Moira DEEMING (Western Metropolitan) (17:02): I would like to start by thanking God for the honour of standing here today, and I would especially like to thank the people of the Western Metropolitan Region for trusting me to represent them in Parliament. It is also my honour to be the first Māori Australian member of the Victorian Parliament.

They say that nobody achieves success alone, and that is certainly true in my case. So, firstly, I would like to thank Andrew, my husband of 17 years. You have been a humble and relentless force for good in every sphere of your life, not just mine. You are the man that I admire most in this world, and with you as my husband I have healed and gone from strength to strength in every way. As a father to our children, I could not have asked for one more dedicated, wise or loving than you.

To our four children, Eva-Rose, Will, Lydija and Leah, thank you for turning all my fears about motherhood upside down. I want you to know that these last seven years, when I was able to stay home with you almost full-time, have been the greatest, the most meaningful and the most joy-filled years of my life. You showed me that there is no career, no cause, no adventure that could ever be as inspiring or as satisfying as the simple, ordinary days that I spent at home being your mother.

Thank you so much to all my friends and supporters who have come here. Thank you to all the Liberal MPs and the people on our team. I appreciate your presence. Without your encouragement, prayers, babysitting, reminder texts and endless patience I really would not be here today. I would also like to thank those former students, especially my rainbow students, who reached out to me over the last few years when they saw me being slandered in the media. It meant so much to me that you went out of your way to get in touch, to reassure me that you knew the truth and to encourage me to keep going. It is also nice to know that my lessons in critical analysis paid off.

And last but not least I really would like to say an extra special thankyou to those who came to support me today despite the fact that, politically speaking, we sit on opposite sides of the fence. Our relationships are so precious to me because they are a rare breed and rely wholly on genuine mutual respect and tolerance. When I was being slandered in the media and even by some MPs on your own side, you stood by me even though you knew it was going to cost you dearly in this age of self-righteous hive mind politics. You are some of the bravest and most principled people that I have ever met, and I am honoured to call you my friends and my sometimes political allies.

I love the western suburbs of Melbourne. Robert Menzies once said that the real life of this nation is:

… to be found in the homes of people who are nameless and unadvertised, and who, whatever their individual religious conviction or dogma, see in their children their greatest contribution …

And I think his words are a lovely image of our lives in the west. Everything revolves around family and community; we speak many languages and we follow many faiths but we have so much in common. We work hard, we juggle the bills, we hate traffic and we love our kids. Whether we were born here or not, whether we are descended from migrants or were asylum seekers, this is our home, and as one of my heroes Jacinta Price says, ‘We are all Australians.’

It is no secret that Labor views the Western Metropolitan Region that I represent as their territory, but that is why I believe that the people of the west have actually become the forgotten people of Victoria. Menzies described them as people whose wider wellbeing was of no concern to trade unions but who are not wealthy enough to hire the lawyers and financial advisers to protect them from excessive taxes and government interference in their private lives. And that is the reality for us out in the west. Our schools are overcrowded, our roads are underfunded and our hospitals are understaffed and underfunded – or they exist only in the forward estimates. The western suburbs are used as a dumping ground for rubbish, toxic soil and chemicals, which catch on fire, leak out or pile up above the horizon. Soon we are going to have massive transmission towers crisscrossing our suburbs and new flight paths right over our homes. But when election time has come and gone, we find that Labor’s promises to fix these things are as forgotten as we are. I look forward to reminding the good people of the Western Metropolitan Region, together with Trung and my wonderful lower house colleagues, that they do matter and that the Liberal Party has not forgotten them.

Some of you may be surprised to learn that I was actually born and bred on the political left. In fact I come from a long and distinguished line of union leaders, card-carrying Labor Party members and Labor MPs. My great-grandfather was John Joseph Holland, a western suburbs Labor MP for over 30 years and a councillor for the City of Melbourne. JJ Holland Park and what used to be known as the JJ Holland housing commission flats were also named after him. When he died, his son Kevin, who was also a union leader and a Member of the Order of Australia, took over his seat as a Labor Party MP. My father was a unionised teacher, and my mother was a nurse who worked her way up to be a leader in the Australian nursing federation. Paddy Garritty himself offered to host my wedding in Trades Hall. My husband was horrified. As my mum likes to say, I come from good Catholic Labor stock, and I just love her too much to remind her that in the mid-1950s many Catholics were actually expelled from the Labor Party for protesting the communist infiltration of their unions.

