Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm so proud of my home state of Tasmania today. A few days ago, on the steps of Parliament House in Spring Street in Melbourne, we saw a pathetically small group of transphobes standing next to actual Nazis as they gave the Sieg Heil salute. It was a disgraceful collusion between two absolutely hateful ideologies that represent actual fascism in this country. But yesterday some of the same people—these Nazi sympathisers, these people who are transphobic and play footsies with actual Nazis—came down to nipaluna/Hobart, in my home state of lutruwita/Tasmania, and do you know what happened? They were run out of town.

They held what they thought would be a rally but turned into a pathetic agglomeration of about a dozen people, and many hundreds of Tasmanians who believe in fairness, who believe in equality, who believe in love and who wanted to support their transgender siblings, came out, shouted them down and ran them out of town. It was a glorious day for my home state of Tasmania because Tasmanians came out and made it very clear that that hateful, transphobic, fascist agenda has no place in our society, has to be stood up against and has to be fought. That's what happened yesterday, and it was a beautiful thing. I thank everyone who came out in lutruwita/Tasmania yesterday to stand up for decency, to stand up for love, to stand up for compassion and to stand against the hateful ideologies of fascism and transphobia.

I want to mention two people in particular who represent the worst of those ideologies. First there is Posie Parker, which is a pseudonym for Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, who is a pathetic and disgusting excuse for a human being, who labelled my partner a 'groomer' yesterday because she has a transgender son, my stepson, Jasper Lees. I say to Posie Parker—or whatever pseudonym Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull wants to go by—that what she did yesterday was vile, disgraceful, untrue and disgusting, and it provided us with a window into her dark and warped soul.

Also yesterday, another pathetic and vile excuse for a human being, who goes by the name of Kim Allen, or @kimberleyallen, on Twitter, deadnamed my stepson Jasper Lees, deliberately misgendered him and said the most vile and disgusting things about him on Twitter. Well, Kimberley Allen, you can get in the bin alongside Posie Parker, because Jasper has more humanity in his little toenail than either of you have in your entire bodies. He is an intelligent, funny, highly empathetic human, not to mention a very handsome young man, and his intelligence, his humour and his empathy are diametrically opposed to Posie Parker's and Kimberley Allen's.

And Posie Parker belled the cat in Hobart yesterday when she admitted that she wasn't a feminist. She said that yesterday. And I agree with her that she's not a feminist, and there are plenty of transphobes like her who are not feminists. We need to call Posie and Kimberley and their ilk what they actually are, and that is trans-exclusionary right-wing dropkicks—T-E-R-D-S. They are not TERFs; they are TERDS, and that's how we should describe them: T-E-R-D-S.