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Reports recently that Queensland has become the first state to ban “conversion therapy” by health professionals was a sad day for all Australian mums and dads who know the biological reality of male and female. 

The ACT government is pushing hard to make the same move while many are distracted with the COVID-19 crisis.

“Conversion therapy” is a red-herring term designed to conjure up images of shock therapy. Instead, the bill attacks people who offer evidence-based spiritual or clinical therapy to help people struggling with gender dysphoria and unwanted same-sex attraction.

The proposed ACT bill will have implications for the teaching of scripture in churches and religious schools. 

The ACT legislation is so broad it does not appear to exempt clergy members or religious counsellors acting in a religious capacity, nor does it exempt parents or grandparents acting substantially in the capacity of a parent or grandparent and not in the capacity of a mental health therapist.

Is sexual orientation fixed or fluid? For LGBTIQA+ activists, the answer depends on what position most benefits their cause. When it comes to so-called “conversion therapy” to change sexual orientation, the LGBTIQA+ lobby claims that homosexuality is immutable and cannot be changed. Yet in other contexts they claim that sexual orientation is fluid, especially in adolescence.

If sexual orientation is fluid, then it seems reasonable that some minors would seek therapy to change unwanted sexual feelings. And indeed, until the LGBTIQA+ lobby intervened, the psychiatric community largely agreed.

The true harm to children of “treatments” for gender dysphoria, is the destruction of sexual function and fertility through hormones, or by surgically removing genitals or breasts. The hypocrisy of supporting such dangerous “treatments” is morally repugnant and the harm they are doing to children cannot be undone.

FamilyVoice is asking you to contact all members of the ACT Parliament and calling upon them to reject the bill. It should halt this ill-informed legislation until its harmful implications can be fully explored before the ACT election. 

Here are some concerns with the Government’s bill you can convey:

  • The bill attacks parents’ rights to teach children their beliefs in the home, and/or through their school of choice;
  • Parents counselling their male child that he is a boy, when he wants to be a girl, may be subject to criminal proceedings; 
  • The bill will potentially turn parents, teachers, and pastors, into criminals if they teach a traditional view of sexuality; 
  • A faith-based school that teaches there are two genders could end up before the Human Rights Commission, threatening its ability to operate according to its ethos; 
  • The Queensland LNP voted against the bill, rightly claiming it would “turn doctors into criminals,” and so will the ACT legislation if it goes ahead; and
  • The Government has stated that it only wants to focus on "essential business".  This is just a heinous attack on parental rights and religous freedom.

Greg Bondar, NSW/ACT State Director 

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Last Wednesday morning, Prime minister Scott Morrison said that he would like to make coronavirus vaccination mandatory, if current trials are successful.

Following an outcry on social media, Mr Morrison backtracked later that day. “There’s been a bit of an overreaction to any suggestion of this – there will be no compulsory vaccine,” he said.

Vaccines have a long history dating back to the development of a vaccine against the smallpox virus in 1796.

We don’t hear much about smallpox these days.  Last century, this dreadful disease killed some 300 million people. 

Today, smallpox has been totally eliminated from the human population, thanks to an effective vaccine and a vigorous eradication program.  Now, only a few small samples of the virus remain in high security laboratories. The vaccine is still being produced, in case of biological warfare.

Over the past century, dozens of vaccines have been produced for a wide range of bacterial and viral illnesses, including tetanus, diphtheria, polio, measles and mumps.  We “moderns” have little understanding of the horrors such diseases inflicted in times past.

However, vaccines themselves can be dangerous.  In the 1940s and 1950s, polio (or poliomyelitis) paralysed or killed over half a million globally every year.  Dr Salk’s vaccine against this greatly feared disease was tested on 2 million children in 1954 and its success was widely hailed. But in 1955, a batch of vaccine produced by Cutter Laboratories was faulty. Some 200,000 US children received it; 40,000 caught polio, 200 were paralysed and 10 died.  The fault was later corrected.

