, Gymnastics Australia announced a policy that says:

Within Gymnastics Australia and Australian Gymnastics Organisation managed facilities, people have the right to use changing and bathroom facilities which best reflects their gender identity.

This means that males can use women's changerooms where young girls are changing and there is nothing that those girls or their parents can do to stop that. This is happening in an organisation which only a week prior joined the National Redress Scheme for child sexual abuse. It's as if Gymnastics Australia has wilfully chosen to ignore everything that has ever been learnt about safeguarding young girls from opportunistic, predatory male sex abuse in exchange for a few extra reward points from a lobby group which has its logo plastered all over this same Gymnastics Australia policy.

Of course, Gymnastics Australia was following the lead of many Australian sporting organisations, including the Albanese government's top sports bureaucrats, who encourage males identifying as women to participate in women's sport. What's the reason that Gymnastics Australia and all of those other sporting organisations give for allowing males into women's sporting facilities? The Sex Discrimination Act requires them to. And that's because the Gillard government took the definition of 'woman' out of the act, and the Albanese government has refused to consider my save women's sports bill, which would put it back in and protect single-sex sport for women.

So what is a woman, Ms Gillard? What is a woman, Mr Albanese and Premier Daniel Andrews—