So how did someone like me, a ‘Labor Party princess’, as one of your MPs has put it, end up standing here in this place as a Liberal MP? As it happens, there is a long tradition in Australian politics of those raised on the gospel of unity who come to learn firsthand the value of liberty and then switch to the Liberal side of politics. Sadly, they are often referred to as Labor rats, but in fact they were just ordinary people who foresaw the problems that are now plaguing all political parties that refuse to tolerate independent thinking and the tragic consequences of idolising economies that are controlled by the state. They are ordinary people like Joseph Cook, who worked in an English coalmine from nine years old and after becoming a New South Wales Labor MP went on to become the first Liberal Prime Minister to win an outright majority at a federal election; like Joseph Lyons, a humble schoolteacher like me, who renounced Labor’s socialist economics to successfully steer Australia through the Great Depression; and then there is my personal favourite, Warren Mundine – or Uncle Wazza, as my children like to call him. Warren went from being president of the Labor Party to a staunch Liberal and chairman of the Conservative Political Action Network Australia. I too am heir to this tradition. I grew up idolising the left, the unions and the Labor Party. The ideals of unity and equality still resonate with me, but when taken to extremes these ideals have a dark side.

As a teenager I witnessed firsthand the corruption and the brutal, coordinated bullying of anyone who does not think and act in unity with the left. There are many stories that I could tell, but one stands out. A woman that I loved and admired quietly refused to take part in the corrupt misuse of union funds. Enraged by this, the union leaders ruthlessly bullied her, blacklisted her from working in Victoria for over 20 years and destroyed her career. Even after these bullies were successfully sued for their behaviour, they kept their jobs and their fines were paid by the very same union whose money they had been siphoning off – for guess who? For years afterwards I would see them on TV being publicly praised as champions of the working class. Now of course we need unions. We have been hearing all week about the wonderful work that they have done, but they need to be apolitical. Our workers deserve better.

If you look up in this beautiful and historic chamber, you will see eight figures, all holding different items representing different ideals – truth, glory, justice, mercy, wisdom, architecture, abundance and unity. Unity is shown holding a circle of chains, but those chains were originally designed to appear broken in half. And what is more, ‘Unity’ is not her original name. Unity’s real name is in fact ‘Liberty’.

Liberty’s reforged chains of oppression are the best illustration I can think of for the dangers of left-wing ideology. That is why I turned away from it. Because individual rights and liberties must never be sacrificed for coerced unity. I believe that every individual is unique, endowed with human dignity and worthy of our care and respect. And those on every side of politics care in exactly the same way. We have all heard it this week, and I do not deny that. But too often they have been willing to sacrifice individual human rights in the pursuit of collective goals. They argue that the end justifies the means, but as a Liberal, I believe that only by just means can we achieve a just outcome. That is why I believe in the freedom to worship, to think and, as my dear friend Abdullah put it, the right to disagree well forever.

I believe in freedom from compelled speech, the freedom to travel outside my own suburb, the freedom to meet and embrace my family members and the freedom to accept or refuse medical treatment. These freedoms are under threat today, and as these last few years have proven, if we do not cherish them, if we do not fight for them, they will be taken away. Rights and liberties must systematically constrain governments, not the other way around.

So that is why I am a Liberal, but politics was not my original plan. I had chosen a career in teaching, and I was loving it. I felt incredibly honoured that parents would entrust their children to me. But I began to be very concerned about the things that I was being told to teach. Lessons on tolerance were being replaced with lessons on inclusion. It was not enough anymore to just accept each other’s differences with respect. Now students were required to affirm and celebrate beliefs that they just did not share. Perfectly reasonable moral and religious differences were being reframed as discriminatory and intolerant, and a new vocabulary was introduced categorising people as allies or enemies.

Instead of being inspired by history’s heroes, students were being chastised and even told to stand up in class and apologise for historical crimes that they had neither committed nor condoned. They were told that the physical world is on the brink of doom, but rather than being assigned research projects to find practical solutions, they were being assigned activism as work, including social media awareness-raising campaigns, ideological fundraisers and even attendance at protests during school hours.

Instead of being taught the life-changing value of grit and character, my most vulnerable and disadvantaged students were being weighed down and discouraged with spectres of insurmountable social forces all arrayed against them – capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy. I remember one boy sitting at the back of my class with no pencil case and no books. I did my rounds of the desks, and when I got to him, I smiled and said, ‘Would you like any help with your work?’ He just grinned at me cheekily and said he did not need to do his schoolwork because when he grew up, he was going to be a gangster. I grinned right back and said, ‘Well, I’m not sure that Australia has much of a gangster industry. Do you have a plan B?’