Vaccines can also be dangerous to people with certain pre-existing conditions.  Contra-indications to vaccination are listed in the Australian Immunisation Handbook, for example.

Like all medical treatment, whether you should receive a vaccine against a specific disease is a question for you and your health professional.  The doctor needs to weigh the expected benefit against the likely risk, given your personal medical history.  You can either accept or decline the doctor’s advice.

This fundamental human right to give or refuse consent to medical treatment comes from the Christian faith. All people are made in the image of God and are accountable to him for their actions. To be accountable for actions to our own bodies, we must have freedom to decide whether to accept or reject possible treatment.

This is the origin of the common law offence of battery – intentional touching of another person that is harmful or offensive.  A doctor must have a patient’s consent before doing anything with the patient’s body, such as giving an injection.  A doctor who acts without consent runs the risk of being charged with battery.

Good medical practice in Australia requires doctors to obtain a patient’s informed consent before undertaking any examination or providing treatment (except in an emergency).

Consequently, any proposal to make vaccination mandatory conflicts with the person’s primary accountability to God. It denies a person’s freedom of conscience and is contrary to good medical practice. We pray that the Prime Minister keeps his word that there will be no compulsory vaccine.

Peter Downie

National Director - FamilyVoice Australia 

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This prestigious journal got it wrong

I recently told you about Dr Peter Ridd, the professor who was sacked by James Cook University after disagreeing with findings by some of his colleagues about the Great Barrier Reef. He is now seeking to appeal his dismissal in the High Court of Australia.

Dr Ridd’s research suggests that some studies claiming the Great Barrier Reef is dying are unreliable. However, such unreliability is no surprise.  

A few years ago, a survey by the respected science journal Nature found that more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments.  A majority of those surveyed agreed that there is a “crisis of reproducibility”.

And last week we saw yet another example of untrustworthy science, this time on transgender treatment.

The Australian (12/8/20) reported that the prestigious American Journal of Psychiatry has had to publish an extraordinary correction to a 2019 US-Swedish paper.

This widely praised, peer-reviewed paper had claimed that transgender surgery – such as breast removal or genital reconstruction – reduced the need for mental health treatment.  This claimed benefit of transgender surgery has been used to push for easier access to such treatment.

Dr Michelle Telfer, clinic director at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne has argued that mastectomies improve the mental health of “trans boys”.  Lobbying by Telfer succeeded in securing funding of $6 million from the Andrews government in Victoria to cut waiting times for treatment.

But last month, the American journal retracted this claim. It published a correction, an editorial and letters from a dozen psychiatrists, clinicians and researchers in four countries. They identified multiple flaws in the 2019 paper. Faced with the criticisms, the authors of the original paper acknowledged that “the results demonstrated no advantage of surgery” for subsequent mental health.

As a leading researcher pointed out, the 2019 paper had ignored post-surgery suicides!

The correction has come not a moment too soon. The original US-Swedish paper had been hailed by Australian trans activists in their campaign to achieve full Medicare cover for all trans surgery.

Treatment guidelines from the Melbourne Royal Children’s Hospital transgender clinic argue for trans breast removal for girls as young as 16 with gender dysphoria (distressed by their biological sex).

This campaign comes at a time when the number of gender dysphoric children seeking treatment is rising faster than ever before. The spike in cases may be linked to “copycat” pressures from social media. Many of these children have autistic traits.

FamilyVoice has been alerting MPs about this worrying trend. We continue to urge federal health minister Greg Hunt to set up a national inquiry into the causes and treatment of childhood gender dysphoria.

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This is a grim and ugly fact. Our civil government is no longer able to meet its first obligation — to protect the people —  we are really in trouble. There is no question that civil government today is trying to do everything under the sun, and doing nothing at all successfully. In terms of efficiency and effectiveness, the only thing that civil government does at all well is to take money away from us.

