/qresearch/ -  Q Research

>>24576260

Australian author Craig Silvey's books permanently pulled from WA public schools

David Weber - 6 May 2026

The best-selling books of disgraced Australian author Craig Silvey will be permanently pulled from public schools in his home state of Western Australia, after he pleaded guilty to child exploitation offences.

Silvey's home in Fremantle was raided by detectives from WA Police's child abuse squad in January and he was charged with possessing and distributing child exploitation material.

The news of his arrest made international headlines, and many bookstores across the country immediately pulled his work from shelves, including his most popular novel, Jasper Jones.

The 43-year-old father-of-three pleaded guilty on Tuesday to the two charges, which related to images of child exploitation material.

WA Education Minister Sabine Winton has confirmed a temporary ban on Silvey's books being used as texts in public schools will now be made permanent.

"There is absolutely no place in our school system for works authored by someone who has admitted to such serious crimes," the minister said in a statement.

"Now that he has pleaded guilty, those texts will not return to the curriculum.

"Predatory behaviour against children is abhorrent and has no place in our community, let alone in materials studied by students in our schools."

Ms Winton said schools will be supported to adjust lesson plans and switch texts, while students who had already studied the text and planned to use it in their ATAR exams would not be penalised.

Premier Roger Cook said the action was "appropriate".

"I support the very strong decision from the minister of education yesterday to remove the books from the curriculum and the shelves of WA public schools," Mr Cook said.

"It is appropriate we act in this manner."

Shop owner removed books

Nat Latter, who co-owns Rabble Books & Games in Maylands, opted to remove Silvey's books when he was charged in January.

She said she felt she had a responsibility, given some of Silvey's books were targeted at children.

"When you have a book in your shop, you're responsible for promoting and marketing it, and I don't want to be a part of contributing to his income," Ms Latter said.

She said her focus was now on supporting customers concerned about Silvey's books.

"People do want to come and have conversations [about the charges] with us," she said.

"And we give them some advice, and provide them with some books and resources for people navigating age appropriate conversations with children about this."

Several local governments in the Perth metro area have confirmed they have removed Silvey's work from their library collections, including the Perth and Vincent libraries.

Publisher Allen & Unwin said it would end its relationship with Silvey.

"While legal proceedings were underway, Allen & Unwin paused the sale, distribution and promotion of Mr Silvey's work," it said in a statement.

"Following Mr Silvey's plea, Allen & Unwin will review all available steps it can take to end its relationship with the author."

Aside from Jasper Jones, which was adapted into a feature film, Silvey has won numerous accolades for other books, including Rhubarb, Honeybee and Runt, a children's novel that was also made into a film.

His books have been popular with children and young adults, often delving into profound themes such as racism, sexual identity and abuse, mostly featuring teenage protagonists.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-06/craig-silvey-books-permanently-banned-from-wa-school-curriculum/106647464

>>24556810

Landon Germanotta-Mills: Encrypted chats reveal horrific allegations against ‘satanic paedophile’

Perry Duffin and Clare Sibthorpe - May 5, 2026

A Sydney man accused of running a satanic paedophile ring allegedly hoarded almost 7000 abuse images involving babies and animals and told acolytes using encrypted chats that he “wished” to abuse children.

But when police burst through his door he tried to claim he was “building a case” as an “investigative journalist”.

Landon Germanotta-Mills, 27, was charged in late November by the NSW Police child abuse squad under Strikeforce Constantine, which was probing an online abuse cell operating on a New Zealand file sharing website.

Germanotta-Mills was arrested at his Waterloo apartment and remained in custody until last week, when he was released on bail by the NSW Supreme Court.

The town to which he was bailed cannot be revealed under court order.

A police document, released by the court on Tuesday, alleges Germanotta-Mills told 12 other users in encrypted one-on-one chats that he was into “young doesn’t matter what age” as well as “zoo” and “incest”.

The descriptions of images in the document are too horrific to repeat, but one user allegedly asked Germanotta-Mills if he had ever “f*cked young”, to which he allegedly replied “I wish”.

Police who dug into the New Zealand company’s servers discovered the images involving animals, adult men and infants, and tracked the emails and phone numbers used to register the accounts.

One email allegedly led police to Underground Media Network, Germanotta-Mills’ blog in which he claims he works as an investigative journalist exposing police corruption, racism and “trauma informed” stories including child abusers.

But Germanotta-Mills, who described himself online as an independent First Nations’ journalist, was allegedly using those accounts to chat with other users requesting and sending child abuse material.

“Trying to find some pervy porn,” Germanotta-Mills allegedly wrote to another user just two weeks before his arrest.

The person he was chatting to described abusing a child.

“You hot perverted pedo,” Germanotta-Mills allegedly added.

Police marched into Germanotta-Mills’ home in Waterloo on November 27 last year and found him on a lounge. He offered to “cooperate, if I get a chance to explain reasons”, according to the document.

“[The material] was on my devices to build a bigger case… I should have sent it straight away to you guys and reported it straight away,” Germanotta-Mills allegedly told police.

“Instead of trying to make my case… be a typical journalist.”

Detective Superintendent Jayne Doherty, then head of the NSW Sex Crimes squad, said the material consisted of victims aged from babies to 12, was “among the most extreme we have seen” and that its “use of satanic iconography demonstrates the level of depravity”.

She said police were working with international law enforcement and had gathered evidence identifying 145 alleged overseas offenders.

Germanotta-Mills was charged with a string of offences including accessing, transmitting and possessing child abuse material and some relating to bestiality material.

Germanotta-Mills was released on April 28 by NSW Supreme Court Justice Belinda Rigg who found the risks posed by releasing him could be managed by home detention, daily police reporting and bans from phones and internet devices.

“There is apparent strength to the prosecution case on my analysis of the detailed fact sheet, including the ways in which the applicant is linked with the different devices and platforms relied upon by the prosecution, and also a number of admissions made by him,” she said.

Germanotta-Mills was allegedly sexually involved with another man, Benjamin Drysdale, who had previously been convicted of child abuse material, the fact sheet says.

Drysdale, ex-police officer David Turner and former Victorian swim coach Mark Andrew Sendecky were among those arrested in connection with the alleged child abuse ring and remain before the courts.

Germanotta-Mills and the others charged have not yet entered pleas. They will next face the local court in May and June.

https://www.theage.com.au/national/nsw/encrypted-chats-reveal-horrific-allegations-against-satanic-paedophile-20260505-p5ztv4.html

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>>24569462

Social media giant fails to act as Jewish community fears ‘next Bondi’

Alexandra Smith and Michaela Whitbourn - May 5, 2026

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A Jewish academic who lodged complaints with Facebook over posts glorifying Hitler and likening the Jews to rats has told the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion that social media giant Meta failed to act after claiming the content did not “violate community standards”.

Israeli-born Tali Pinsky, who moved to Australia last year for an academic posting, told the commission on Tuesday she did not believe social media was “necessarily the main driver of antisemitism, but it’s certainly a great amplifier”.

Pinsky was one of 12 witnesses to give evidence to the commission about their lived experience of antisemitism during the second day of public hearings before former High Court judge Virginia Bell in Sydney.

SBS board director and former chief executive of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies Dr Vic Alhadeff also appeared, warning: “I know I’m confident that I speak for most Jewish-Australians when I say that we fear the next Bondi”.

“And that is our truth, that is our normal, that is our new reality,” Alhadeff said.

During Pinsky’s evidence, the commission was shown a series of social media posts glorifying Hitler, accusing Jews of masterminding the John F. Kennedy assassination and the September 11 terror attack, as well as likening Jewish people to rat plagues.

She told the commission that when she had tried to report the posts to Meta-owned Facebook she was given “the standard response” that they did “not violate the community standards”.

In a statement, a Meta spokesperson said its “hateful conduct policy” prohibits attacks against people based on protected characteristics, including religion and ethnicity, and this includes dehumanising speech, harmful stereotypes, and calls for violence.

“We use a combination of AI technology and human review to enforce our policies. While we do not always get it right, we are committed to improving our systems and we continuously invest in our ability to detect and remove hateful content at scale.”

The spokesperson said the company works with “Jewish community groups to understand how antisemitism is expressed online” and said when mistakes were made “people have the ability to appeal to us or the Oversight Board”. The board independently reviews Meta’s decisions.

Pinsky said she intended to return to Israel at the end of the year because she and her family no longer feel Australia is safe.

Another witness, a Victorian mother who used the pseudonym AAP, said her high school-age children attended single-sex Catholic schools and are “probably the only Jewish children there”.

