Gendered Language

The Hon. S.L. GAME (15:19): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before directing a question to the Attorney-General regarding school-age children being asked about their pronouns.

Leave granted.

The Hon. S.L. GAME: It was reported in The Advertiser this month that across Victoria children as young as five will be asked to identify as he, she or they as part of new taxpayer-funded guidelines being rolled out at public libraries. Staff will also need to avoid gendered language and will offer pronoun badges, pins or lanyards to library patrons. This is all part of a government-funded initiative known as the 'rainbow toolkit', which includes adding books on gender diversity to library collections, promoting drag story-time sessions and not assuming the sexuality of any patrons. This initiative was introduced and funded following a survey of 156 respondents from LGBTQIA+ families and 80 respondents from public library staff.

Evidence exists this is also happening in South Australia and my office recently received a written account of a girl at a rural South Australian school being asked, 'What are your preferred pronouns?' and she replied, 'Can't you see that I am a girl?' My question to the Attorney-General is: what is the state government doing to ensure South Australian children are kept safe from pressures to prematurely confront adult concepts like sex and gender in what need to be safe spaces like public libraries?

The Hon. K.J. MAHER (Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Attorney-General, Minister for Industrial Relations and Public Sector) (15:21): I can tell you one thing we are doing as a government to ensure South Australian children are kept safe, and that's a bill that we are going to be discussing this afternoon for a start. In relation to the rallying against gender-specific or gendered language that the honourable member seems so excised by, we recall that only in this term of parliament members sitting opposite rallied against the removal of gendered language from the standing orders.

They thought that was wokeness gone mad, and then they found out a few days later that that king of woke, the Hon. Rob Lucas, had already done that a number of years before—this whole idea that it's some recent creation that we don't try to refer to a woman as 'chairman' and other sorts of things is wokeness gone mad. The Hon. Rob Lucas was on to this years and years ago. We are absolutely committed to keeping children safe and we are committed to people being referred to in a correct and respectful way.