Tuesday, 27 August 2024

Women’s rights

Bev McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (17:31): (1073) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Women and concerns women’s rights in Victoria. I attended the well-organised and impeccably behaved Women Will Speak rally earlier this month on the steps of Parliament House. I did not turn up to be provocative but simply to defend fairness, safety and respect for women – basic rights which it still astonishes me are under attack in our state. Yet like other speakers at the rally, I was hit with eggs thrown from just behind police lines. It is beyond disgraceful. Radical trans zealots and professional protesters will go to any lengths to shut down and drown out those they disagree with. Blaring music, offensive chants, throwing eggs, placards, distraction, disruption, violence and intimidation – they throw anything but actual arguments. How appalling it is not just that hundreds of police are needed to protect a handful of women exercising their rights to free speech on the steps of our Parliament but that those police were attacked and abused by the same thugs. It was notable that the anti-women rabble were also joined by the anti-Israel Palestinian flag wavers. Of course women’s rights are not high on the priority list with Hamas terrorists and many of their supporters.

That women – that is, adult human females – now have to fight even to have their basic definition recognised demonstrates just how far we have sunk in this so-called progressive state. Yet despite this, foreign minister Penny Wong last week said:

Australia condemns the Taliban’s efforts to silence the voices of Afghanistan’s women and girls.

…

We stand together … in support of their human rights.

What about the rights of Australian women, Ms Wong, to safety, to toilets, to prisons, to women’s refuges, to fairness in competitive sport, to recognition of our own language? Just this week in Tickle v. Giggle we have seen the Federal Court’s ruling on the nonsensical, deeply unjust consequences of Julia Gillard’s 2013 amendment. At the Women Will Speak rally we heard from the Lesbian Action Group, who next week will appeal the Australian Human Rights Commission’s rejection of their application to hold women-only lesbian events.

Contrary to the lies and propaganda perpetrated by aggressive opponents, neither I nor the women’s rights advocates that I know are anti-trans. I have always said people should be able to be and act as they wish so long as they respect the rights of others. This is not anti-trans, it is pro women’s rights. The action I seek is for the minister to disassociate herself from the radical trans zealots who prefer noise and violence to logical argument and whose ignorant abuse can only be designed to intimidate women and to drown out their legitimate core beliefs.