Pauline Hanson bill banning transgender issues from schools attacked by Greens’ Penny Allman-Payne

A teacher-turned-senator from the Greens has rejected Pauline Hanson’s attempt to ban transgender issues in schools.

The One Nation leader managed to revive her 2020 bill after it was rejected by a committee two years ago and was debated in the Senate on Wednesday.

Senator Hanson’s grievances about the education system included that “Marxism,” critical race theory, and “climate change prophecies of doom” were taught along with “gender fluidity.”

Her bill demanded that Department of Education bureaucrats create a “balanced” curriculum and that schools receive government funding only if their states passed laws prohibiting “indoctrination.”

Rookie Senator Penny Allman-Payne, who was a high school teacher for nearly 30 years, including teaching sex education, said the bill was an affront to teachers.

“It’s not about balance. It’s about hate and propaganda,” she said.

The former humanities head said the school curriculum was based on truth and science and teachers delivered it.

“We don’t pick the bits of science that we agree or disagree with, we don’t pick the bits of history that we like and are hard to face, and we don’t discriminate against the kids who are. for us in our lessons,” she said.

“I invite you to come to a school and sit in front of a student who has made several attempts on his life because he was a victim of hate and transphobia.

‘How dare you use our young people as political footballs. They want nothing more than to be accepted as they are.’

Senator Allman-Payne said students had critical thinking skills and their teachers were not interested in indoctrinating them.

Instead, it was Senator Hanson and other proponents of the bill who “tried to indoctrinate the people with their hateful and bigoted views in our schools.”

“I will not subject young people in this country to your intolerance and hatred. I will get up every time I see it, and the Greens will call it out,” she said.

“This bill is not about critical thinking; this bill is about the legal establishment of a right-wing extremist curriculum.’

Senator Allman-Payne warned that allowing politicians to overpower educators has led some parts of the US to ban racism and sexuality in schools and even burn books.

This bill is dangerous. As a teacher with more than 30 years of experience in our schools, I know it is unfair to the young people in our schools, and it is an insult to teachers,” she concluded.

Senator Hanson previously opened the second reading of her bill with a 14-minute speech about everything she saw as wrong about the education system.

She started by saying that teachers were supposed to teach, not “indoctrinate them with Marxism”

“They’re not supposed to make them believe that they can be a boy one day and a girl the next. They are not supposed to recruit them as fighters for climate change or social justice,” she said.

Senator Hanson claimed the bill was necessary because the education system had been “thoroughly infiltrated by activists and disturbing views of race, climate and gender, based on disproved neo-Marxist theories.”

Parents only discovered this, she claimed, when they were forced to homeschool their children during the Covid lockdowns.

“They found that their children were being told they were evil, racist oppressors just because they were white and that they should be ashamed and repent of it,” she said.

“They found their kids were brought up to believe they could pick their own sex on a whim, damn biology. They discovered that their children were being terrorized by doomsday prophecies about climate change.’

Senator Hanson went on to claim that schools were “busting our kids’ little minds” and likened learning about transgender issues to being groomed by a pedophile.

“We are against pedophiles punishing children for what they want to do to our children. Why is this different? Why doesn’t this take care of our children at a very young age?’ she said.

Senator Hanson said her eight-year-old grandson said he was “totally confused” by a boy in his class who wore girls’ clothes to school, and was told you could choose male or female.

She demanded that ‘normal’ Australians stop being told to change their lives for the 1,200 people who identified as transgender in the 2016 census.

“We sit here and listen to the nonsense that comes out of the mouths of the Greens with all the damn nonsense they push about gender fluidity and identity and LGBTIQ and the over 39s [genders] “I don’t know how many there are,” she said.

“I can’t believe how many sexual identities they want to impose on people, but at the end of the day we are male and female.”

Senator Hanson ended by telling parents to “grow up” and take responsibility for what their children were taught.

“And if you don’t like what they teach, go to the schools and the teachers and the principals and speak up,” she said.

Deputy leader of the Greens, Senator Mehreen Faruqi, also spoke out against the bill, saying it showed how racist and aloof Senator Hanson was.

“Senator Hanson, frankly, leave it alone. You’re kidding yourself. What you’re doing is reprehensible,’ she began.

Senator Faruqi explained that when the education committee reviewed the bill in 2020, it was poorly drafted, vague and inconsistent.

“But in addition to being bad legislation in a technical sense, this bill is also just mean,” she continued.

“It’s transphobic. It’s anti-science. It is an attempt to force a curriculum rewrite to teach climate denial and harmful, outdated ideas about gender and sexuality.”

Liberal Senator Alex Antic and One Nation Member of Parliament Malcolm Russell stood in support of the bill with speeches using similar arguments to Senator Hanson.

Labor Senator Louise Pratt and Secretary of Commerce Don Farrell opposed it, along with 28-year-old Greens Senator Jordon Steele-John, who spoke as a youth.

Liberal National Senator Gerard Rennick said he had not read the bill and thought parents should have more of a say in what their children were taught and that children were too young to understand such issues.

“Even if you’re in your twenties, I don’t want you getting involved in politics. When you’re in your twenties, go out and get drunk, learn to understand women better, get rich and travel the world,” he said.

“Get back into politics when you’re in your 40s and you’ve lived a life and can really throw yourself into it.”

However, he opposed the legislation because he wanted the government to get as much out of people’s lives as possible.

‘I want ideology completely out of education, whether it’s right or left. I don’t really care. I just want kids to be kids, and I want parental primacy to remain in their upbringing,” he said.

“We just want the government out of our lives and we want the innocence of childhood to stay as it is.”