A lot can happen in a week in the culture wars. The fight over the very unsafe Safe Schools program has certainly heated up, with a number of new developments. Just hours ago La Trobe University in Melbourne announced that it had suspended the radical activist behind the program, Roz Ward.
Now that is good news indeed. But let me provide some background as to how things led up to this point. Ward was the chief architect of the wretched Safe Schools program and had been going from strength to strength. He/she has been working at La Trobe’s Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society.
Although the program was reviewed and found to be wanting by the Federal Government, the modifications made to it were rejected by Dan Andrews, Victorian Premier. He not only said he will keep the program just as is, but said it will be mandatory for all secondary schools from 2018 onwards.
Worse yet, the Victorian government appointed him/her to a further role as an advisor to the Education Department as announced in the press on May 23. But four days later he/she was forced to resign after getting a bit too open and cocky about his/her radical Marxism and hatred of Australia:
Controversial Safe Schools Coalition co-ordinator Roz Ward has resigned from a Victorian government advisory role after The Australian discovered a Facebook post where she labelled the national flag “racist”. Ms Ward made a Facebook post on Tuesday after Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews apologised to the gay community for past discrimination. The government hoisted a gay-pride rainbow flag on parliament house as part of the event. Ms Ward posted a photo of the rainbow flag on Facebook with the comment: ‘Now we just need to get rid of the racist Australian flag on top of state parliament and get a red one up there and my work is done’.
Others started to get quite antsy about Ward as well. Jeff Kennett, chairman of BeyondBlue, for example, threatened to pull their funding of the department. And La Trobe said it would investigate his/her radical public remarks. As to the former, one news report states:
One of the most influential backers of the Safe Schools program has threatened to withdraw future financial support, unless the founder of the program, hard-line Marxist Roz Ward, steps down over her comments denigrating the Australian flag.
Beyondblue chairman Jeff Kennett yesterday called for Ms Ward to resign from the role, saying her “extreme political views” rendered her “ineligible to be involved in any program …. in schools”. Mr Kennett, whose charity has provided almost $600,000 over the past two years to La Trobe University’s Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, which administers the Safe Schools program in Victoria, added: “You don’t want extremists in there. Her behaviour and her statement clearly indicate a belief which goes well beyond the conditions of which I am prepared to have this subject taught in schools.”
As to the latter, we have just had the terrific news I mentioned above. The leftist magazine New Matilda began its story on this as follows:
Criticising the Australian flag will get you suspended from LaTrobe University. Chris Graham reports. Roz Ward – a respected Melbourne academic and one of the co-founders of the Safe Schools program – has been suspended from her job at La Trobe University this afternoon, over a private Facebook post which criticised the Australian flag as “racist”. Ms Ward, who has been at the centre of a News Corporation engineered media storm this week, was notified in writing this afternoon of her immediate suspension (with pay) from the university.
Fiona Reed, the Executive Director of Human Resources at LaTrobe accuses Ms Ward of breaching her employment conditions by embarrassing the university, causing the Victorian Government – a major funder of LaTrobe – to divert resources to defending Safe Schools, and of putting her colleagues at risk by creating an ‘unsafe’ environment.
Last week, under a photograph of the gay and lesbian flag flying above Victorian parliament, Ms Ward joked with a friend on Facebook: “Now we just need to get rid of the racist Australian flag on top of state parliament and get a red one up there and my work is done.” The ‘red’ is a reference to the Marxist flag – in addition to her work with Safe Schools, Ms Ward is a prominent figure in Melbourne’s Marxist political movement….
This afternoon, Ms Ward was handed a letter by LaTrobe University, immediately suspending her from her job. Specifically, La Trobe claims Ms Ward’s conduct:
“a. … Undermined public confidence in the Safe Schools program by undermining public confidence in you as a researcher and as a person associated with the Safe Schools program.”
“b. … Damages the reputation of the Safe Schools program and aligns the Safe Schools program with views which have nothing to do with the program and its message and content.”
“c. … Has required members of the Victorian Government to take up their time in defending the Safe Schools program, rather than be positive advocates for the Safe Schools program.”
“d. … Has required senior staff at the University to take up their time in defending the Safe Schools program, rather than be positive advocates for the Safe Schools program or undertake other duties they have.”
“e. … drawn (your colleagues) into the negative publicity around Safe Schools and this has impacted on their ability to continue with their research in a safe environment.”
