Thursday, 24 September 2026

 Melissa HORNE (Williamstown – Minister for Ports and Freight, Minister for Jobs, Minister for Industry and Advanced Manufacturing, Minister for Defence Industry) (17:36): I move:

That this house:

(a)   condemns the Leader of the Opposition for her silence as federal coalition figures, echoing Senator Hanson, attacked the evidence-based Respectful Relationships program as ‘anti-boy ideology’;

(b)   affirms that teaching children respect prevents family violence; and

(c)   calls on the Leader of the Opposition to state publicly where she stands.

I move this motion today because there are some things in this place that should sit above the ordinary business of politics, and one is the safety of women and girls. The protection of our children is another. Every so often a moment arrives that tests whether members of this house are willing to stand up for both or whether they will look away because it is easier. A fortnight ago such a moment arrived, and the Leader of the Opposition looked away.

Let me begin, though, not in this chamber but on a footy field in my electorate. A couple of weekends ago I watched two teams of young girls, the under-14 girls from Altona and the under-16s from Williamstown, win their grand finals – girls who a generation ago would have had nowhere to play at all. They are now competing, now belonging and now being told in the clearest possible terms that they matter. It was a celebration of everything community sport can be at its best: a place where young women are respected, where they are safe and where they thrive.

But I want to be honest about the other side of community sport too, because it was in the news just this month. Our community sporting fields are seeing a surge in abusive behaviour from the sidelines: parents and coaches screaming abuse at children, at officials and at each other. It has become so serious that clubs around the country are now looking for ways to name it, to shame it and to stamp it out. When we ask where that behaviour comes from, we are asking exactly the question at the heart of this motion, because the person abusing a child from a sideline was once a child themselves, and somewhere at that point, no-one taught them better or someone taught them worse. That is what this debate is really about: whether we teach our children respect or whether we leave it to chance, to the sideline or to the screen.

Let me set out plainly what this motion is about, because I want no-one in this chamber and no-one following this debate to be in any doubt. A fortnight ago senior federal coalition figures launched a sustained public attack on a program taught in Victoria’s schools. It was not a fringe program and not an experiment but a program that has been part of Victorian education for years, taught from the very first years of school right through to year 12. It is a program built on evidence and a program with one purpose at its heart, which is to teach our children respect. The Respectful Relationships program teaches children how to treat one another well. It teaches them about equality. It teaches them about consent. It teaches them to recognise disrespect and to understand that violence is never acceptable. It exists because we made a decision in this state – a hard-won decision paid for in the lives of too many women – that we would try to stop violence before it begins rather than simply clean it up afterwards.

The federal Nationals leader Senator Matt Canavan stood up and called that program ‘anti-boy ideology’. He said it had ‘no place in our schools’, and the Leader of the Opposition here in Victoria, the member for Kew, said nothing. The federal opposition leader Angus Taylor spent an entire day refusing to say clearly whether he even believed consent should be taught in schools. He talked about teachers running ‘agendas’. He called for so-called balance in the curriculum, as though teaching a child that they should never hit, should not coerce, should not abuse are positions that require a counterweight, and the Leader of the Opposition here in Victoria said nothing. Behind both of them stands Senator Pauline Hanson, who has promised to drive so-called woke ideology out of Australia’s schools. That is the movement; that is the direction. That is the company the Leader of the Opposition’s federal colleagues are now keeping, and still the member for Kew has said nothing. That silence is what this motion condemns – not a difference of policy, not a robust disagreement about curriculum, which is the ordinary stuff of democratic debate and entirely legitimate. This motion condemns a failure of leadership, because when the people in your own political movement attack the very programs that keep women and girls safe, staying silent is not neutral. Staying silent is an absolute choice.

Parents are entitled to know what their children are taught. Curriculum content is a legitimate subject for public debate. Schools should teach kids how to think, not tell them what to think. But that is not what has happened. That is not the debate the Leader of the Opposition’s colleagues chose to have. Calling a violence prevention program ‘anti-boy ideology’ that has no place in our schools is not a contribution to a balanced curriculum, it is an attempt to abolish a program altogether. Refusing three times to say whether consent should be taught is not a defence of parental rights, it is a signal. There is a line now between debating how we teach respect and denying that we should teach it at all, and the federal coalition walked straight across it. The question for this house is whether the Victorian opposition will walk back.