“Very soon after [the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023], the sentiment towards Jewish people became very negative,” she said. Antisemitic messaging was “in their face” on social media.

She said slurs included “We owe Hitler an apology. The Nazis should have finished them off” and “Racism only applies to humans”.

Antisemitic comments like “dirty Jew” were thrown around by “ordinary kids”, AAP said.

AAP said some of her son’s friends joked about dressing up for year 12 muck-up day “as Adolf Hitler or the Bondi shooters”.

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Another witness, known only as Dina, told the commission she grew up on Bondi Beach, a place she said was welcoming to everyone.

However, Dina, whose paternal grandfather was murdered in the Holocaust, said the Sydney she knew and loved as a child had changed dramatically. She said her children attended the “exact same school” she did, but the level of security was extreme.

There were “concrete bollards so they don’t get rammed with a car”, high fences, security guards and often police in attendance, Dina said. The contrast was “frankly shocking”, she said.

Dina said her children were deeply affected by the December 14 massacre on Bondi Beach. When her 8-year-old passes Bondi Beach, the little girl says she “[thinks] about dying”.

“It’s impossible for children not to internalise and understand that they are living through that reality. They hear antisemitism around them all the time,” Dina said.

“Now when you hear the word Bondi, it’s associated with the massacre, with the terrorist attack, with the death of Jews.

“I remember saying to my husband not long after the December 14 attack, while we were trying to process it, that it’s so painful – even if you weren’t there – because the reality is they came to kill us, we just weren’t there.”

Dina said she had now seen security guards being hired for a Bat Mitzvah, a coming-of-age ritual for girls, and said she would likely do the same for her own children.

She said she now approached everyday situations with caution and suspicion.

Jeremy Stowe-Lindner, principal of Bialik College in Melbourne, said students “can’t go into the CBD in Melbourne any more in school uniform” after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack precipitated a wave of antisemitic abuse.

“We have had Hitler salutes and Jewish slurs,” he said.

Stowe-Lindner said pupils were spat on by two students from another school during one university trip.

He told the royal commission it should not fall to the Jewish community to fund their own security measures, in the same way one would “never expect there to be a tax” on any group of citizens to protect themselves.

This was “a tax on Jewish identity”, he said.

Peter Wertheim, co-chief executive of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and a former practising lawyer, said the ECAJ had been compiling annual reports on antisemitism since 1989.

The “gradual trend” was up, he said. “After [the Hamas attack of] October 7, 2023 it went up by 316 per cent. It has changed our perspective, and I think it has changed the country.”

The hearing continues on Wednesday.

https://www.theage.com.au/national/nsw/social-media-giant-fails-to-act-as-jewish-community-fears-next-bondi-20260505-p5ztzw.html

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>>24569462

Antisemites ‘blur the lines’ to attack Jewish identity, royal commission told

JAMES DOWLING - 6 May 2026

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Antisemites intentionally “blur the lines” between criticism of ­Israel’s existence and its actions, one of Australia’s most eminent Jewish lawyers says, arguing that Jewish Australians have been forced to choose between their morals and their livelihoods.

Arnold Bloch Leibler partner Jeremy Leibler was one of a dozen witnesses who testified in the Antisemitism and Social Cohesion Royal Commission on Wednesday, along with a 13-year-old girl traumatised by the Bondi Beach massacre.

Royal commissioner Virginia Bell challenged Mr Leibler to distinguish between delegitimising Israel and the critical views of well-intentioned non-Jewish Australians of the actions of Israel.

“I don’t believe that it is difficult to draw the line,” Mr Leibler said. “I believe that there are many that have an agenda to make it very difficult, in order to blur the lines.

“It is perfectly acceptable to criticise Israel’s conduct of the war. It is not legitimate, it is not acceptable, and it does cross the line to describe the Jewish right to self-determination as something that is inherently evil or immoral.”

Mr Leibler, whose firm is acting for Jewish organisations in the royal commission, said ABL had taken on dozens of pro bono legal clients since October 7, 2023, who saw their livelihoods threatened for refusing to disavow Zionism.

“My phone was ringing off the hook after the 7th of October, and it was almost always from traumatised members of the community asking for help because of antisemitism, isolation, exclusion, discrimination,” he said. “It was particularly bad within the arts, within progressive spaces, within academia, but it was everywhere.

“Jewish artists … were having venues cancelled, often … not because the venue ideologically wanted to. Often the cancellation would be accompanied by: ‘I’m so sorry, but I’ve been told that there’s going to be a BDS boycott campaign if we allow you to perform, and we’re a small business, and we just can’t afford to be ­attacked online.”

Mr Leibler said the rise in antisemitism proved to successful Jewish Australians that their seat at the table “was conditional on them rejecting a core part of their Jewish identity”. “Their success, their contribution to this country, bought them a seat at the table, not with special treatment, but as an equal,” he said. “And they discovered after the 7th of October, very quickly, that that seat was conditional on them rejecting a core part of their Jewish identity: that being their Zionism, their belief in the right of Jewish people to have their own homeland.”

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Witnesses repeatedly lamented the failures of institutions to hold antisemites to account, or take their concerns seriously.

The mother of a Jewish schoolboy pelted with antisemitic slurs on a school excursion at a museum said she was misled by education officials after a months-long complaint process.

High school students had taunted her 10-year-old son and his classmates with calls of “free Palestine”, “free Hezbollah” and “dirty Jews”, and multiple witnesses said the high school’s teacher and the museum failed to intervene.

The woman, referred to as AAU, took her son’s case to the ­department. “They said that they were going to investigate the incident and that the school was in touch with my son’s school, and that the school had provided a written apology,” she told the commission. AAU followed up her complaint to see what action had been taken, but the query went unanswered. Finally, in March, she received a letter saying there was a delay in identifying the offending students and teacher.

“The department also informed me that the school engaged (antisemitism education non-profit) Courage to Care to provide some educative services to the school,” AAU said.

“I know people that work at Courage to Care, so I contacted them directly. The CEO expressly told me in writing that they have never been engaged by this high school to provide any educative process. I’m still very disappointed that an independent statutory body provided me with misleading information.”

The 13-year-old girl had been at a bat mitzvah at Bondi Pavilion on December 14 last year. “I did not see or hear any shooting, but I could see through the glass doors of the venue, hundreds of people running away and screaming,” she said. “I had to be in lockdown at the venue. It was terrifying. My mum could not get to pick me up because the roads were closed. When I eventually got home, I was shaking and sweating and crying.

“I am so sad about all the people who died, especially Matilda, because she was just a kid and she did nothing wrong.”

She has spent months trying to recover from what she saw, and recalled how a close friend refused to go to her bat mitzvah because “her parents don’t like Jews”.

Many parents and teachers told the commission how antisemitism had calcified in schools amid rising criticism of Israel. A former Tasmanian public high school teacher said students developed “a fascination with Hitler”, would perform Nazi salutes. “The hatred of Israel … seemed something that they didn’t really know a whole lot about and were parroting from perhaps what they’d seen from online or family,” she said.

A 13-year-old was subjected to such intense antisemitic bullying he was forced to move from his Darwin high school, his father said, only to be subjected to more abuse at his second school. “Yesterday, he rang up his mother and asked her to come and pick him up from school in the middle of the day,”he said. “I knew straight away what had happened.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/antisemites-blur-the-lines-to-attack-jewish-identity-royal-commission-told/news-story/71fb4e0b7d59f6f1290992d2933a5a39

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>>24569462

Man arrested after wearing Nazi swastika T-shirt outside antisemitism royal commission

'JAMES DOWLING and WILL SEITAM - 6 May 2026

A man who sparked outrage after he was removed from outside the antisemitism royal commission in Sydney when he was spotted wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a Nazi swastika has been ­arrested by police.

The man, who gave his name as Ian Minus of Killarney Heights to the media and wore a shirt depicting the slogan “Anti-Semitism: proud to be accused, speak up!”, was issued a move on by police, which he complied with about 11am on Wednesday.

“Officers attached to Operation Shelter were patrolling outside a building on Clarence Street, Sydney, where a man was seen to be wearing clothing which allegedly displayed an offensive slogan on the front,” a police statement read.

“About 2.45pm, the man attended Manly Police Station where he was arrested by officers attached to Operation Shelter. He remains in custody while inquiries continue,” police confirmed later on Wednesday afternoon.

The man calling himself Mr Minus was seen sipping coffee in a neighbouring cafe adjacent to the building’s entrance.

He told the media: “I have business in town, and I wear this all the time. I’m just … enjoying a cup of coffee in the streets of ­Sydney. Why am I being assailed in such fashion?

