Wednesday, 12 November 2025

 Bev McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (23:38): (2096) My adjournment matter for the Minister for Health concerns our duty of care to Victoria’s most vulnerable children and the fundamental collapse of confidence in the legal and clinical foundations of paediatric gender care in this state. The minister has repeatedly asserted that she is fiercely proud of Victoria’s gender clinics, claiming their care is exemplary. That view is now utterly indefensible. Former Family Court Chief Justice Diana Bryant, the same judge who wrote the landmark 2013 decision which removed court oversight for puberty blockers, has recently stated she has serious doubts about that ruling. Had she known what we know today, she would have reached a different conclusion. She now accepts what many of us have been saying for years: that the expert evidence her court relied upon in 2013, particularly testimony that puberty blockers were fully reversible with no side effects, appears, in her own words, misleading and overconfident. It is extraordinary: the architect of our approach admitting the foundation was built on sand. Furthermore, the Royal Children’s Hospital gender service has had its credibility severely damaged by the Family Court. Justice Strum described evidence from their lead expert as misleading and infected by ideology, noting that claims dismissing opposition as Nazi-like oppression had no place whatsoever in objective testimony.

Minister, when courts determine that evidence from your primary service provider is ideologically contaminated and when the legal architect admits the grounds may be flawed, the state cannot claim its care is exemplary. When Nordic countries tightened protocols, Victoria looked away. When the UK banned routine puberty blockers following the Cass review, your government arrogantly shrugged. When Queensland paused new treatments, you continued to declare, ‘We’re fiercely proud.’ Your refusal to heed these warnings is not a defence of care; it is a combination of complacency and stubbornness. Clinical best practice, the best evidence and long-term researched care for our children take second place to fashionable ideological ideas. These are vulnerable young people struggling with mental health, autism and their sexuality. They deserve careful assessment, not to be fast-tracked into experimental treatments with life-altering consequences like infertility, sexual dysfunction and cardiovascular disease. Minister, the action I seek is that you immediately commission a truly independent clinical audit of Victoria’s paediatric gender services, convene an expert review panel and pending that work, impose a precautionary pause on the prescription of puberty blockers to patients under 18.