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

I want to give Australian parents examples of what's being taught in our classrooms: 'You can't tell if someone is a boy or a girl by looking at their genitals. You can be a boy but feel like a girl inside. You are assigned male or female at birth, but this can change. Some people feel they did not get a good match with their body parts and they don't want to be called a boy or a girl.' These are just a few examples of the perverse rubbish our children and grandchildren—in some cases as young as four years old—are being taught in our schools across Australia. This is ideological indoctrination, not science and not truth. As a grandmother myself, I know this is causing untold damage to our kids. I am raising this issue because I'm immensely concerned that our children's health and wellbeing is being sacrificed for a vicious, hateful ideology trying to remake human beings into its own deviant image. I'm raising it to bring awareness to parents.

My seven -year-old grandson recently came home from school and asked his mother, 'Where's your penis?' 'What do you mean?' she asked, reminding him that she is female and females do not have a penis. My grandson then sked his mother where his vagina was. Troubled, my daughter asked him where these questions were coming from and why. 'From school,' he said. He said, 'School told me that you can choose if you want to be a boy or a girl,' and then added that he wanted to know when he gets to choose. Let's think about that for a second. He wanted to know when he gets to choose. All his life up to the age of seven years, he's been told he's a boy. He was reared as a boy, he looks like his father and his brother, he knows he's not like his mother, and now he gets to choose. Now he knows he's a boy—his parents told him that—because biological sex can't change because of words or an operation. I wonder if the school is also teaching him, if he then says he has a vagina, how he has a baby.

Parents and grandparents across Australia, you need to be aware of this. You need to find out what your children are being taught and take a stand against this perversity. Schools and departments call it 'sexual education'. It is part of the Australian national curriculum, promoting diversity and inclusion. No, this is absolute rubbish. We need to step in now before more harm is brought upon our kids, whether it be in public, private or religious based schools. This is happening everywhere across Australia, and many parents are simply unaware.

Parents are being deliberately kept in the dark. This is being delivered, in some instances, by a third-party external provider under various names and banners, including the Growing Up Program in Tasmania or Respectful Relationships in Victoria, which is now extending to Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia. It is all the same: transgender ideology which is pressuring our children and causing great distress and long-term harm. In many cases, no prior consent or permission is obtained from parents to teach this curriculum, and in some cases parents are denied access to or visibility of the content when requested. Why? Because, apparently, it's commercial-in-confidence. Why and how is this allowed? What are they trying to hide? Parents have a right to know what is being taught to their children, and under no circumstances should this be withheld or children be told to keep it a secret from their parents. That's exactly what paedophiles tell their victims. Schools do not have this right.

Our schools are being perverted into turning our kids into fodder for gender clinics where they are drugged and butchered. Parents are being backed into a corner and having to resort to school shopping in the hope of finding a principal who is willing to intervene and stop this deviancy. Unfortunately, they are few and far between. More and more parents have lost faith, trust and confidence in the education system and are turning to homeschooling, as they have no other option. In Queensland alone, homeschooling increased by 229 per cent from 2009 to 2014. (Time expired)

Karen Grogan (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We will now move to two-minute statements.