“What’s disrespectful is what’s happening in Gaza and Lebanon and overseas, the killing of innocent people and children. What is it about group punishment that Zionists don’t understand or ­object to?”

He questioned whether the symbol was “clearly a swastika”, and when asked what his objections to Zionism had to do with the antisemitism royal commission, he said, “I don’t know”.

A social media profile matching the name Ian Minus displayed the shirt online in a post on ­Sunday, offering to sell copies of it.

“Despite urgings of the press that this claim makes this T-shirt illegal, NSW police did not act immediately. I guess we shall see when Zionist ­influence raises its ugly head,” he wrote. “This T-Shirt is getting positive reactions now, not surprisingly as people ­realise the true agenda and its ­effects on the entire world. Time for a stroll along a beach.”

On Wednesday, the Antisemitism and Social Cohesion Royal Commission said it was “appalled” by the man, and confirmed the police were dealing with the matter. “The royal commission is aware that this morning an individual wearing an antisemitic shirt was moved on by NSW police from out the front of the royal commission hearing location. We understand the matter is being dealt with by NSW police,” it said in a statement.

“The royal commission is appalled that such an item of clothing was worn in the vicinity of our hearing venue. Safety of witnesses is paramount to the royal commission. We want to reassure ­witnesses and those wishing to engage with the royal commission that safety protocols are in place. The royal commission is determined to investigate antisemitism in Australia without fear or intimidation.”

Photos uploaded to the same account on February 9 show a Mr Minus attending the Town Hall protests wearing a similarly inflammatory T-shirt with Hebrew text which reads, “Israel, you are f*cked.”

The February 9 post read: “There were plenty of Jews Against Israel at the town hall protest today. Interestingly, none of the many I talked to could read Hebrew. Do I really look like a mossad (sic) agent recording dissent protesters?”

In NSW, it is a criminal offence to wear or display a Nazi swastika in public without a reasonable excuse.

It is also an offence to act in an offensive manner near or within view or hearing of a public place or school.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/man-arrested-after-wearing-nazi-swastika-tshirt-outside-antisemitism-royal-commission/news-story/9e67635cd5ab20b31f87013ce6208e79

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>>24569445

Man charged with hate speech after neo-Nazi rally outside NSW Parliament House

Jessica McSweeney and Patrick Begley - May 6, 2026

A notorious neo-Nazi who spoke at a rally outside NSW Parliament House last November has been charged with a hate crime.

More than 60 black-clothed members of the National Socialist Network (NSN) gathered outside parliament on November 8, 2025 after submitting a protest application that was unopposed by police. They chanted “blood and honour”, a Hitler Youth slogan, and held a banner that read “Abolish the Jewish lobby”.

Joel Davis, 31, was part of the gathering that went ahead after NSW Police sought legal advice only to be told police likely did not have the legal grounds to stop the protest.

Davis had shouted into a megaphone to promote baseless and offensive conspiracies about the Jewish community.

He was charged on Wednesday with publicly inciting racial hatred on the grounds of race causing fear, a relatively new offence created under the current NSW Labor government.

He was given conditional bail to appear at Downing Centre Local Court next month.

Davis was granted bail in April after several months in custody on a federal charge, following a message he posted on social media encouraging followers to “rhetorically rape” federal independent Allegra Spender.

After the rally, Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon had told parliament in an answer to a budget estimates committee submitted on March 26 that “a subsequent review of the actions of the protesters conducted after the protest identified no offence”.

However, a spokesperson for the police said on Wednesday that he had been charged in connection with the event.

“An investigation into this matter was undertaken by the Security Investigation Unit, Counter Terrorist and Special Tactics Command, who sought legal advice in relation to the public assembly and content of the speeches,” the statement said.

NSW Police Minister Yasmin Catley described the behaviour of those at the rally as “completely unacceptable”.

“People have a right to protest. They do not have a right to target Jewish people, intimidate communities or incite racial hatred,” she said.

“These laws exist for a reason – to protect people from hate and fear, and the government will continue to support strong action against hatred and extremism.”

NSW Jewish Board of Deputies president David Ossip said in a statement: “It would be inappropriate to comment on this precise case, but fair-minded Australians have had a gutful of divisive and hateful language and calls for violence on our streets. Enforcing hate speech laws is key to repairing social cohesion and protecting public safety.”

The NSN claims to have disbanded earlier this year to avoid being listed as a prohibited hate group under new legislation introduced by the federal government. The government, which listed the Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir under the new laws, did not proceed with the NSN designation.

Despite this, neo-Nazi Jack Eltis, who spoke alongside Davis at the November rally, has signalled an intention to challenge the legislation in the High Court.

Davis is the first to be charged with a crime in relation to the rally. South African national Matthew Gruter, who stood alongside Davis at the protest, had his visa cancelled by the federal government and was deported in December.

“If you are on a visa you are a guest. If you’re a citizen you’re a full member of the Australian family,” Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said in November.

“Like with any household, if a guest turns up to show hatred and wreck the household, they can be told it’s time to go home.”

https://www.theage.com.au/national/nsw/man-charged-with-hate-speech-after-neo-nazi-rally-outside-nsw-parliament-20260506-p5zugy.html

https://qresear.ch/?q=Joel+Davis

https://qresear.ch/?q=National+Socialist+Network

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>>24569462

Alleged Bondi shooter Naveed Akram is set to be hit with 19 new charges, including attempted murder

BIMINI PLESSER - 6 May 2026

Alleged Bondi shooter Naveed Akram is set to face 19 new charges, including several counts of attempted murder, over his alleged role in the antisemitic terror attack.

Mr Akram, the younger of the two alleged perpetrators of the Bondi Beach massacre in December last year, has officially been charged with 59 offences, including terrorism, 15 counts of murder, and 40 counts of attempted murder.

A further 19 charges against Mr Akram were listed by the courts on Wednesday but have not yet been served by police.

Of these charges, 10 were for shooting with intent to murder, three were for wounding with intent to murder, and six were for discharging a firearm et cetera with intent to resist arrest.

Akram is yet to enter pleas to any of the charges laid against him.

There was no mention of any new or impending charges when Mr Akram’s case was mentioned in Sydney’s Downing Centre Local Court on Wednesday.

Outside court, Mr Akram’s lawyer Leonie Gittani said the alleged terrorist’s team “haven’t been served with any new court attendance notices or anything”.

“Things like this happen in criminal matters. It’s a big matter and a long road ahead,” Ms Gittani said.

“These things don’t come as a surprise, if I can answer it in that way. These charges, once they’re filed, we’ll deal with them at that point.”

Neither Mr Akram nor his barrister, Richard Wilson SC, were in court on Wednesday, but the alleged gunman had other legal representatives attend on his behalf.

Lawyers for the commonwealth asked Judge Susan McIntyre to extend the interim non-publication orders currently covering the identity of yet-to-be-named victims of the Bondi attack.

The orders were set to expire on Wednesday.

The commonwealth said they required more time to contact and consult dozens of victims – some of them children – about whether they wished to have their names suppressed before submitting a final application for a non-publication order.

Judge McIntyre agreed to extend the interim orders until Mr Akram’s next court appearance, which will take place some time in June.

Non-publication and suppression orders have been a key focus of the case against Mr Akram.

At a hearing last month, Mr Akram’s application to have the names, addresses, schools and workplaces of his family suppressed for 40 years was dismissed, despite his claims their lives were at risk.

Judge Hugh Donnelly said such suppression orders “should only be made in exceptional circumstances”, and Mr Akram’s was “not an exceptional case”.

While the “gravity” of Mr Akram’s alleged conduct would “inevitably” draw public comment and criticism, some of which may be directed at his family, the judge said “this alone is not enough to intrude on the principle of open justice”.

“It is essential that this case be fairly reported,” he said.

Mr Wilson said he would not be appealing against Judge Donnelly’s “well-considered” decision.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/alleged-bondi-shooter-naveed-akram-is-set-to-be-hit-with-19-new-charges-including-attempted-murder/news-story/d65388c004f988033235a9cbc929519e

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‘Critical gap’: The 2020 warning to police before Bondi terrorist bought guns

Nick McKenzie and Perry Duffin - May 6, 2026

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The NSW Police unit that gave a gun licence to shooters’ club member turned Bondi terrorist Sajid Akram was urged in writing five years ago to close a “critical gap” in the firearms licensing regime that could be leaving extremists unchecked.

During a meeting at police headquarters on December 8, 2020, psychologist and gun club official Daniel Gregg warned officials from the NSW Police Firearms Registry that far too little was being done to encourage club members to spot and report any signs of extremism among their fellow shooters.