Having said this, we must add that the fault is by no means entirely on the side of civil authorities. Lawlessness is so widespread and extensive that it is becoming impossible to control. I can still recall the whining of one man at a neighbourhood meeting about how the police were not doing their job. The fact was that his boys were the neighbourhood menace. We have no right to complain about the failures of the police if we are creating a part of their problem by failing to train our children properly.

The church has always been the main force for law enforcement. By the religious and moral instruction it gives, the church has been our greatest law enforcement agency. This, however, is not true now of many churches. Neither sound doctrine nor sound morals seem to be present in many Sunday-school lessons and pulpit expositions. To teach Sunday-school children about indigenous cultures and aspirations and nothing about the Ten Commandments is hardly sound teaching of morality. Instead of being a moral force in the community, such churches become a disintegrating force, and the children are robbed of the moral discipline and faith they so greatly need.

Moreover, government (like charity) begins at home. The failure of the family to discipline its children is a key contributing factor to our moral decline.

Today, government is indeed failing to protect its citizens, but the failure begins at more basic levels than the police. It represents the moral failure of the churches, families, and individuals of our country. Whatever else an election might do, and whoever we may vote in, we cannot alter or erase the moral failure. It begins where we live. The remedy also begins there.

Peter Downie - National Director

FamilyVoice Australia

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Safe Schools Manager Roz Ward (left)

I was tempted to let One Nation MP Mark Latham write this article.

He introduced his Parental Rights Bill in the NSW Legislative Council last week (5 August 2020). And –I can hardly believe that I am saying this – I agreed with every word he said.

He spoke more than 4000 words, so there’s no way I can quote them all. But I’ve included an edited selection to show why this Whitlam-mentored, former ALP leader now has conservatives cheering.

Hon Mark Latham MLC

The purpose of the Education Legislation Amendment (Parental Rights) Bill 2020 is:

  • to outlaw gender fluidity teaching, course development and teacher training in the New South Wales education system;
  • to reassert the rights and role of parents in the moral, ethical, political and social development of their children.

The parliament should legislate to defend the family unit and the biological science of gender. Parents, not schools, are the teachers of the values of their children. There are some fine teachers in the education system, but at the end of the day they come and go while parents are there 24/7, loving, nurturing, and dealing with the problems late at night and on weekends.

I congratulate the Berejiklian government on removing the Safe Schools program from the New South Wales curriculum. The government has some good intentions, but good intentions are not enough. The state government has lost control of the education system. It is run by bureaucrats, the Teachers Federation and what I call the education establishment.

The Teachers Federation has on its website all the material that the government thought it had banned, including the Stand Out Minus 18 guide, written by Roz Ward in 2011 for the Victorian Safe Schools Coalition; the Gayby Baby curriculum guide, showing teachers how they can fit gender fluidity teaching into existing school syllabuses; and a series of Safe School information kits also written by Roz Ward.

Roz Ward has admitted that Safe Schools was never an anti-bullying program. Ward has said that it was only ever neo-Marxist indoctrination.

The University of Newcastle has issued a classroom practice manual for teachers, depicting gender and families as "socially constructed" and urging kindergarten children—five- and six-year-olds—to think of nuclear family structures as "problematic". Parents are being marginalised.

Since I was elected to this Parliament 16 months ago, my office has had a constant stream of complaints about politics in schools. Parents are sick and tired of their kids texting them to say that day's English class was actually gender studies again. Parents are sick and tired of teachers and school counsellors telling their children that gender is a choice. Parents are sick and tired of students being lectured about political issues, but with only one side of the story being told.

This bill is unequivocally on the side of parents and their children. The time has come to protect their rights in law.

I congratulate Mark Latham on his important research. The notorious “Safe Schools” program is far from dead, even in states that have supposedly banned it.

Mark’s office told us that his bill has been referred to a parliamentary committee to identify ways it can be most effective.

Please pray for him, and for us as we rally support for his bill.

Peter Downie - National Director