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

Earlier this month, England's National Health Service became the latest health authority to stop the prescribing of puberty blockers to children. The reason that they did this was simple: they undertook an independent expert review, they looked at the evidence behind what gender clinics had been doing and they found it totally lacking.

You would have hoped that there would have been a direct and immediate response in Australia to an expert finding that children have been given drugs with serious side effects without any evidence proving that they are safe or effective. After all, Australia has been more than happy to follow the example set by the UK on gender ideology for years. We imported the talking points falsely claiming that puberty blockers were proven to be safe and effective when in fact that opposite was true. Australian media outlets followed the lead of UK media outlets in attacking and denigrating anybody who spoke out about this. We imported Stonewall's lobbying scheme via ACON, with dozens of government departments paying taxpayer money to be spoonfed gender ideology by lobbyists. We imported abusive and aggressive activists who harass and try to intimidate women who speak up on the dangers of ideology to young girls and to women's sex based rights.

Yet now the Australian gender medicine industry and its friends in the local media are insisting that we shouldn't follow the UK's example by commissioning independent experts to look at the evidence. We have lobbyists going around actively demanding that no state government or parliament should inquire into the practices of the gender medicine industry. Let's be very clear about what is happening here. We have a concerted effort by lobbyists in this country to obscure the fact that multiple expert reviews have found that giving children puberty blockers is not backed by evidence. There is a cohort of people in Australia—and you will find many of them in the Labor and Green parties—who would prefer that children continue to be given drugs against the recommendations of expert reviews rather than to admit that the people who pointed out that healthy children should not be given experimental treatments to alter their bodies were right to be concerned. That is the state of so-called progressive politics in Australia. You are the best asset that big pharma companies selling off-label drugs to children have, and you're proud of it.

Nobody in this parliament or in any Australian health authority should be surprised at the decision made by England's NHS. The finding of that expert review followed similar evidence based reviews, which have been undertaken in Sweden and Finland, which, perhaps not surprisingly, also found that the evidence for prescribing puberty blockers to children was very low. Warnings about the lack of evidence of giving puberty blockers to children have been around for years. Back in 2021, I spoke in this place and warned that state governments are giving experimental, life-altering medical treatments to children and refusing to produce data demonstrating the extent of these practices or any evidence about the long-term outcomes and side-effects. I pointed out in that speech that, in any other field of medicine, that would cause a major scandal and prompt immediate investigations, but in this case the states feel empowered to operate in secrecy and to actively avoid public scrutiny or any independent oversight. Many parents, doctors and psychiatrists have been raising the alarm for much longer. Despite this, potentially thousands of Australian children have been prescribed these drugs while those concerns were being deliberately ignored. It has continued for years after other countries woke up and started raising the alarm.

We have health authorities and government ministers here in Australia continuing to put their heads in the sand. Where is the federal health minister, Mark Butler, on this? Why have we heard nothing from him about why children in England will no longer be prescribed off-label drugs because of the findings of an expert review but children in Australia will be? Because that is exactly what is happening on this minister's watch. It seems that he's ducking for cover, but, Minister Butler, your cover is blown. You know that there is a lack of evidence for these drugs. Groups like WPATH, who declared themselves experts, have been exposed for ignoring dangerous side-effects and acknowledging in private that children can't consent to being given off-label drugs for which there is no evidence base.

The Albanese government's choice now is to protect children from a medical experiment or protect the gender medicine industry, which has been carrying it out. Let me be very clear, the world is watching.

Senate adjourned at 17:37