Safe Schools Coalition under attack
The idea that all students should have the right to feel comfortable and safe at school is intolerable to the right wing of the Liberal Party. The Safe Schools Coalition, which provides schools with information and training about how to create a “safe and inclusive learning environment” for LGBTI students, has been the focus of savage attacks from a range of government figures and the far right Australian Christian Lobby.
The program should be uncontroversial in any decent society, aimed as it is at encouraging empathy with the experiences of a particularly vulnerable group of young people during a difficult phase of their lives. Seventy-five percent of Australian LGBTI school students have experienced abuse or discrimination, according to a 2010 study, 80 percent of this abuse taking place at school and most targets of it feeling that they had no support.
For Turnbull, political ambition outweighs any putative opposition to homophobia or support for the well-being of LGBTI youth.
But for the Australian Christian Lobby and their sympathisers in parliament, the program is an abomination that “imposes a sexual agenda on children”. They have called for it to be defunded, with the notoriously bigoted Liberal MP Cory Bernardi describing it as a “disgrace” and claiming that it “bullies heterosexual children into submission to the gay agenda”. National Party leader Barnaby Joyce and MP George Christensen have also attacked the program and called for its scrapping, Christensen likening it to “grooming work that a sexual predator might undertake”.
Shamefully, however, the attacks have not come only from the loony right. Malcolm Turnbull, who for many years has tried to present himself as a friend of the LGBTI community, has also weighed in on the side of homophobic reaction, announcing a hostile review of the program and refusing to discipline Bernardi or Christensen over their remarks. In so doing, he has outdone Abbott, who, for all his reactionary social views, never threatened the funding of the Safe Schools Coalition during his time as prime minister and demoted Bernardi to the backbench in 2012, following similarly offensive comments linking marriage equality to bestiality.
Nor is this the first time Turnbull’s actions have contradicted his LGBTI-friendly words. In 2004, he voted for Howard’s homophobic amendment to the Marriage Act, and he has voted against every challenge to marriage discrimination that has been put over the last 12 years, all the while assuring his strongly LGBTI electorate that he is their greatest champion.
More recently, he embraced Abbott’s reactionary marriage equality plebiscite proposal in a cynical about-turn to secure the prime ministership. For Turnbull, political ambition outweighs any putative opposition to homophobia or support for the well-being of LGBTI youth, and to pursue it he is prepared to do the bidding of the influential right inside his party.
The motivation of this right wing, as well as the non-party religious right, is to hit back against the growing consensus in modern capitalism as to the necessity of accepting and incorporating various family forms without discrimination. Harking back to a time when men were men and effeminate ones were bashed, they are fighting a desperate rearguard action against the achievements of the 1960s and 70s, now thoroughly incorporated into the structures of capitalism.
Illustrative of this pro-LGBTI consensus are moves like that of the Victorian government in 2015 to quash historic convictions for homosexuality, or the NSW Liberal government’s recent apology to those arrested and bashed at the first Mardi Gras demonstration. It is also now routine for politicians, political parties from across the spectrum, the police and major corporations to march in events like Pride or Mardi Gras, occasions which would have once been seen as a challenge to the powerful.
The state and federal funding of the Safe Schools Coalition is another indicator of how mainstream pro-LGBTI feeling has become, but one that the right hopes can be reversed by a sufficient moral panic. And protecting children is the most effective form of moral panic.
That is, of course, so long as no-one mentions George Pell and the religious right’s silence in the face of his refusal to return to the country to face questioning about the Catholic Church’s monstrous record of child sexual abuse. Or the fact that the school chaplaincy program, which the ACL lobbied for, imposes an anti-gay ideology on students and costs the taxpayer more than 30 times what the Safe Schools program does. It seems concern for children and protecting them from ideology is selective for some.
The goal of the religious right is thus broader than simply destroying or defunding the Safe Schools program. In the longer term, it hopes to push the political climate back to the right on these questions, and prepare the ground for a potential “no” campaign in the marriage equality plebiscite that Turnbull is promising. The right see this as their only chance to stave off reform, and by whipping up a climate of homophobic panic they hope to mobilise the family values zealots and win back those who might be open to the marriage equality message. Hence their outrageous demand to be exempt from the Anti-Discrimination Act during the campaign – they know they need to generate extreme homophobic reaction to counter the prevalence of pro-LGBTI sentiment.
It is essential in the face of this that the Safe Schools Coalition is defended, and that the right is taken on politically and organisationally. The homophobes in government and beyond must be forced further into the margins of society, not given space to make gains. This will be possible only by countering their bigotry with arguments and actions on our side, and a renewal of activism and struggle.
