Parental Primacy

The Hon. S.L. GAME (15:31): I believe that reasserting the rights of parents in educating their children is a particularly serious and pressing issue at this time. I have spoken a great deal about parental primacy in this chamber, and I intend to do so again today. Parental primacy means that parents, not schools, are the prime educators of their children when it comes to moral and ethical issues, especially concerning gender and sexuality.

The prime authority that parents have to guide their kids in moral and ethical issues is being threatened now like never before. That is why last year I presented to this chamber my parental primacy bill. The bill seeks to do two things: ban gender fluidity teaching in the South Australian education system and reaffirm the role of parents to educate their children when it comes to moral and ethical issues.

Why ban gender fluidity in schools? Because it is an insidious ideology that is destroying the lives of thousands of young people through hormone therapy and surgical castration. Governments around the world are now putting a stop to the gender medicalisation of minors. More and more young people who have de-transitioned are now calling out for justice, revealing how they were isolated from their families by gender clinics and pressured to undergo irreversible surgical procedures, something they and their families will have to live with for the rest of their lives.

This ideology, the ideology that gender is fluid and can be changed according to a child's feelings, is being taught in our classrooms without the knowledge or consent of parents. Education has been increasingly ideologically driven rather than facts driven. It has been used as an agent for social and political change rather than a chance to give every student the best start in life. This is serious overreach, and it has to stop. At a time when Australian students are failing to meet basic standards of numeracy and literacy, schools need to forget about ideology and give our young people a strong foundation in real knowledge so they can succeed in life, not encourage students to focus on what type of sex partner they want to be.

This parliament needs to face the reality that our education system has increasingly sidelined parents and pushed views about sexuality and gender onto children when they had no right to. My bill will make sure that when schools teach children anything to do with moral and ethical standards, political and social values, or matters of personal wellbeing and identity, they teach them from a non-ideological standpoint. The bill would enshrine in South Australian law article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which says:

The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to have respect for the liberty of parents and, when applicable, legal guardians to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions.

This is not a radical proposal: this is bringing South Australian law in line with an international covenant that Australia signed in 1980, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Let me stress that the idea that parents, not schools, are primarily in charge of the moral and ethical teaching of their children is not a controversial position for the majority of people. When my parental primacy bill was first introduced, The Advertiser ran a poll that showed that 90 per cent of the over 600 respondents agreed that parents should be in charge of guiding their children on moral and ethical matters, not schools.

Again, I stress that this is not some policy from the far right of politics, this is not just a One Nation issue: this is what South Australian families want. People are sick of their children being force-fed gender ideology at school. I have parents emailing my office regularly saying that they live in fear of what might be taught to their children without their knowledge or consent. They are rightly disturbed at the lack of transparency in our schools' education programs.

The fact is that it is currently extremely difficult for anyone to actually find out what is being taught in classrooms. It is virtually impossible to get a copy of the curriculum taught by the government's approved sexual education providers.

My parental primacy bill will ensure that class material is approved in advance by parents so that no school gets away with teaching material like we saw in Renmark last year, exposing year 9 girls to the concept of bestiality and images of transgender surgery. After what happened in Renmark many parents, like Kristy Fyfe, have completely lost confidence in the state's education system—and, as a parent myself, I empathise with them.

Section 82F of my bill forces schools to be transparent with parents about what they are teaching kids on moral and ethical issues. I quote from the bill:

Before the commencement of a school year, the principal of a government school must give notice of…content relating to matters of parental primacy that is intended to be taught to students

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