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

Educators argue there is no need for legislation to protect children from indoctrination because schoolchildren can use their critical-thinking skills. That's a cop-out, because students are no match for an adult using their position of power to instruct. The children can't answer back. Parents have the responsibility to decide how their children will be educated, provided it is in the best interests of the children. Parents want their children educated, not indoctrinated.

Firstly, the bill seeks to prevent indoctrination by placing an obligation on the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority to develop a balanced curriculum for states and territories to adopt. This is currently not the case in many subject areas, including climate. I'll tell you why. The teachers are complaining they don't get the assistance or the help from the education department on what the curriculum is. They are struggling to come up with curriculum. That's why they need help from the education department. We need a broad-based curriculum for the schools to actually ensure that they are teaching our kids correctly. We've got teachers coming out of universities that can't even read and write properly themselves. They are put into the educational system and they are not up to the standard. This is why we have a failure, with many kids not being able to read and write. Our teachers need assistance. They need help. But we have to ensure they are up to the job of teaching the kids in our educational system.

If teachers were up to the job, we wouldn't have the failure that we are having at the moment. Nearly half of our kids of 15 years of age are more than two years behind in the education system compared to our counterparts in Singapore and China. Why is that the case? It's because they are not being properly taught. We have changed our curriculums from the years gone by when I attended school, and it has now failed our kids. It needs to change. I call on parents: get some backbone about you. It's your children we are talking about—the future generations of this nation. They must have the right to critical thinking. They must have the right to question this. We must have a balance of both sides of the argument. I went into this especially with regard to climate science. The curriculum says, 'Most agree that human activity is responsible for the majority of measured global warming. Climate science is far from settled, however, with no-one knowing the climate sensitivity to increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.'

Secondly, the bill seeks to tie federal education funding to the existence of state and territory legislation and prohibits indoctrination in schools. The gender fluidity theory is widely taught in schools, even though it is a medical and scientific fact that inheritance from your father of a Y chromosome makes you a biological male, which can never be changed, and inheritance of an X chromosome from your father makes you a biological female. No-one can actually change that. Even today, people ask, 'What is a female?' They're tripping over their bloody lower jaw because they don't even know how to answer the question: 'What is a female?' How ridiculous! The bureaucrats are sitting there, saying: 'Oh, I'm not game to answer that question. It might upset the Greens or the Labor Party or those who are my bosses who have got their jobs here because we push this ideology and this agenda.' That's how stupid it is.

It's up to us as legislators. We sit here and listen to the claptrap that comes out of the Greens' mouths with all this bloody rubbish that they're pushing about gender fluidity and identity and LGBTIQ and 39-plus—I don't know how many there are. I can't believe how many sexual identities they want to impose on people, but, at the end of the day, we are male and we are female. We both play our own roles in our society, and that's who we are. Let the children grow up. Let them decide their own sexual preference, or whatever they want, at an age. Don't put them under the knife for castration or the destruction of their bodies that's allowed. If you speak out against that, you can be taken to the courts or fined. That's a ridiculous point as well. Let children be children. Parents: grow up and be parents. Take responsibility for your own children and what they're taught. And, if you don't like what they're being taught, then go and visit the schools and the teachers and the principals and have your say.