In his presentation to NSW Police Clubs, Intelligence, and Licensing officials, Gregg warned that police were missing an opportunity to improve vigilance within gun clubs amid patchy and inconsistent official guidance about how and when a club member should identify and flag concerns about a fellow member. But Gregg said his warning went unheeded, with police never following up.

Gregg urged NSW Police in his 2020 presentation, which included a written briefing, to “address a critical gap in early detection of emerging risk among [gun club] applicants who may not trigger traditional disqualifiers but exhibit concerning behavioural patterns” indicative of extremism.

In his PowerPoint, Gregg warned the NSW Police that the existing system of firearms’ “regulation and the law” was flawed and there was a risk that “lone-actor extremists [who] exhibit observable behaviours before acting” were not having these behaviours reported to police.

“Clubs are often the first point of contact for new firearm users, giving them a unique opportunity to notice these behaviours. Static checks [by police] alone cannot detect dynamic risk – structured behavioural observation [within a club] can help fill that gap,” Gregg’s briefing stated.

The revelation of the warning comes as the royal commission prompted by the Bondi attack in December last week urged states, territories and the federal government to further strengthen rules across Australia around gun ownership, improve the inter-agency sharing of information about gun owners and “prioritise efforts to implement the proposed National Gun Buyback Scheme”.

But legislative reforms introduced post-Bondi have largely focused on restricting the number and types of weapons available to licensed gun owners, rather than encouraging and empowering firearm owners – who typically have to join a firearms club to get a licence – to help police detect extremists. Gregg said his 2020 warning to NSW Police stressed that this was a vital task that could be funded via state and federal grants. Earlier this year, Gregg submitted his 2020 briefing to the ongoing royal commission.

Reforming Australia’s gun laws is a complex policing and political task, given the division of responsibilities and a patchwork of laws across states, territories and the Commonwealth and pressure from the gun lobby and some conservative politicians to protect the rights of the vast majority of law-abiding gun owners.

More than 900,000 people have a firearms licence in Australia, including more than 250,000 in NSW and 243,000 in Victoria.

Police in NSW and Victoria, along with insiders at the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, have also told this masthead on condition of anonymity, that state police gun licensing divisions remain vastly under-resourced and often seen as a backwater. These problems were untouched by the interim commission report.

In both states, a relatively small number of firearms licensing police oversee huge numbers of gun owners, with multiple sources claiming police in gun licensing teams are “overwhelmed”. NSW Police sources said there was also increasing concern that “sovereign citizens” with firearms licences could descend into extremism, while previous reporting by this masthead has exposed the efforts of Australia’s largest neo-Nazi group to obtain firearms via associates with gun permits.

For years before the Bondi attack, the NSW Firearms Registry had been beset with problems and Police Minister Yasmin Catley had described it a “shambles”. There were serious backlogs between 2020 and 2023, and it was normal for applications to take two to three years to be processed. It was not fully digitised until 2023.

In January 2017, a man called John Edwards was approved for a permit to shoot at sporting ranges. There were 18 previous incidents involving Edwards on the police database, 15 of which related to AVOs, stalking, assault allegations or so-called adverse interactions in relationships. The following year, Edwards shot and killed his two children.

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In 2022, the year before alleged Bondi gunman Sajid Akram was permitted to have multiple guns, it granted a licence to one of the first men to be charged with anti-terrorism offences in Australia. The man, whose nickname was Jihad Jack, had fought for the Taliban and shaken hands with Osama bin Laden. His licence was only revoked after a year.

Gregg’s December 2020 briefing to NSW Police – which he told this masthead applied to gun licensing regimes not only in NSW but across Australia – described how the Christchurch terrorist incident and the case of Edwards had demonstrated “that individuals can legally acquire firearms and join gun clubs despite displaying observable warning signs”.

Gregg told the police how, in the case of the Christchurch terrorist, his fellow New Zealand gun club “members noticed concerning behaviour, but there was no structured process to escalate those concerns”.

“The New Zealand royal commission (2020) highlighted this as a missed opportunity.”

Gregg warned the problem in Australia was exacerbated because of patchy and inconsistent laws and regulations that required some – but not all – gun club owners to report suspicious activity and little guidance for clubs about how to detect signs of extremism.

Gregg told this masthead that the changes he unsuccessfully urged the NSW Police to embrace in late 2020 would ensure clubs could work more closely with authorities to detect a gun club member on the path to extremism or violence.

“The firearms community has been let down by a regulatory system that treats them as only a suspect population to be checked, rather than a community of citizens with a vested interest to be partners in safety,” Gregg said in an interview with this masthead.

“Most shooters I’ve worked with would welcome a credible framework that gives them agency in this process.”

In the months after his 2020 meeting, Gregg said he pushed the NSW Police to take up his proposal to improve the screening and reporting of suspect gun club members by their fellow shooters, but received no follow up.

But after the Bondi attack, when Gregg sought meetings with the Minns government to again raise his concerns, Catley’s office wrote to him to advise the “NSWPF’s Firearms Registry had in April provided an undertaking to further engage with you about firearms club compliance and culture”. Gregg said he subsequently raised his proposal again with a senior NSW Police licensing division official.

There is no suggestion from Gregg, or this masthead, that the failure to address longstanding deficiencies in the NSW licensing regime – a failure officials say is present to varying degrees in all states and territories – directly contributed to Sajid and Naveed Akram’s alleged decision to murder innocent people.

One senior NSW official said that, had Sajid not been granted the right to acquire multiple long-arm firearms he used in the attack, he could have sourced weapons from the black market or used a car or a knife.

But the Bondi tragedy has highlighted longstanding problems with firearms licensing regimes that experts and insiders warn make it too easy for criminals or potential extremists to sidestep existing system checks and lawfully acquire guns.

In December, this masthead revealed how federal officials had warned that the development of a National Firearms Registry, operated by the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission and meant to improve data sharing about gun owners across the nation, had been plagued by internal problems and poor buy-in from some states and territories. The royal commission’s interim report urged the prioritisation of the registry’s launch.

Extremism researcher Josh Roose told this masthead it was in the interest of gun clubs to identify and out potential attackers within their ranks.

“Gun clubs do not want members going out and carrying out extremist attacks,” Roose said.

“In context of the recent attacks, such as Bondi, the impact on the clubs is immense. It’s in their best interest to weed extremism out and identify it.”

Roose said a major issue was the lack of awareness and training in identifying extremists, given that gun owners, and club members, can come from across the political spectrum.

https://www.theage.com.au/national/critical-gap-the-2020-warning-to-police-before-bondi-terrorist-bought-guns-20260505-p5ztxm.html

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Speaking at a press conference in Canberra, Barrett said police had been investigating since 2015 whether the Australians who travelled to Syria “may have committed Commonwealth offences, including terrorism offences”.

“Some individuals will be arrested and charged,” Barrett said.

“Some will face continued investigations when they arrive in Australia, and children who return in the cohort will be asked to undergo community integration programs, therapeutic support and countering violent extremism programs.”

Barrett said she was unable to say how many of the women would be arrested.

Police inspectors made several trips to Syria, including in times of danger, to establish whether criminal charges could be laid against Australians in the camps, she said.

Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Mike Bush said his officers would work with the AFP to monitor those returning to Victoria, while NSW Police Minister Yasmin Catley said police would “have a role” in managing the return of the two people in Sydney.

Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan echoed Burke’s comments about the adults facing potential charges, and said the returning children would be asked to complete programs designed to counter violent extremism.

ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess said he was not concerned by the return of the families but added his agency would continue to monitor them.

“It’s up to them what they do when they get here. If they start to exhibit signs of concern, we and the police, through the joint counter-terrorism teams, will take action,” Burgess said.

Zahra Ahmed, one of the women expected to return to Australia, previously told this masthead that her extended family left their home in Melbourne’s outer suburbs to do humanitarian work. She said they were abruptly prevented from leaving Syria when Islamic State closed the borders of its self-proclaimed caliphate.

While men in her family reportedly joined Islamic State, Ahmed insisted the women had no choice but to follow.

The group has been held in camps since the fall of Islamic State and the death or capture of their husbands and fathers, who allegedly fought for the terrorist network.

Save the Children chief executive Mat Tinkler, who has lobbied for the government to help return the women and children, said it was better for some of the group to face criminal charges than languish in Syria.

“The reality is they are coming back … it’s going to happen,” he said. “We need to turn the temperature down.”

He said that two-thirds of the Australians remaining in the camp were children who did not decide to leave Australia and were suffering untreated shrapnel wounds and teeth falling out.