It seems that La Trobe is in damage control here big time. They know they are on big do do, but they don’t have the courage to fire him/her, which is what should have happened. So we have no idea how long this suspension will last before it is back to business as usual.
Indeed, it is not just Ward who should be dumped, but the entire lousy Safe Schools program as well. Columnist Miranda Devine has just written a piece on this very matter and is worth quoting from:
Jeff Kennett has to be kidding. The BeyondBlue chairman has called for the resignation of Roz Ward, the co-founder of the Safe Schools sexual indoctrination program. . . . Instead of trying to deflect anger onto an easy scapegoat, Kennett needs to explain to donors what due diligence was done on this donation. Not much, clearly. A brief Google search of the people and publications involved should have set off alarm bells for Kennett and fellow board members, including former prime minister Julia Gillard.
Kennett’s due diligence on behalf of vulnerable youth is put to shame by a group of mothers from inner-western Sydney’s Greek community. They are on the warpath against Safe Schools and similar radical sex education programs, and have set up a Facebook page and website titled: You’re Teaching our Children What? Sophie, one of 10 mothers involved, says they want to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals but they have had an “overwhelmingly positive response” from parents. “I found out my son’s school was part of Safe Schools and I hadn’t been informed so we started looking at the program and all the gender theory behind it,” she said yesterday.
“None of it sat well with us. When you speak to (other mothers) they’re horrified, upset and feel they have no control … “It’s not an anti-bullying program … This program is about sexualisation of children and it’s not what our families believe in, and I don’t believe it is what most Australians believe in.”
Emails to the website have flooded in from parents anxious about Safe Schools and other sex programs taught without their knowledge. They say their children are being bullied and stigmatised by teachers for not conforming on issues such as same-sex marriage and gender and sexual fluidity.
One girl wrote to complain about her geography teacher’s advocacy of same-sex marriage: “I dreaded going to my geography lessons. If someone tries to say anything we get shut down and are labelled as bigots or haters … It makes me feel scared and uncomfortable”. One mother wrote that her children were shown a video during assembly before Wear It Purple Day: “My children … felt as if the video was promoting homosexual and transsexual lifestyles as desirable.”
Devine concludes:
State-sponsored sexualisation of children, in the form of Safe Schools, Building Respectful Relationships (BRR), and Start Early for preschoolers is not occurring by accident. It is a deliberate and systematic program of sexual indoctrination designed by university gender studies academics, and based on the anti-family theories of the architects of communism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and their later mutations.
It is being administered without parental consent, and is designed to revolutionise family relationships and transform the way children think about gender and heterosexual sex. But the sleeping giant of parental concern is beginning to stir.
In churches and schools in the inner west the Greek community has begun the backlash, and they’re making it an election issue. Vote Labor and you get Safe Schools, they say. The problem is that both major parties have allowed these sexualisation programs to infiltrate schools.
The Andrews government in Victoria is the most extreme proponent, but Safe Schools was launched by the Gillard government, funded and defended by the Abbott government, and continues with modifications under the Turnbull government.
And the Prime Minister’s wife Lucy Turnbull has become an ambassador for Our Watch, the organisation that is pushing the introduction of BRR in Victorian schools, in the guise of preventing domestic violence. No one has done the due diligence and our children are the losers.
Exactly right. Even former Labor leader Mark Latham has attacked the despicable program: “The more I research the BRR and Safe Schools programs, the more bewildered I am as to how Labor leaders like Bill Shorten and Daniel Andrews endorsed this rubbish.”
Ward has lost two positions now, at least temporarily. But the entire crumbling edifice of the cultural Marxist war on our children needs to come down. The sexualisation of our children is reprehensible, and those political leaders who have allowed this depravity to go on for so long have a lot to answer for.
newmatilda.com/2016/06/01/latrobe-suspends-safe-schools-co-founder-and-academic-roz-ward-for-criticising-racist-australian-flag/
www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/education/jeff-kennett-safe-schools-funding-lost-if-roz-ward-stays/news-story/0aef42a2d0c918d5dc7450683b581f33
blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/mirandadevine/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/jeff_kennett_failure_to_play_it_safe/
www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/opinion/from-reason-to-radicalism-gender-fluidity/news-story/832eb330f1e68c0af8ab37521dc402d7
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