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

CHANDLER () (): I believe women and girls are entitled to play single-sex sport, and I believe that women and girls are entitled to the privacy and safety of single-sex spaces. These are basic, simple requests for fairness, safety, dignity and privacy. They are rights that have been available to women for decades. It is hard to believe the intensity of attacks a woman receives in 2023 simply for saying these rights should continue to be available for women and girls in Australia. As the world has seen over the last two weeks, these attacks come from all angles. They come from social media, where a man in Canberra, the city where I'm standing right now, proudly tweeted that his community would burn a woman alive if she ever came back. They come in the form of physical violence, as demonstrated when a man taking part in a vicious baying mob punched a 70-year-old woman in the face in Auckland last week. They come from courts and tribunals, where women face punishment simply for offering a female-only service or even just for saying that women's sports and women's spaces should be female only. They come from the media and political leaders who defame, denigrate and punish women defending their own rights in order to appeal to the more authoritarian elements of the left, and haven't we seen this in action over the last two weeks!

This political and media culture has been created for one reason: to try and intimidate women out of raising completely legitimate concerns about the erosion of our own rights. Back in 2019, I asked Sport Australia whether it agreed that the purpose of women's sport was to ensure that females—women and girls—had the chance to compete fairly and safely. My proposition, then and now, was this: women and girls playing sport at all levels should be allowed to compete in their own sex category. Nothing in this proposition prevents sporting codes from making sure that everyone can compete in sport. Each sport can and should make sure there is a place in sport for everyone, and there are so many ways to achieve this without denying women and girls single-sex competition.

For more than two years the media, both here in Australia and around the world, insisted with everything they could muster that maintaining this position was bigotry, but last week World Athletics became the latest global governing body to recognise that protecting the female category from male advantage is essential for fair competition. They have joint World Aquatics and World Rugby in making this finding. In Australia, women are defamed and denigrated for holding the same position as the global governing bodies for athletics and for swimming. For three years now, I have seen journalists and media outlets repeatedly insist that nobody in sport is calling for female-only categories to be protected—that no female athletes are asking for female categories to be protected. Let's be clear: that is always a lie. I have had days where I've spoken to Olympic athletes in the morning about how important it is to protect single-sex sport and then been lectured in the afternoon by journalists insisting that no female athletes care about this issue. Many female athletes have been pressured and even threatened into not speaking out. It has only been through the sheer bravery and tenacity of female athletes, along with the biologists, coaches and supporters who have spoken out, that women's categories are now being protected. This should be a lesson to those who insist on using the power of the state, the power of the media and the power of their own positions to control what women say and when we say it. We were right about women's sport. We were right about women's prisons. If people had listened in good faith to us, instead of looking for any angle to attack and diminish us, they would have understood this before women got hurt.

Senate adjourned at 17:48