Labor cabinet minister Anne Aly, a former terrorism and deradicalisation expert, expressed little sympathy for the returning women, saying it would have been “very, very difficult for any individual” to travel into Syria a decade ago.

“There were laws enacted to make it unlawful. There were travel warnings at the time,” she said.

“That indicates, then, that anyone who went there at that time went there with a nefarious purpose, with a commitment to the ISIS agenda of establishing a caliphate by violent means. I think that is a very serious situation that needs to be considered when we undertake threat assessments.”

https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/burke-confirms-is-families-have-made-plans-to-come-to-australia-20260506-p5zu7k.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjLSkKT2iw8

>>24355021

>>24578172

What is known about the Islamic State-linked families about to arrive in Australia

Nick Newling - May 6, 2026

Four women and nine children linked to Islamic State fighters are bound to arrive in Australia from Syria on Thursday, after Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke on Wednesday confirmed they had acquired plane tickets.

Members of the group have been attempting to return to Australia since the rise of IS’s self-proclaimed caliphate in 2015.

Here’s everything we know about their return and what awaits them.

Who are they?

Kawsar Abbas – The 54-year-old grandmother is expected to fly to Melbourne with her adult daughters Zeinab and Zahra Ahmed, and their children. Abbas is married to Mohammed Ahmed, who worked for the charity Global Humanitarian Aid, which was at one time suspected of directing resources towards Islamic State – a charge the family denies.

Mohammed claimed in 2019 that the family travelled to Syria to attend the wedding of his son, Omar, in 2014 before being trapped in the country when the border closed. A number of the men of the family fought for Islamic State. Kawsar insisted the women were unwitting victims.

Zahra Ahmed – The 33-year-old daughter of Kawsar Abbas and Mohammed Ahmed is the widow of IS recruiter Muhammad Zahab and has insisted she and her family travelled to Syria to do humanitarian work. She told this masthead that men in her family chose to join IS, but women had no choice but to follow.

Zeinab Ahmed – The 31-year-old sister of Zahra told the ABC last year that she feared for the safety of her children if they remained in Syria, and that other repatriations had made the cohort “so happy”.

Janai Safar – The 32-year-old former health science student is bound for Sydney alongside her child, born in 2016. She travelled to Islamic State-occupied Syria from Australia in 2015 and was married to an IS fighter who is believed to have died in 2017.

Safar told The Australian in 2019 that she would never return to Australia because she feared arrest and didn’t want her son growing up in a non-Islamic country. Her father, Samer Safar, said at the time he believed his daughter wanted to return to Australia, but was “stubborn”.

The four women will be joined by nine children. They were all part of a larger group of 34 people who unsuccessfully attempted to return to Australia in February.

Where were they?

The families had been living in the al-Roj refugee camp in the north-east of Syria near the Iraq border. US officials have been frustrated by the Australian government’s reluctance to repatriate the group, as they seek to shut down camps in Syria amid the war in Iran.

Last week, members of the group acquired plane tickets to Australia but were turned back by Syrian authorities while travelling to Damascus International Airport. Syrian authorities appear to have been heavily involved in transporting the group within the country, and holding them in Damascus while they await flights.

A Syrian government official said the Australian government “had the ultimate authority” and was the “deciding factor” in the group’s departure, according to reports by the ABC.

The official said the two-week hold-up in leaving Damascus was due to the Australian government’s delay in putting “procedures in place” for the arrival of the women and children.

What awaits them?

The federal government has long maintained that no support was provided to the group, and they would face “the full force of the law” upon their return. The group was furnished with passports – a right that can be exercised by all citizens.

Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett said on Wednesday some of the women would be arrested upon landing in Australia, but would not confirm how many.

Other members of the group will face “continued investigations”, while the nine children will “be asked to undergo community integration programs, therapeutic support and countering violent extremism programs”.

How will they be monitored?

Head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, Mike Burgess, said he was not concerned by the cohort’s return, but confirmed the group would be monitored in Australia.

“It’s up to them what they do when they get here. If they start to exhibit signs of concern, we and the police, through the joint counter-terrorism teams, will take action,” Burgess said.

https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/what-is-known-about-the-is-linked-families-about-to-arrive-in-australia-20260506-p5zuaz.html

https://qresear.ch/?q=Muhammad+Zahab

https://qresear.ch/?q=Mariam+Raad

>>24355021

>>24379388

>>24505851

>>24505912

More than $10 billion slated to boost fuel supplies and emergency stockpiles

Stephanie Borys - 6 May 2026

More than $10 billion will be spent bolstering Australia's fuel security as the federal government attempts to shield the nation from the long-term consequences of the war in Iran.

Countries have been scrambling to secure adequate fuel, gas and fertiliser since the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, raising questions about whether Australia has adequate emergency stocks in times of crisis.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has confirmed next week's budget will include an Australian Fuel Security and Resilience package, which includes:

• increasing Australia's minimum stockholding obligation by a further 10 days;

• $7.5 billion in financial support for fuel companies to access loans, insurance and equity to purchase and store more stock;

• $3.7 billion to establish a government-owned fuel security reserve that would hold 1 billion litres of emergency diesel and aviation fuel.

Currently, refiners and importers are required to store between 20 and 32 days of emergency supplies, depending on the type of fuel they hold.

Under the proposal, which will require government and private-sector funding, Australia's mandatory petrol stockpiles will increase to about 37 days, while diesel and jet fuel will be about 50 days.

Mr Albanese said the details of how the package would be funded would be announced in Tuesday's budget.

"This is aimed at making sure that Australians can have more confidence in protecting our energy sovereignty, not just during this crisis, but going forward," he said.

$10 billion for more fuel and storage capacity

The government's new funding package includes $7.5 billion in financial support for fuel companies to access loans, insurance and equity so they can buy and store more fuel.

Fuel companies have already used a portion of that funding to acquire extra stock through the government's new strategic powers, which allow Export Finance Australia (EFA) to underwrite fuel purchases.

Ampol, BP Australia and Viva Energy have used the scheme to secure about 450 million litres of extra diesel and 100 million litres of additional jet fuel.

The government will also spend $3.7 billion to set up a government-owned fuel security reserve that would hold 1 billion litres of diesel and aviation fuel for use in times of crisis.

These stockpiles would be scattered across the country, and Energy Minister Chris Bowen said there would be a focus on regional areas.

"Australia is actually in a minority of countries in the International Energy Agency who don't have a government-owned fuel reserve," he said.

"This is a big change in our approach as a country and a good one."

Federal and state governments will spend $10 million to determine whether Australia needs new or expanded fuel refinery capabilities.

Currently, there are two refineries in the country.

Mr Albanese said the overall package would significantly boost supplies and increase the emergency stockpile.

"This will support an overall expansion of Australia's onshore fuel reserves to ensure at least 50 days of fuel supply and storage of diesel and aviation fuel," he said.

Opposition calls for large stockpiles

Opposition Leader Angus Taylor said it was a no-brainer to boost supplies and stockholding obligations.

"We need more fuel stocks … the government needs to get on with it," he said.

The Coalition had already proposed to go further than the government's plan by increasing Australia's fuel stocks to 60 days.

Mr Taylor said the government's plan did not go far enough, but said he would look at the details and determine which elements the Coalition would support.

"The minimum stockholding obligation should get to 60 days," he said.

"I have laid out a pathway to do that. The government needs to get on with it. They are not going that far, and that is disappointing."

Climate Council director Greg Bourne said the government's announcement should have included a greater focus on renewable energy.

"I hope there's an encore because this is not an energy security plan, it's a short-term petrol supply plan," he said.

"This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to provide genuine energy security, with renewable energy that we own and control."

Australian Airports Association chief executive Simon Westaway welcomed the announcement.

"Increasing Australia's minimum stockholding of jet fuel will help ensure future supply disruptions can be better managed, while supporting continued connectivity for communities, tourism and business," he said.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-06/government-commits-10-billion-for-australian-fuel-supply/106582514

>>24474213

>>24512269

>>24536322

>>24573048

One Nation defends campaign corflutes supporting Ben Roberts-Smith in Farrer by-election campaign

Jess Scully - 6 May 2026

One Nation corflutes expressing support of alleged war criminal Ben Roberts-Smith, have been erected outside of pre-polling booths across southern NSW, ahead of this weekend's Farrer by-election.

The signage contains a photo of Mr Roberts-Smith in service dress beneath the words: "He fought for us. One Nation stands with him."

The ADF has advised political parties to avoid using images of current or former ADF personnel in campaign material, while legal experts have warned about the risks of commentary around matters that are currently before the courts.

