Teaching Consent And Respectful Relationships
The Federal Government’s latest production of material to help schools teach consent has been rightly removed from access.
The Member for Western Victoria, Bev McArthur, has questioned why the Federal Government would even be involved in school tuition at this level.
But she has also warned that parents should be equally alert to the Victorian Government ‘Respectful Relationships’ program.
“$82 million dollars has been spent on this mandatory policy that is taught in every Victorian Government School with non-government schools under pressure to adopt the programme,” Mrs McArthur said.
Starting this week, the programme will also teach consent.
“The real issue is should schools be the place where social reforms and personal standards of behaviour are established or should this be the core domain and responsibility of families and parents?
“The Victorian Government has shown an overblown propensity to get into our lounge-rooms, our bedrooms and even our boardrooms and more recently, into the minds of our children without parental consent.
“We understand that respect and consent needs to be upheld everywhere.
“But it is a bit rich for most people to be taking lessons on respect from a Government that applies double-standards to law enforcement, lies to an Inquiry and separates families with snap decisions to close borders.
“This is the same Labor Government that thinks it was okay to sign up to Belt and Road initiatives with the Chinese Communist Party which blatantly disregards human rights for the minority Uyghur Muslim population in China.”
“In Australia, we don’t think that’s very respectful.
“The Federal government was right to tear up the Belt and Road Agreement.”
The Respectful Relationships programme’s website demonstrates the Andrews Government’s awareness of its ability to influence the minds of a generation of young people via a ‘captive audience’.
At the Respectful Relationships Education Forum in 2016, Emily Maguire, the CEO of the Domestic Violence Research Centre said: “So what you’ve got is a captive audience of hundreds of thousands of employees and then hundreds and thousands of children…”
The Area Executive Director from the Department of Education and Training also said “…we have a really big community that we can have a positive impact on, and for future generations…”
Mrs McArthur said the view exposes the Government’s political opportunism.
“The ability to instruct left-wing ideology, including its version of gender equality – a central theme of Respectful Relationships - is clearly on show here.
“Does the Andrews Government’s version of gender inequality include instruction about quotas as a means to achieve this, and if so what quotas - after all there are innumerable ‘identities’ that might argue for a quota?
“Guided by their Labor-linked Education Union - we can only guess what teachers will tell students about respect, equality and quotas,” Mrs McArthur said.
“Will the programme also talk about the abuse of women and children in indigenous communities, or of female genital mutilation or child brides?
“Surely these are issues of consent which should be part of an educational debate which illuminates the spectrum of problems, and not just select ideological parts?
An example of classroom indoctrination of left-wing, Marxist ideology was revealed in the disgraceful BLM posters done by students at the Lindfield Learning Village in Sydney.
The posters included comments such as ‘Stop killer cops’, ‘Pigs out of the country’, ‘White lives matter too much’ and ‘Change climate change’.
“If equal focus and fanfare was made of better literacy and numeracy standards, then Victoria, even Australia, would have a chance of clawing back the decline in education standards. Hopefully, the Federal Government will concentrate on raising the bar in educational outcomes and keep out of the social engineering space with costly, inappropriate videos.
“After all education - and not social manipulation - is what schools are supposed to be about.
“Devising and implementing these well-intended programmes is fraught with problems on multiple levels.
“Amongst these is the financial imposition on taxpayers – and the potential parental naivety about what others are teaching their children about social and personal standards.”
“These programmes might sound good - but do they do good? That is the real question.”
22 April 2021