Let me talk about what the actual program is. The Respectful Relationships program was one of the direct outcomes of the Royal Commission into Family Violence. It was grounded in evidence about how violence begins, how attitudes form and how early we need to intervene if we want to change the trajectory of a child’s life. It teaches age-appropriate lessons. For the youngest kids it means learning about emotions, about friendship and about treating others kindly. As children grow it means learning about respect in relationships, about equality between girls and boys and about consent and where to turn if something goes wrong. This is not radical; this is not extreme. Ask any parent in my electorate whether they want their kids to be taught to treat others with respect, and you will get the same answer every single time: ‘Yes, of course. That is what decent people want for their kids.’ So when Senator Canavan calls that an anti-boy ideology, he is attacking the idea that boys should be taught to respect girls. He is attacking the idea that our sons should grow up understanding consent. He is attacking a program whose entire reason for existing is to prevent the violence that kills a woman in this country, on average, every single week. The federal education minister put it better than I could. He said, ‘Teaching boys to respect girls isn’t woke. It’s just common decency.’ And he is right.

So let me talk about the world that our boys are actually growing up in. They are growing up online, in spaces engineered to hold their attention at any cost. In those spaces boys as young as primary school age are being served a steady diet of misogyny – content that tells them that women are lesser, content that tells them that dominance is strength, content amplified by algorithms that have learned that outrage and grievance keep young men scrolling. That is not a moral panic.

Teachers are telling us this. Teachers are reporting that children as young as six are repeating misogynistic language they have absorbed online. Teachers, and particularly women teachers, are reporting rising aggression and sexism in their classrooms, directed at them and at female students. Some teachers are even leaving the profession over it. That is the tide our boys are swimming against. Here is what those who cry anti-boy refuse to understand. Abandoning a boy to that tide is not respecting him, it is failing him. The manosphere does not love our sons, it preys on them. It finds them when they are lonely or uncertain or struggling and it offers them contempt dressed up as confidence. It tells a boy that his worth depends on the women he can dominate. That is an ideology with no place in our schools.

When I hear of a program that teaches boys with the message that it is anti-boy, I say the opposite is true. The people leaving our boys to the algorithms are the ones failing them. This program is one of the few things standing between a lonely boy and a machine that wants to radicalise him. To attack it is not to defend boys; it is to surrender them. It is not only the screen that shapes them. It is us. It is every adult in a child’s life who models what respect looks like or fails to. It is a coach who teaches a team to win with grace and to lose with dignity. It is the parent on the sideline who claps for both sides or the one who screams abuse at a child in a striped shirt. Children learn respect or its absence from the grown-ups around them. That is why community sport matters so much in this conversation and why the surge in sideline abuse should worry all of us. Our clubs, our coaches and our volunteers are among the most powerful of teachers of respect that we have. They show boys week in and week out what it means to be a good man. Respectful Relationships education is exactly the same lesson taught in the classroom. The two belong hand in hand. You cannot cheer for one while tearing down the other.

I want to dwell on what this means for our girls, because it is really easy to forget how recent their place in these sporting clubs has been. Not long ago a girl who wanted to play footy had nowhere to go once she reached her teens. There was no team for her. There was no jumper with her name on it. The message, spoken or not, was that this was not her game. It changed, and it has changed because community clubs decided to make room. Those two grand finals that I watched a couple of weekends ago did not happen by chance. They happened because volunteers, coaches and parents built something that told a generation of girls, ‘You belong here. You’re an athlete. You’re welcome and you’re safe.’ It is a fragile thing, and it has to be protected because a girl learns just as much from the sidelines as a boy does. When she hears a grown man screaming abuse at a kid, when she sees disrespect treated as part of the game, she learns something about how much her place is really worth. When she is respected, when the adults around her model dignity and fairness, she learns the opposite. She learns that she belongs fully, and that lesson does not stay on the field. It follows her into the classroom, into the workplace and into every single room that she will walk into. Protecting these spaces and keeping them respectful and keeping them safe is not separate from the fight we have today. It is the same fight. It is the same question of whether we will build a culture where women and girls are respected or whether we will look the other way while that culture is torn down on the sidelines in the social media feed or in the Parliament.

I do not come to this debate as a bystander. I come to it having served in this state as the Minister for Prevention of Family Violence. I have sat with survivors. I have seen what violence does, not as a statistic but in the faces of the people that it leaves behind, and I have seen what works. Let me tell this house what Victoria has done. This is what taking this crisis seriously actually looks like: it looks like money, and it looks like systems and laws and years of sustained work. It does not look like a press conference attacking a school program to score a point in a culture war. It was Labor that called the nation’s first Royal Commission into Family Violence – not a review, not an inquiry, but a royal commission with all the weight and seriousness that carries, because we believed that this crisis demanded nothing less. When the commission handed down its 227 recommendations, Labor delivered every single one of them – all 227. Since then the government has invested more than $4 billion to build a family violence system that is now regarded as the national benchmark. Other states look to Victoria to see how it should be done.