One of the signs at the North Albury pre-poll for One Nation candidate David Farley said it was authorised by party leader Pauline Hanson.

The ABC approached Mr Farley for comment and was provided with a statement from a One Nation spokesperson.

"One Nation is the only party which has expressed support for Ben Roberts-Smith and we're making sure voters in Farrer - where many veterans live - know it," the One Nation spokesperson said.

"Our support for him reflects our strong commitment to support all Australian veterans much better than the Labor government currently does."

Mr Roberts-Smith has been charged with five counts of war crime murder, alleged to have occurred during tours in Afghanistan between 2009 and 2012.

He has consistently denied the allegations throughout a high-stakes civil defamation case against Nine newspapers, which he lost in 2023.

Defence politicised

The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) said Australian electoral laws do not regulate signage content beyond requiring an authorisation statement.

Military emblems are protected under the Defence Act 1903 and Trade Marks Act 1995.

The Australian Defence Force (ADF) does not comment on individual cases about ADF imagery being used as part of political campaigns, however, it advises parties not to.

"Defence respectfully requests political parties and those standing for political office to refrain from using imagery of former or current ADF personnel as part of any campaign material," a Defence spokesperson said in a statement.

One Nation did not respond to the ABC's questions when asked whether Mr Roberts-Smith, the Department of Defence or the Australian War Memorial had given consent to the use of the images.

Veteran and Greens Candidate in the Farrer by-election Richard Hendrie said it was important Defence stayed apolitical.

"They're there to serve the interests of the foreign policy and domestic policy of the government of the day and the parliament of the day," he said.

Mr Hendrie said he was not comfortable with the use of Mr Roberts-Smith, or any veteran, in political discourse.

"I'm a veteran myself, it's caused me a lot of angst and distress. The veteran community is entitled to be heard on this issue and that's a healthy thing in democracy," he said.

"But what I object to … is having the veteran community used for political motivations or interference."

Sub judice concerns

The signs may impact proceedings before the courts under sub judice contempt laws.

"Ben Roberts-Smith VC MG is entitled to the presumption of innocence," Mr Hendrie said.

"Political parties need to distance themselves from these matters and let the courts do their job."

University of Sydney Law School Professor David Rolph said messages of support about a matter before the court could impact proceedings under the principle of sub judice.

"There have been examples in the past of prominent people who have made statements in support or against people who have found themselves on the wrong end of sub judice contempt," he said.

Professor Rolph said the laws existed to protect the presumption of innocence of an alleged offender, and to ensure a fair trial before the courts and not the "court of public opinion".

He said courts may impose non-publication orders that could impact the reporting of the trial if the courts deemed there to be a case of prejudicial publicity.

"Open justice is a really fundamental part of our legal system because for centuries we've proceeded on the basis that justice not only needs to be done, but needs to be seen to be done," Professor Rolph said.

"That constrains what the public can know about what's going on."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-06/one-nation-signs-support-ben-roberts-smith/106643228

>>24556964

>>24569450

>>24569454

>>24573024

Takaichi’s ‘kneeling’ tribute in Australian war memorial sparks controversy; a political calculation aimed at pleasing West, but offensive to Asian neighbors: Chinese expert

Deng Xiaoci - May 06, 2026

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Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, a prominent right-wing figure who has repeatedly offered tributes at the notorious Yasukuni Shrine which enshrines Class-A war criminals directly responsible for wars of aggression during the WWII, surprised many during her recent visit to Australia, during which she knelt on both knees in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Australian Soldier to lay flowers at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.

Her such act has sparked controversy online, with many criticizing it a hypocritical political performance aiming to appease the West and showing the Japanese leader's white supremacy complex. A Chinese expert commented that Takaichi's behavior is full of political calculation and is offensive to Japan's Asian neighboring countries.

On May 4, Japan's Prime Minister's Office released a statement saying that Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, who is visiting Canberra, the Commonwealth of Australia, laid a wreath at the Australian War Memorial during her visit to Canberra. The statement was accompanied by a photo of Takaichi kneeling on both knees while offering the flowers.

According to a post by the office, later on May 4, Takaichi also planted a tree at the Canberra Nara Peace Park and offered flowers and silent prayers at the memorial for the late former Japanese prime minister Abe Shinzo.

Based on public information available online, the Australian War Memorial (AWM), located in Campbell, a suburb of Australian capital city of Canberra, is a national war memorial, museum and archive dedicated to all Australians who have died as a result of war. In 1993, the Tomb of the Unknown Australian Soldier was installed inside the Memorial Building's Hall of Memory.

Although the memorial was initially envisioned to only commemorate those who had died as the result of the WWI, the institution's scope was changed to include service-members of the WWII in 1939, service-members from all other wars in 1952, and all Australians who died in conflict in 1975.

Japanese major media outlets, including the Nikkei, Jiji Press, and Asahi Shimbun, have simply outlined the itinerary and focused on the floral tribute while omitting the kneeling at the AWM. Instead, Global Times reporters noticed that Japanese local media such as the Sankei Shimbun has covered Takaichi's tribute to Abe's later on the day with more details, and highlighted that Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was accompanying her and also honored the late former Japanese prime minister.

Despite the efforts of Japanese authorities and mainstream press to frame the event as a simple floral offering while downplaying the act of kneeling, the move indeed sparked controversy on the internet.

Some Japanese netizens said they approved of the gesture. Posting a video of Takaichi's visit to the AWM, Japanese netizen @don_mai_don_mai claimed in a post that "Prime Minister Takaichi visits the Australian War Memorial and lays a wreath. With the bond between Japan and Australia in heart, renewing the pledge for peace."

There is also a wave of backlash and criticism has also emerged among Japanese netizens

X user @ChiakTokai, taking a more extreme right-wing stance, claimed that "I'm not saying it's a bad thing to kneel at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier…But look, please pay your respects at Yasukuni Shrine before you do that!!"

However, there are also strong criticizing voices, especially over the double standards toward Asian neighboring countries. X user @SUZUKIYASUSHI55 wrote in Japanese that "Prime Minister Takaichi is pictured at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, kneeling as she offers flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. If she could show this same humility toward our neighbors, we might actually have peace. Instead, her stubbornness continues to escalate tensions with neighboring countries."

"I wonder why she can do this for Australia but not for East Asia. Is it because they're white? We've been taught since we were kids that apologizing is the bigger move and refusing to is just pathetic - so what happened there?" wrote another @rien4048323.

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Another Japanese X user @zomihooo slammed that "Diplomacy is about maintaining a balanced relationship with various nations. Clearly, she is being selective about who she respects. Based on her past words and actions, I don't see Takaichi showing any genuine respect for the history or culture of our counterparts. Japan has no need for 'low-IQ' politicians who act like bullies toward other Asian countries."

Some also contrasted Takaichi's humble move in Australia with her refusal to make formal apology over the recent incident of SDF member's intrusion into the Chinese Embassy in Japan, and criticizing that "same war, same destruction, yet she kneels for Australia while looking down her nose at Asia. Not a word of apology even when an SDF 'thug' invades an embassy. What is going on in this PM's head? This combination of refusing to apologize and harboring such petty jealousy toward our neighbors is honestly embarrassing."

"I thought it was just the signature, but I am simply left speechless.

Lacking both common sense and [knowledge of] history, the far-right chauvinist Ms. Takaichi has no qualification to be Prime Minister. What would the citizens of China and South Korea think? NHK and the mass media report nothing but achievements; they should report the photos and articles of [her] kneeling," @suhamayuki commented on X.

To prove the double stands and inconsistency toward Asian and Western countries even more stark, some netizens also make comparison with her visit to Vietnam, where Takaichi performed a standard bow during her floral tribute in Ho Chi Minh City.

A netizen @gloomydeaf criticized that "Sanae Takaichi kneels in Australia. Aside from the atrocities committed against prisoners of war, Japan's war crimes against Australia during WWII were relatively few—negligible when compared to the horrors inflicted upon China, South Korea, and Southeast Asia. Yet, a Japanese Prime Minister has never once dropped to their knees in any of those Asian nations."

Xiang Haoyu, a distinguished research fellow at the China Institute of International Studies, told the Global Times on Wednesday that Takaichi's "kneeling" is a world apart from former German Chancellor Willy Brandt's act of kneeling on both knees in front of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Memorial. "The latter represented genuine reflection and respect. In contrast, Takaichi's behavior is full of political calculation and has offended Japan's Asian neighboring countries."

