Tuesday, 10 September 2019

 Mr FINN (Western Metropolitan) (17:54): My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Education. We have spent a good portion of today in this house debating legislation which will protect children, and indeed the protection of children is something that is very, very high on my list of priorities. So it concerns me enormously when I hear reports from parents, and particularly from doctors, who tell me of children who are suffering nightmares, who are suffering severe anxiety and who are even suffering depression. Some, I am told, are too afraid to get out of bed in the morning.

Now, you might ask what is causing this dreadful plague that is upsetting our kids. Well, it has a lot to do with teachers who are telling them that they are about to die or that the end of the world is imminent. Is it any wonder that our kids are going through such agony when they are being fed such nonsense from people who are supposed to care for them? Climate change extremism as we see it in our schools today is child abuse, pure and simple—nothing more, nothing less. It is child abuse. It is something that I find intolerable; indeed it is something that we all should find intolerable. We should not have children being fed this garbage, terrifying them every day of their lives.

I have mentioned before that when I was growing up we were worried that the Americans might blow up the Russians or the Russians might blow up the Americans or they might all blow everybody up. That was a fairly legitimate concern at the time, but on this particular occasion this is all politics. This is all political. The end of the world is not nigh. We are all not about to die.

What we are hearing in schools now is particularly bad, in my view, when it is coming from teachers. Teachers are supposed to be responsible. Teachers are supposed to be caring for the kids that they are in charge of. In certain instances it is clearly not happening, and that has to change. What I am asking the minister to do on this occasion is publicly dissociate himself from this campaign of terror by extremists in the Department of Education and Training and to issue a directive for them to cease and desist in this campaign. Our kids are far too important to be faced with this barrage of—well, it is filth. It is filth, nothing more or less. It is just appalling. I am asking the minister to do something about it and to stop it now.