Let me tell you what $4 billion builds. It built the Orange Door network. For the first time Victorians in every part of this state have a single front door to safety – one place to go, one point of contact. No more being bounced between services at the worst moment of your life. This is what we built. It built new refuges – safer, more accessible crisis accommodation for women and children fleeing violence, designed around dignity rather than making do. It built the multi-agency risk assessment and management framework, and through it we have trained more than 400,000 workers across this state to identify signs of family violence risk early. Four hundred thousand people in health, in education, in community services and in police are now equipped to see what too often went unseen. It built the family violence information-sharing scheme, backed by a central information point that is the only one of its kind in Australia. It means our services can see risks sooner and keep perpetrators in view rather than losing them between the gaps. It built Respect Victoria, a dedicated agency whose entire purpose is prevention, to stop this violence before it begins rather than only responding once harm is done. We invested in programs that hold men who use violence to account, because prevention is not about supporting victims, it is about changing the behaviour of those who cause harm.

We committed to at least 10 per cent of all new family violence funding going to Aboriginal-controlled organisations, because Aboriginal women experience this violence at rates that should shame this nation, and because solutions must be led by the community. We have strengthened the law as well. Alongside a suite of women’s safety reforms, this government is delivering landmark legislation to make coercive control of an intimate partner a standalone criminal offence. We understand – because the evidence and the experience of survivors tells us – that controlling, isolating and terrorising behaviour that strips a woman of her freedom is so often a warning sign that comes before physical violence and before the worst outcome of them all.

That is the record, and here is the thread that ties it all together, the thread those opposite would prefer we did not follow, because every part of the system – the refuges, the training, the information sharing, the laws – is about responding to violence that has already taken root. Respectful Relationships education is different. It is the part that reaches back to the very beginning. It is the part that tries to make sure that the boy in the classroom today never becomes the man that the police report tomorrow. You cannot claim to care about ending family violence and attack one program designed to prevent it at the source. You cannot support the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff and campaign against the fence at the top. You cannot, as a leader, watch your own colleagues take an axe to that fence and say nothing at all.

Which brings me to the Leader of the Opposition in Victoria. The member for Kew has been silent, and that is the failure, because leadership is not only about the positions you take, it is about when you are willing to stand up when standing up is inconvenient because people attacking women’s safety are not your opponents but your own side. When Senator Canavan called Respectful Relationships education an ‘anti-boy ideology’ the Leader of the Opposition in this state had a choice. She could have stood up and said, ‘Not here. Not in Victoria. Not about a program that keeps our daughters and our sons safe.’ She could have drawn a line. She could have shown the women of this state that when it counts she will defend them, even against her own colleagues. But she said nothing. And silence in a leader is never just silence; it is a message. It tells every young woman watching that her safety is negotiable. It tells every survivor that the program built from their pain can be trashed without consequence. It tells the federal figures leading these attacks they will face no resistance here. And it tells the growing number of Victorians drawn to the politics of Pauline Hanson that the Victorian Liberal Party will not stand in their way.

We are told that One Nation is rising, and in this environment the temptation for a Liberal leader is obvious: say nothing, offend no-one, let the culture warriors run and hope to catch the drift of their support, do not condemn Senator Canavan because his supporters might be your voters, and do not defend the program because defending it might cost you. That is the calculation that is behind this silence, and it is a calculation that puts political advantage ahead of the safety of women and girls. This is not an abstract concern. Let us be honest about the arithmetic of this next Parliament. On the polling that we are seeing, the path for government for those opposite runs through One Nation. If the Liberals are to govern this state, they in all likelihood need One Nation to do it. So the question of who leads One Nation in Victoria, and what that person stands for is not a curiosity. It is a question about who the Leader of the Opposition is prepared to work with, who to depend on and who to trust with the safety of Victorian women.

So let us have a look. The leader of One Nation in this state promotes the very online accounts that form the shallow end of the manosphere, accounts that trade in a particular brand of masculinity content: resilience, discipline, self-mastery – posts engineered to sound harmless. One reads:

There is a calm some men have that didn’t come from peace. It came from being tested so often they stopped flinching at every storm.

