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

I rise to speak today on the important issue of women's safety. Any government and any policy that allows a violent male rapist to choose to be placed in a women's prison has profoundly lost its way. For a number of years, women's rights campaigners have been trying to warn that self-identification policies, which have been embraced by governments worldwide in the name of inclusion, create loopholes that dangerous male predators will exploit. The response to women raising those logical concerns has been for left-wing politicians and media outlets to go on the attack—not against the predators who exploit these loopholes and put women in danger but against the women who sound the alarm. We have seen a classic example of this occur over the last few weeks in Scotland.

The Scottish government allowed a man called Adam Graham to elect to be sent to a women's prison after being convicted of raping two women. As many in Scotland have pointed out, Adam Graham was far from the first dangerous male sex offender in Scotland to be housed alongside women, but this time something happened that the Scottish government weren't expecting, and that was that the media actually called them out for it. There was a predictable and swift public backlash, particularly because the Scottish government had spent the previous months insisting that this would never happen and that anyone who suggested that it would were bigots. As usual, women who correctly pointed out what would happen were attacked by the political Left as transphobic and as TERFs—all the usual slurs thrown at women by the Left to intimidate others into staying silent.

The Scottish government and its First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, confirmed that those women were right all along when it was announced last week that Adam Graham would be moved out of the women's prison. But by dodging questions about other male sex offenders in women's prisons Ms Sturgeon unwittingly revealed the truth about self-identification in prison policies. That truth is that such policies are always based on secrecy and falsehoods and are unjustifiable when exposed to public scrutiny. That's why the governments and lobby groups who create these policies do whatever they can to hide the truth from the public, and this brings me to Australia.

We don't have to look overseas for evidence that dangerous men can identify as women and be placed in women's prisons. It's happening right here. Every government, state and federal, knows that it's happening. They rely on the silence and complicity of the media to sustain this policy to attack any woman who raises it in the public domain. Just like in Scotland, governments and the media in Australia have stayed deliberately quiet about male offenders who identify as women and request to access women's prisons.

How many Australian media outlets have reported that a man sent to a women's prison in Victoria had spent six years in a German prison for repeatedly sexually abusing his six-year-old daughter; that, upon returning to Australia, he was charged and imprisoned for failing to comply with sex offender reporting obligations; that, despite this conviction, he is known by police to use multiple different identities, which has somehow been permitted, according to the AFP in answers provided to me through Senate estimates, on the grounds that he 'did not officially change their name but rather chose to informally be known by other names'—and that is a direct quote from that response—and that he committed a serious sexual assault on a woman in 2021 yet was sent to a women's prison? Any reasonable person knows that this is indefensible, just as the Scottish government ultimately could not defend placing Adam Graham in a women's prison when they were caught out. That's why activists and governments put so much effort into stopping the media reporting on this information so it never reaches the public.