"This is merely a political show designed to please Western allies. It is not sincere repentance at all. If Japan truly wants to reflect and show genuine remorse, it should first properly answer and make amends to its Asian neighboring countries," Xiang noted.

"The voices of supporting Takaichi to visit Yasukuni Shrine precisely reflects the spread of erroneous historical views within Japan, where right and wrong are blurred," the Chinese expert warned.

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202605/1360383.shtml

https://japan.kantei.go.jp/105/actions/202605/04australia3.html

https://japan.kantei.go.jp/105/actions/202605/04australia4.html

>>24359367

>>24359409

Australian Psychological Society slammed over gender care backflip

STEPHEN RICE - April 16, 2026

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Australia’s peak psychology body has been labelled “disgraceful” and “dangerously outdated” after supporting gender-affirming medical care for children and teenagers, an about-face on its previous recommendations for a more evidence-based approach to dealing with gender dysphoria.

In a newly released position paper, the Australian Psychological Society deleted references in an earlier draft to the ground-breaking UK Cass report and more than a dozen other studies that cast doubt on the mental health claims of the gender-­affirming treatment model.

Statements in the 2024 draft document that “medical gender affirmation is not the only way to support transition” and more research was needed to determine long-term impacts have been entirely removed from the 2026 final position statement.

The revisions appear to have occurred after the draft was handed to an internal APS body called the Psychology of Diverse Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities Interest Group, according to clinical psychologist Sandra Pertot.

That was a “betrayal” of APS’s 25,000 members and “an insult to the taskforce members who spent their time and energy working towards a genuine consensus document’, Dr Pertot said.

The review was set up in 2022 after Dr Pertot successfully fought a complaint to the APS over suggesting that a comprehensive assessment of any ­gender-questioning young person was needed to arrive at the safest diagnosis for an individual.

While the 2024 draft report contained much with which Dr Pertot disagreed, it made reference to studies like the Cass review and acknowledged the marked increase in the number of young people being referred to medical gender clinics, “the reasons for which are debated”.

The draft also stated that “aspects of transition may not necessarily reduce the risk of suicide” and noted that the use of a new name or pronouns in children who were yet to be assessed might be considered “a form of active intervention”.

All these references have been deleted from the final position statement.

Dr Pertot said a common grievance of dissatisfied clients was that the clinician simply affirmed their belief they were transgender in the first session.

“I naively assumed that an in-depth assessment would be mandatory in the new APS document,” Dr Pertot wrote in a piece for the online Gender Clinic News.

“Instead, proper assessment comes across as just a possible option, outweighed by the dogma that if a client says they are trans, they are trans, and must be affirmed immediately, for example, by asking them their pronouns.”

Dr Pertot told The Australian she was able to speak publicly because she was recently retired “but many of my colleagues are just too scared to say anything – it’s nuts. So many people just won’t speak out because they know they’ll be called a bigoted transphobic. It’s awful and very hard to come back from.”

“I’ve worked with trans people throughout my 50-year career. The problem is not denying their existence, it’s that we have to be really sure that we’ve come to the right diagnosis,” she said.

“We have a responsibility to take our time to consider possibilities and some of these kids are likely not to be trans.”

(continued)

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University of Sydney emeritus professor of psychology Dianna Kenny, who treats gender-­dysphoric young people, said the APS position statement was “a disgraceful denial of evidence-based medicine”.

“Psychologists are already terrorised by the trans activist lobby to not practise evidence-based psychotherapy and not even take on young patients with gender dysphoria because of the very public punishment that is meted out to professionals who dare to contradict the gender ideological policies propagated by the trans lobby,” Professor Kenny said.

Queensland child psychiatrist Jillian Spencer labelled the APS position “dangerously out-of-date” and urged that it be immediately retracted. “They’re letting down their members because they’re not acknowledging the complexity of the issue and the emerging evidence that this is harmful to children,” she said.

“I know of APS members who have left over this issue. They just can’t bear to give the APC one more cent of their money when they’ve been let down so badly by their professional organisation.

“Psychologists who are doing the right thing by providing an exploratory approach to children and youth with gender distress are left vulnerable because they don’t have the support of their professional organisation backing them up.”

APS president Kelly Gough said the position statement was “guided by current evidence and ethical practice” and was not a clinical guideline. “We understand this is a complex and evolving area,” Dr Gough said.

“The position statement reflects our commitment to respectful, person-centred, evidence-informed support from psychologists”.

The APS did not respond to specific questions from The Australian about why references to the Cass report were removed from the final statement or whether they were removed at the suggestion of the APS Psychology of Diverse Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities Interest Group.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/australian-psychological-society-slammed-over-gender-care-backflip/news-story/03385e6eeb4588eb399d9e84c6feeba7

https://qresear.ch/?q=Cass+Review

https://qresear.ch/?q=Jillian+Spencer

>>24578951

Australian psychologists treating gender distress may be working from a flawed evidence base

CLAIRE LEHMANN - April 18, 2026

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As an undergraduate psychology student in the early 2000s, I remember hearing jokes about “physics envy” – the insecurity that research psychologists sometimes felt about the robustness of their science. To compensate for this insecurity, we were put through the wringer on statistics and research design. It was hammered into us by our professors that all findings were provisional. If we were to go out into the world as proficient practitioners, we needed to stay across the best available evidence, and continually update our knowledge.

That insecurity wasn’t always warranted, of course. In some areas such as intelligence and personality research, psychological studies are highly robust. Nevertheless, psychology does remain a young science and evidence-based practice requires reading new research as it emerges. What counts as consensus today may not tomorrow.

This is easier said than done. Psychologists, like all practising professionals, are busy. Working clinicians rely on their professional bodies to summarise the literature, produce position statements that reflect current best practice and update them as the evidence evolves. The Australian Psychological Society is the largest such body for psychologists in Australia, and its 27,000 members pay annual fees expecting exactly this: reliable guidance they can trust when they don’t have time to read every journal.

This month, the APS has demonstrated it is unable to deliver this remit. Its new position statement, “Supporting the mental health and wellbeing of transgender and gender diverse people”, sacrifices scientific rigour for activism. It relies on circular reasoning, leans heavily on guidelines that are six years out of date and ignores the most significant reviews in this field. The result is that Australian psychologists treating children and young adults with gender distress may be working from a flawed evidence base.

As our professors drilled into us: unless we are certain our interventions are safe, there is always the possibility of causing harm. Damage is not caused only by mental health conditions. Damage also can be caused by our efforts to fix them.

Damning findings

In April 2024, the National Health Service of England published the Cass Review, the most rigorous inquiry conducted into care for gender-dysphoric children. It took four years to complete and was chaired by Hilary Cass, a retired pediatrician and former president of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health. The findings were damning.

The review found that the evidence base underpinning what is called gender-affirming treatment – which affirms the cross-sex identity of a young person presenting with dysphoria – was consistently poor. Gender-affirming treatment had spread around the world based on a single Dutch study involving a small, highly selected group of children who took puberty blockers and found some benefit. That study had no control group. Most participants didn’t complete a follow-up. It was too short to measure long-term effects on bone density or brain health.

It is difficult to imagine a weaker foundation for an international standard of care – but that is exactly what it became.

As a result of gender-affirming treatment being taken up so quickly, with so few studies to support it, gender-dysphoric youth had been “exceptionalised”, the Cass Review found. They were treated differently from other young people with complex needs.

They had been rushed on to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones while other causes of distress, such as trauma or autism, were ignored. They were given drugs by doctors when no long-term data had proven their safety. The usual caution that guides medical care for children went out the window.

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When the Cass Review was released, it led directly to the banning of puberty blockers for under-18s in Britain. The Tavistock Clinic – once Britain’s flagship gender clinic, and from which a former clinician blew the whistle in Quillette in 2020 – was permanently closed.

You might think such a consequential review would be worth mentioning to Australian psychologists dealing with children with gender dysphoria. The APS agreed back in 2024. It was originally cited in an earlier draft of its position statement, but by the time the final document was published this month the Cass Review had been airbrushed out.

Gone, too, was the draft’s acknowledgment that “medical gender affirmation is not the only way to support transition”, and its caution that “aspects of transition may not necessarily reduce the risk of suicide”.

In any honest evidence review, findings that challenge a prevailing position must be acknowledged, grappled with and, if necessary, used to revise that position.

What the APS has done is the opposite: it has found the most rigorous review conducted in this field and has hit delete.

To understand why the APS position statement is so flawed, it helps to understand the influence of WPATH – the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.

Founded in 1979, WPATH is a US-based professional body that publishes guidelines on transgender health. It is not a government body or a regulator. But before the Cass Review, its Standards of Care became the bible for gender clinics around the world, including in Australia.