On its own that is just a poster on a gym wall. But that is precisely the point. These accounts are anodyne by design. The soft language is the doorway – it is the entry level – and the same accounts and the algorithms that push them escalate. They move from resilience to resentment, from discipline to grievance, from self-improvement to anti-women content that teachers are now reporting in the mouths of children as young as six years of age. That is the pipeline that this program exists to counter. And the man who leads One Nation in Victoria, the man the Liberals may well see as holding the keys to government, is standing at the entrance to that pipeline, holding the door open. So I ask the Leader of the Opposition directly: is this the man that you will work with? Is this the man you will trust? Is this the partnership you will enter into to win power while the program that protects our children from exactly this content is attacked by your own colleagues and defended by your silence?

The women of Victoria are entitled to know where she stands – not in vague generalities, not in a statement about wanting ‘great young men’, which is what her federal leader offered when he was asked three times how boys should be taught to respect women, and could not bring himself to say the obvious. The women of this state deserve a clear answer. Do you support the Respectful Relationships program, yes or no? Do you condemn the description of it as an anti-boy ideology, yes or no? Will you stand up for the members of your own movement who are attacking programs that keep women and girls safe, yes or no? These are not difficult questions. They are only difficult if you have decided that the answer might cost you votes. If that is the calculation, then the Leader of the Opposition has already told the women of this state every single thing they need to know.

I want to close by returning to where I began, to that footy field in my electorate and the kids that were on it. I have watched what happens when we build spaces where girls are respected: they thrive, they belong, they take up space without apology and they carry the confidence off the field and into the rest of their lives. I have thought about the boys in those same communities and what they are being taught by us, their coaches and the screens in their pockets. I have thought about which messages will reach them first, because it will be one or the other. Either we will reach them with respect, or the algorithm will reach them with contempt. There is no neutral ground. There is no ‘Let’s wait and see.’ The content is already there. There is only one question: whether we can meet it with something better. Respectful Relationships education is that something better. It is not an agenda. It is not an ideology. It is not a threat to boys. It is a gift to them. It is how we raise a generation of young men to know that strength is not domination, respect is not weakness and the measure of a man is how he treats those with less power than he has. To attack that is to fail our children. To stay silent while others attack it is to fail them just as surely.

The house has a choice today that the Leader of the Opposition would not make a fortnight ago, and I extend it to every single member across the chamber, including those opposite who know privately that Senator Canavan was wrong. You do not have to defend this government to defend this program; you only have to be willing to say out loud that teaching children respect is not negotiable. It prevents violence. It is saying that we will not allow the safety of women and girls to become collateral in someone else’s culture wars and that when the leaders of this state are tested we expect them to stand up and not look away. Silence is a choice, and today this house can choose differently, because the standard that we walk past is the standard that we accept. I do not accept the standard that Senator Matt Canavan and Angus Taylor put in place the other day. I commend this motion to the house.

 Vicki WARD (Eltham – Minister for Public Transport, Minister for Creative Industries) (18:02): I ‍also rise regarding this motion, and I follow on from the very excellent contribution by the member for Williamstown. It will not be any surprise to know that I agree with the member for Williamstown wholeheartedly. I thank her for her work in the prevention of family violence portfolio.

We know that the culture wars started with John Howard, and the culture wars were put there to divide people. They were there to sow fear, to spread misinformation, to cause division and to try and cynically garner votes through that. This is the most distressing, challenging, wrong and deeply cynical form of politics. This is not politics for the community good, this is not politics to strengthen communities and this is not politics to make a stronger society. This is politics purely for self-advancement, and it is politics in its most base form. What we see with the commentary of recent times by the national leader of the Liberal Party and the national leader of the Nationals is something that really does not bring people together, it really does not help instil respect and it does not help identify and address the challenges that societies around the world are experiencing with the manosphere. It is something that is put there basically to be a dead cat on the table, to deflect, to send people in the wrong direction, to divide people. What is most deeply distressing about it is that it is an attempt to play to the One Nation vote. That, I think, is the thing that is incredibly, deeply distressing about the politics of this – that there are people who are willing to sacrifice others, that are willing to sacrifice social stability and that are willing to sacrifice people’s personal safety solely for an attempt at a political game of trying to stem the tide of One Nation voters in Liberal or National Party seats.

