Ralph Babet (Victoria, United Australia Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Labor government recently announced $3.5 million in funding for what it calls the 'healthy masculinities project'. It is to help teenage boys to be the right kind of masculine, a bit of a soy boy type. In other words, the government wants to spend more money to further emasculate young men. If the Labor Party were really worried about what they claim to be teenage boys following poor gender stereotypes online then Labor should seriously address the elephant in the room, and that is the number of teenage boy that grow up without a father in their home. Teenage boys should obviously be mentored predominantly by their parents, but they most definitely should not be mentored by the state, especially by the Labor Party and the woke far-left activists among their ranks. I know it is old-fashioned, but it has worked since the dawn of time. It is called the nuclear family. The government should try promoting and supporting that instead. It is only in recent times that we have thought that we could have a fatherless generation, a generation outsourced to the nanny state. A healthy masculinities project run by bureaucrats in Canberra is more likely to produce a generation of they/thems than a generation of healthy, well-adjusted, strong and confident young men. The government should be doing everything that it can to encourage families to stay together and once again make the nuclear family the bedrock of our nation—the bedrock of our nation. Weak men create hard times, and we are seeing this play out right now in Canberra. Scrap this project. We need to make boys masculine again—more masculinity, not less.