The Turnbull government has made dramatic changes to its Safe Schools anti-bullying program that have been described by the scheme’s opponents as “gutting” its content.



The changes sharply reduce the lesson content, restrict it to secondary schools, shift the program to a government website, remove all links to other material and sites, and add a requirement that students get parental consent and schools get parent-body consent before opting to use its materials.

The education minister, Simon Birmingham, said this was a “strong but measured response” to the concerns raised by Christian groups and conservative MPs, including the former prime minister Tony Abbott, who demanded for the program to be defunded. There were also claims made that it promoted Marxism and had links to paedophilia and pornography.

Birmingham said it left intact the program’s core aims – to give support and guidance to students grappling with questions of sexual identity and to allow them to feel safe at school.



But one of the leading opponents, the Liberal National backbencher George Christensen, said the program had been “gutted of all its bad content” and he was expecting that the Safe Schools Coalition, which delivers the program, would reject the new conditions. He said, if that happened, the minister had assured him the remainder of the program’s funding would be “pulled”.

“It’s all going,” Christensen said. “Boys in girls’ school uniforms, girls and boys using the same toilets, classroom role plays where kids imagine they have no genitalia or they’re gay ... I doubt the Safe Schools Coalition – who came up with with the weird and wonderful elements of this, attempting to instil queer theory, sexual liberation and Marxism into classrooms – will accept this. And if they don’t, the funding will be cut.”



The Labor party accused the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, of giving in to the conservative bullies in his own ranks.

The program’s $8m in federal funding finishes next year. Birmingham said it had never been intended for the funding to be extended but the anti-bullying content would “live on” on the government’s Safe Schools Hub.

Birmingham said he did not believe the program itself had been used for “activism and advocacy” in the classroom – as many of its critics have contended. But he said some of the people involved in it had presented themselves as representing the program.

“They did so outside the resources of the program but foolishly allowed the name of the program to be used,” he said. They will now be banned from “political activism … that represents their views as being endorsed by the program”.

A spokeswoman for the Safe Schools Coalition said it was considering the report.

The government’s response goes considerably further than the recommendations in the review by Prof William Louden from the University of Western Australia, which was released simultaneously. The response includes:

Requiring parental consent for student participation.

Requiring the agreement of parental bodies to decide whether, and how, a school will participate in the program.

Amending the lesson in which year 7 and 8 students imagine that they are attracted to the same sex and lessons in which students are asked to pledge how they will be an ally to an LGTBI friend (Louden said only that these lessons were sound and age-appropriate but that some activities might not be suitable in some class contexts and that this should be a matter for teachers’ judgment).

Redesigning a lesson about the biological processes behind intersex variation (Loudon said it was suitable, educationally sound and age appropriate).

Requiring that resources called OMG I’m Queer, OMG My Friend’s Queer and Stand Out only be available for one-on-one discussions between students and qualified staff (Loudon said this should be left up to schools).

Removing all links and references to other any nongovernment organisation from the Safe Schools material, including the Minus18 site that contained materials to which many conservative critics had objected.

Requiring that “the national and local program managers not bring the program into disrepute or engage in political advocacy in any way that represents their views as being endorsed by the program” and that its resources “not be used for political advocacy”.

Requiring that the entire resource be moved to the Australian government Safe Schools Hub website, with the existing Safe Schools website used only as a contact point. Birmingham said: “We will expect that the Safe Schools Coalition website will remove all such resources from its website and purely be a website that schools can access to find out how to register to participate in the program and who to contact in their relevant state or territory. It will be a contact point only.”



Labor’s education spokeswoman, Kate Ellis, accused the Coalition government of giving in to the “conservative bullies” within its own ranks.

“How do we expect any student in the schoolyard to stand up to bullies if Australia’s own prime minister can’t stand up to the bullies within the fringe of his own party?” she said. “What we have seen today is the Turnbull government have overturned the decisions that their own government took just a matter of months ago.”

The Greens’ sexuality spokesman, Senator Robert Simms, said it was “clear that Malcolm Turnbull has thrown LGBTI young people under the bus today by bowing to the rightwing backbench bullies and stripping back the Safe Schools program”.