There is a long tail to the Howard years that has influenced, in my view, the worst society in this country. And the long tail we are starting to experience now we are hearing from the mouths of the national leaders of the Liberal Party and National Party. It is extraordinary that there are people in this place, including those opposite, who have remained silent on those comments made by the national leaders of the Liberal and National parties. Those attacks on teachers, those attacks on the work of teachers and those attacks on the principles of teachers and what teachers are trying to bring to their school communities were pretty astounding. But what is also astounding is that a program that is successfully helping children and young people understand and work through respect, understand what it means and understand how to treat each other respectfully can be demonised in this way. To remain silent on that is a very poor reflection on those who are happy to let that standard walk by.

I went out a couple of years ago, when I was the Minister for Prevention of Family Violence, to Watsonia Heights Primary School with the member for Bundoora. We sat down with some students who were student leaders in wellbeing, and they talked to us about the Respectful Relationships program. They talked to us about what it meant to them. They talked to us about the fact that they could see the kids around them being kinder, that kids were paying attention to how they spoke to each other and that they were talking to each other when they were being disrespectful, when they were being rude and when they were being hurtful. They felt that they had the words and the support to be able to stick up for other kids. They felt that Respectful Relationships made their school kinder. How do you demonise kindness? I really do not know. The only reason you demonise kindness, that you demonise a program like Respectful Relationships, is because you want to use it for base political gain to demonise certain communities and to go after the so-called woke. This is just such lazy politics. It is absolutely lazy politics.

We know teachers work very, very hard to teach and support their students. They care deeply – I know, I have lived with and loved a teacher for nearly 30 years. He sees Respectful Relationships in practice. My kids have experienced it at their own schools. This is a program that helps, and this is a program that has prevention of family and sexual violence at its very core. To object to that, to find a problem with that, I find quite concerning. Suggesting that teachers who teach about respect and consent are pushing their own agenda is ignorant, especially in the current teaching context where we are hearing from teachers that the manosphere and its toxic messaging are seeping into classrooms and that female teachers are hearing sexual moaning noises from male students while they are trying to teach – while they are teaching Respectful Relationships and how to behave in a respectful way. Blaming Respectful Relationships for that behaviour instead of the toxic online influencers who are at the core of this problem is quite astonishing, as is the silence of those who do not call out that behaviour, who do not call out that commentary that demonises those teachers who are supportive and teaching Respectful Relationships.

The federal government is doing excellent work in bringing reforms to address these concerns around big tech and the algorithm and pushing toxic messaging in front of boys and young men. They are doing that work, and the federal opposition should be supporting that rather than going after teachers, rather than going after those who are supporting the Respectful Relationships program.

Respectful Relationships is about helping people treat each other better. It is no more complex than that. There is nothing to demonise here. There is nothing to be cynical about, and it is really, really, really sad that there are those who do not care and who think it is a joke – the commentary and criticism that we have seen of Respectful Relationships. One Nation thinks that this is a bit of a joke and that it should stop, and federally the National and Liberal parties think it is a bit of a joke and that it should stop, and there is not one conservative voice in this state who has said that they are wrong. What that tells us is that there are conservative parties in this state who will do anything to court that One Nation vote – that vote that is steeped in division.

One Nation talks about wanting to teach patriotism in our schools. They do not need to. Our kids love our country. They love our state, they love where they live and they love being Australian, and what they strongly identify with is a fair go. They absolutely believe that treating people with respect and kindly, treating them for who they are with respect and kindness, is absolutely a fundamental part of the Australian character. Kids do not believe in dividing cultures and communities. Kids believe in multiculturalism. They believe in a respectful community that is united, that respects difference and that does not demonise difference. They do not get what this division is about.

I would really encourage those opposite and all conservative parties in this state to get behind Respectful Relationships and to stop with the culture wars, to stop using cynical politics in order to try and garner votes through rage bait that they try and put on social media with their Trumpian style politics, their social media feeds and their videos that scream out their desire to be seen as Trump lite. I call on those opposite to be a proper, mature political party, to stand up for Respectful Relationships, to stand up for respect in this state, to stand up for inclusion, to stand up for equality and to stand up for people to be seen for who they are, to be respected for who they are and to be treated well for who they are – not to be demonised, not to be othered, not to be told they are not worthy of support and not to be told that they should not be seen or heard. Women, girls, multicultural communities – everybody in this state deserves respect.

 Belinda WILSON (Narre Warren North) (18:13): I move:

That the debate be now adjourned.

Motion agreed to and debate adjourned.

Ordered that debate be adjourned until later this day.