And he laughed and enjoyed that and we got to chatting, but during that chat I learned that he wanted to be a gangster because he had escaped to Australia from a war-torn country only to be told repeatedly by his teachers that Australia and Australians were racist, and this poor boy of 13 or 14 actually believed them. Here he was, safe in Australia, welcomed, happy in the classroom, unable to concentrate on his work, though, because he was scared of systemic racial violence. No child should be told that they are hated. The final straw, which compelled me to challenge the government head on, was discovering that school policies and curriculums had been radically altered to remove almost every child safeguarding standard that we had had. Primary school children were being subjected to erotic sexual content. Female students no longer had the right to single-sex sports teams, toilets or change rooms, and teachers like me were being forced to lie to parents about their children, who were secretly living as one gender at school and another gender at home. I realised then that my teaching career was over, because I simply would not ever do the things that I was being asked to do. I would never ask students to tell the class which sexual experiences they had had and which they were willing to do. I would never tell girls to bind their breasts. I would never accuse gay students of being transphobic. I would never tell my female students that they had to tolerate a male teacher supervising their change rooms, and I was never, ever going to lie to parents about what was going on with their own children at school. But I also knew that if I spoke out I was going to be vilified and that I would never work in a public school again, and that is exactly what happened – but so be it.

I wrote articles. I did interviews. I gave talks all across Victoria. I worked with brave women and men from the left – women like Jasmine, Holly, Stassia and Kat. I worked with LGB organisations and free-speech organisations and with doctors, lawyers, brave journalists like Bernard Lane and amazing women like Claire Chandler and Kath Deves. I worked with people of all faiths and none. I worked with betrayed parents and shattered detransitioners. We put everything else aside and we worked together, and every single one of us was attacked for shining a light on these issues. Eventually I got myself elected as a local government councillor in Melton. Councils are responsible for providing change rooms, toilets and all sorts of domestic violence and women’s services. So I asked whether it was legal to provide these single-sex services and facilities anymore because biological males could just identify as women. I asked the council officers; they did not know. I asked the lawyers; they did not know. I asked every single local government council in Victoria, and not a single one of them knew either, but almost all of them knew unequivocally that it was transphobic just to ask. I asked the gender equality commissioner and the LGBTIQ+ commissioner, and all that they could tell me was that some men are women, but you are not allowed to ask which ones are which because that would be discriminatory. They also told me that I should encourage any women who were unhappy about this, including religious women and victims of sexual assault, to ‘be more tolerant’. I tried to ask the human rights commissioner, but their office told me that I would never, ever – ever – get a meeting with them. So I asked the Victorian Government Solicitor’s Office, and they handballed my question to the Attorney-General of Victoria, who has to this day failed to answer. So now here I am.

Democracy in Victoria is almost 170 years old, and one of the reasons for its enduring success is that we are blessed with this Council, this house of review. So I am just going to get right to work by quickly reviewing three areas of the law, and I am going to focus on women and children because that is what the Governor’s speech focused on. First of all, sex-based rights. Women and girls are suffering in Victoria because this government cannot or will not define what a female is, and as a result every woman and every girl in Victoria has lost the right to enjoy female-only sports, female-only change rooms and countless other female-only activities. As a result, what most women would consider to be sexual harassment and indecent exposure is now legal in Victoria. As a result, there is right now at this very moment a twice-convicted male rapist housed with the female prisoners in my area in the Dame Phyllis Frost correctional facility. They are the most vulnerable women of all. Surely there must be ways to ensure the safety and dignity of trans people which do not trample on the rights of women and girls. I call upon this government to immediately reinstate sex-based rights in the law.

Secondly, children in brothels – I was very glad to hear that industry called ‘the adult industry’, because children do not belong anywhere near it. Yet this government has made it legal to have children inside brothels in Victoria. That is right – in commercial brothels newborn babies and children up to 18 months of age are allowed on the premises. In home-based brothels children of any age are allowed inside. Devastated police officer friends of mine have told me that Victoria will now inevitably become the child rape capital of Australia. So again I call on the government to amend that act as well so that no child can be taken inside brothels of any kind in Victoria.

Thirdly, transgender affirmation practices on minors – this government has made it illegal for parents and clinicians of gender-dysphoric children to seek out any treatments at all, no matter how reasonable, if they are designed to naturally alleviate the dysphoric feelings and leave the child’s body intact. In Victoria that is simply not allowed. In Victoria doctors will lose their medical licences and parents will lose their children unless they affirm and entrench that dysphoria via experimental conversion therapies which try to socially, surgically and hormonally convert boys into an approximation of girls and girls into an approximation of boys. It has been all over the media for at least five years. And despite the fact that these interventions have now been proven to be medically unjustifiable, irreversible and devastatingly harmful, ideologues continue to vilify and incite hatred towards anyone sounding the alarm. They even blame these whistleblowers for trans youth suicides, which is the most disgusting and cynical act of political exploitation I have ever seen. The devastated parents, the furious clinicians and most of all the heartbroken ex-trans youth whose health has vanished and whose bodies are scarred deserve justice. I call on this government to reinstate common sense and compassion and to conduct an open inquiry into gender affirmation practices in Victoria.

Members applauded.