Discover Top Posts Tagged with #roz ward

https://redflag.org.au/node/5326

#red flag #roz ward #lgbti #lgbt #safe schools coalition #auspol #socialist alternative

The Murdoch press has been instrumental in this propaganda war. Not content to see the mere gutting of the program, it is campaigning to bring down the Victorian convener, Roz Ward.

The attacks on Ward, led most aggressively by the Australian, have been unrelenting. In characteristic style, her privacy has been invaded and her personal political beliefs put on trial.

Commonly known as red baiting, this is a tried and true tactic of the right.

READ MORE: The attack on Safe Schools is classic red baiting

#safe schools #safe schools coalition #murdoch #roz ward #we stand with roz #red flag #socialist alternative #lgbti #auspol #la trobe

The Australian newspaper has printed more than 17,000 words about the Safe Schools Coalition since notorious right-wing bigot Cory Bernardi launched an attack on the program just over a month ago.

The coverage has been overwhelmingly negative, and has singled out for special attack its Victorian manager and Red Flag contributor Roz Ward, describing her as an “outspoken hard-left warrior” and the program she runs as “a Marxist social change strategy”.

But it is the deranged hard-right politics that pervade those employed at the country’s only national broadsheet that have been exposed through this episode, and which provide real cause for alarm.

Symptomatic of this is Angela Shanahan, one of two Australian opinion writers who have led the charge against the program. Shanahan writes in the style of a concerned parent, but is in fact an outspoken hard-right warrior intent on pursuing an extreme political agenda.

Programs like Safe Schools strike a small blow against the conservative status quo.

Firmly in her crosshairs (figuratively, at least for now) are the achievements of the women’s and gay liberation movements of the 1960s and ’70s. Writing in theSpectator in 2012, she described these movements as “destructive social revolutions” requiring in response “a counter revolution of family life” to restore “strong parental authority, particularly paternal authority”.

READ MORE: The Oz’s ideological war on Safe Schools

#safe schools coalition #auspol #red flag #socialist alternative #roz ward #lgbti #queer #safe schools #marxism #cory bernardi

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.

READ MORE: Safe Schools Coalition under attack