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

The government is well aware that children are being indoctrinated through the curriculum and by teachers, yet it chooses to do nothing. This leads One Nation to draw attention to the problem and to offer a solution. It's the reason I introduced the Australian Education Legislation Amendment (Prohibiting the Indoctrination of Children) Bill 2020 earlier this week. In some areas, our children are being taught to accept ideas that are either unproven, such as gender fluidity, or debatable, such as catastrophic man-made climate change. Australian 15-year-olds are falling behind their counterparts in global tests of literacy and numeracy. The curriculum is overcrowded. I want our schools to focus on the basics so our children don't leave school with skill levels three years behind their global counterparts.

The authority responsible for developing the curriculum needs a shake-up. Under my proposal, they will be obliged to be balanced in their presentation of political, historical and scientific teaching material. Under my proposal, parents will have legal rights to challenge inaccurate and biased teachings in the courts and to have their views taken into account at school. The education system is in desperate need of accountability.

Every day, Australian children are indoctrinated to believe catastrophic human-made climate change alarmism. They are taught that near-surface temperatures have increased in recent decades; but there is no examination of colonial state records between 1855 and 1910, which show it was hotter back then than it is today. How many senators in this chamber know that charter of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change requires it to limit its scientific assessment to human induced climate change? Research related to natural climate change is automatically eliminated from their reports. In short, they only collect information to support one side of the climate change debate. How many in this chamber know that HadCRUT4, created in 1994, the primary global temperature dataset used by the IPCC, was independently audited for the first time in 2017 and found to be unreliable?

The IPCC only presents one side of the climate change debate. But Australian students need to know both sides, which is why I want Australia to adopt a policy similar to the United Kingdom under its Education Act 1996. The UK's Education Act 1996 allowed a parent named Stuart Dimmock to challenge the use of Al Gore's climate alarmism propaganda film in his child's school curriculum. The judge in the case found that a large number of claims made in the film could not be substantiated by science, including the claim made by Al Gore that increasing carbon dioxide levels were causing increases in temperature. Secondary schools in England could have shown TheGreat Global Warming Swindle, a film that suggests scientific opinion on climate change is influenced by funding and political factors, but they did not—because they only wanted to put one side, their side, to students.

Three years after the judgement in the An Inconvenient Truth case was published, the IPCC admitted to a shocking scientific fraud concerning the melting of the Himalayan glaciers. Just imagine what the judge would have thought of a media release from an activist group being passed off as science in the fourth IPCC assessment report!

Sadly, Australian teachers and schools are still teaching climate science in a way which prevents students meaningfully testing the veracity of material and forming an independent understanding as to how reliable it is.

I now want to turn to gender theory indoctrination in schools. It involves some teachers in schools pushing the idea that a child's biological sex does not determine whether they are male or female. How many transgender children are there in schools in Australia? According to the 2016 census, just 57 children—students under the age of 15—identified as transgender. How many transgender students do you think there are in a single school? Well, I'll let you do the maths: 57 transgender students divided by 9,400 schools. Despite the small numbers, every other student in Australia is subjected to transgender policies which are being taken to extremes.

In a decision by the Queensland Department of Education, bureaucrats decided to provide unisex toilets at the Fortitude Valley State Secondary College. I understand that the school, which opened in 2020, has now changed its unisex toilet policy and returned to segregated toilets following parent and student protests. This time the education system backed down, but I have no doubt they will wait and try again later. Legislation needs to be in place to give parents a voice because, as it stands, teachers and schools are not accountable to their students or parents. 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 to buy gender-theory-affirming books and teachers putting gender theory stories on reading lists.

The preoccupation with gender identity by some teachers in schools is correlated with an increase in children identifying as transgender—which is why I say teachers are 'transgendering' our children. 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 the school that their child attends. The Safe Schools Coalition has labelled Queensland's parents homophobic and transphobic and says the government's decision to keep the program secret from parents is justified. 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 LGBTIQ+ agenda—including materials like The Genderbread Person—are humiliated and embarrassed by teachers, according to reports by parents. School policies in every state and territory are based on the belief that 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. Policymakers say they want to protect minorities. There is nothing wrong with that, but when educators protect the rights of a minority by stripping young girls and boys of their rights then something is horribly wrong.

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 a gender group makes it more likely we will suffer discrimination and oppression. These left-leaning elites see life as one long battle of identity groups for social justice. Identity politics causes division and undermines democracy. We don't want artificial divisions in society—we want social cohesion based on common interest. We need to be proud of our history. Our children deserve an education that will allow them to reach their potential and will provide society with a store of knowledge to be passed from one generation to another. We want our children educated for life and not indoctrinated so they can be controlled by others. And we need laws to guarantee parents' rights to challenge indoctrination. Parents should give their assent to the teaching of LGBTIQ+ theory. Parents should not be forced to move their child from school or to home school them to avoid indoctrination at school.