US journalist Jesse Singal, writing in The New York Times, investigated how this came to be. He found that a small group of clinicians, who were themselves providers of gender-affirming care, produced documents (that is, guidelines and position statements) that “routinely exaggerated the evidence base” and helped create the appearance of a scientific consensus where one did not exist.

This illusion of a scientific consensus was achieved through circular citation. The WPATH produced guidelines that were then cited by other guidelines. Those other guidelines were then cited to support its own guidelines. To describe this as abysmal scientific practice is to be charitable. When the Cass Review subjected WPATH’s guidelines to independent appraisal, it found them lacking in rigour.

Of all the international guidelines assessed, only those of Finland and Sweden have met the rigour that normally would be required for use in clinical practice. And notably, Finland and Sweden both recommend psychotherapy as the first line of treatment for gender dysphoria, with medicine only to be used in exceptional cases.

Both Finland and Sweden also recommend no surgery for minors.

Yet despite the flaws of WPATH’s guidelines and the fact the Cass Review found them inadequate, the APS’s position statement leans heavily on them, citing them eight times.

I contacted the APS for comment on why it had done this: I received no reply.

The Cass Review is explicit that exploring a young person’s gender-related distress is not a form of conversion therapy. In fact, it’s what most young people hope for when they visit a health practitioner in their search for help.

“Exploration of these issues is essential to provide diagnosis, clinical support and appropriate intervention,” the review states. Yet the APS position statement encourages Australian psychologists to do the opposite. While it mentions thorough assessment, it frames any clinician-led exploration as a potential “conversion therapy” violation, requiring that such work be “client initiated and led”.

Consider what that means in practice. Imagine if a child with an eating disorder could explore their relationship with food only if they initiated it themselves.

Many serious conditions involve what clinicians call lack of insight – the patient cannot see the nature of their own problem. Gender distress in young people is no different. The assumption that a distressed adolescent can and should lead their own therapeutic exploration is an abdication of clinical responsibility.

This matters because conversion therapy is now illegal in most Australian states. A psychologist who conducts a thorough assessment without immediately affirming a client’s transgender identity may face not just professional censure but criminal liability – even though in Finland and Sweden, an exploratory approach is considered best practice.

The APS has left its members legally exposed and its young patients clinically underserved.

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Sandra Pertot, a clinical psychologist who served on the panel that produced an earlier draft of the APS’s position statement, found that a common complaint from dissatisfied clients was that their clinician had simply affirmed their transgender identity in the first session.

She had assumed “that an in-depth assessment would be mandatory in the new APS document”. Instead, she wrote, “proper assessment comes across as just a possible option, outweighed by the dogma that if a client says they are trans, they are trans, and must be affirmed immediately”.

The latest evidence shows just how out-of-date the APS is.

A landmark study published just this month shows that affirming children’s transgender status has no benefit to long-term mental health. Published in Acta Paediatrica, a Finnish team tracked 2083 gender-referred adolescents against a matched control group across 25 years, making the most rigorous longitudinal study of its kind ever conducted. Among those who underwent medical gender reassignment, mental health did not improve. It deteriorated sharply. Before feminising treatment, 9.8 per cent required specialist psychiatric care, but after transitioning that figure rose to 60.7 per cent. In those who underwent masculinising treatment, it rose from 21.6 per cent to 54.5 per cent. The authors concluded that their findings did not support the idea that transitioning genders improves mental health in gender-distressed young people.

This is precisely the iatrogenic risk my lecturers drilled us about. When we cannot be certain an intervention is safe, we risk causing harm through treatment itself.

In 2026 we have enough evidence to know that rushing kids into a medicalised gender transition is unwise and unsafe. The APS is aware of this evidence. But it chose to delete it. The APS should retract this document, and start again with the full body of evidence on the table. Australia’s most vulnerable young patients deserve nothing less.

Claire Lehmann is the founding editor of online magazine Quillette.

https://quillette.com/

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/australian-psychologists-treating-gender-distress-may-be-working-from-a-flawed-evidence-base/news-story/af38d34b0f0bb8f127858105e24df47e

https://qresear.ch/?q=Tavistock+Clinic

>>24578951

>>24578972

Trans doctor Beth Upton at centre of UK dispute now working in Australia

RACHEL BAXENDALE - April 21, 2026

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Australia’s medical regulator has registered as “female” the transgender doctor at the centre of a landmark UK legal dispute over women’s spaces, allowing the emergency medic to work in two NSW hospitals.

Beth Upton, 30, who began transitioning from male to female in 2022, gave sworn evidence to the UK Employment Tribunal of an intention to treat patients who had specifically requested a female doctor.

Under oath, the medic also described the concept of biological sex as a “nebulous dog whistle”, claiming to be “biologically female” on the basis that “I’m not a robot, so I am biological and my identity is female”.

The case — which has so far cost UK taxpayers the equivalent of more than $750,000 — was brought by Scottish nurse Sandie Peggie, 56, after she was suspended from work as an NHS accident and emergency nurse for refusing to share staff female changing facilities with the biologically male Dr Upton.

In December, the tribunal upheld Ms Peggie’s harassment claim against her employer, NHS Fife, but dismissed claims of discrimination and victimisation over the Christmas 2023 incident. No findings have been made against Dr Upton.

Ms Peggie is appealing the ruling and could take the dispute all the way to the UK Supreme Court.

The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency registered Dr Elisabeth Ruth Annikki Upton as an unaccredited emergency medicine trainee on April 9, listing the medic’s sex as “female”.

AHPRA defines a “female” as any individual “whose biological sex is that of a female” and anyone whose “gender identity or gender expression is that of a female”.

The registration enables Dr Upton, previously Theodore Upton, who graduated with a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery from the University of Dundee in 2021, to work under supervision at the Port Macquarie and Kempsey hospitals on the NSW Mid North Coast.

The Australian put questions to AHPRA over whether the regulator believes it is appropriate to register biologically male medical practitioners as female, and allow them to treat potentially vulnerable patients who have specifically requested a female doctor.

This masthead has also asked, given the relevance of biological sex to the treatment of many medical conditions, whether AHPRA believes it is appropriate to register a medical doctor who claims the concept of biological sex is a “nebulous dog whistle”.

A spokesman for AHPRA and Australia’s national medical boards did not directly address these questions, issuing a one-line statement.

“We can confirm that Dr Elisabeth Ruth Annikki Upton holds provisional registration as a medical practitioner in Australia, as shown on the public register of practitioners,” said the spokesman, who noted “he/him” pronouns in his email signature.

AHPRA says its registration process involves verifying an applicant’s identity, with applicants able to indicate their sex as male, female or intersex, and that information recorded and confirmed against legal identity documents.

In the UK, people with a psychiatric diagnosis of gender dysphoria, who have lived according to their chosen gender identity for two years, are able to change their legal sex, as Dr Upton has done.

In Australian states including NSW and Victoria, no medical test is required, and individuals simply need to present a statutory declaration signed by someone who has known them for at least 12 months to legally change their sex.

AHPRA says that when registering overseas-trained medical practitioners, it requires a certificate of good standing from its counterpart in the applicant’s country of registration, as well as local and international criminal history checks.

Overseas-trained doctors such as Dr Upton are initially given provisional registration, requiring them to work under supervision while they become familiar with the Australian health system.

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AHPRA’s registration of Dr Upton follows a series of controversial decisions by the regulator concerning gender ideology.

In March, AHPRA and the Medical Board of Australia effectively gagged Queensland psychiatrist Andrew Amos, banning him from making online statements about gender medicine and barring him from having direct clinical contact with any patients.

Fellow Queensland child psychiatrist Jillian Spencer is also being investigated by the regulator for sharing on social media an article from The Australian that quoted her concerns about gender-affirming medical treatment for children.

The Australian has sought comment from Dr Upton through the medic’s employer, the Mid North Coast Local Health District.

A spokesman for NSW Health Minister Ryan Park said questions were “most appropriately directed to AHPRA”.

“We cannot comment on individual employment or registration matters,” the spokesman said.

Comment has also been sought from federal Health Minister Mark Butler.

Women’s Forum Australia CEO Rachael Wong said it was “deeply alarming” that AHPRA had registered Dr Upton as “female”.

“(It) raises serious and unresolved questions about the protection of women’s sex-based rights in Australia, particularly in healthcare,” Ms Wong said.

“This exact scenario has already caused serious conflict, distress and legal action in the UK, including a finding that a female nurse was harassed by the NHS after being forced to share a female changing room with Dr Upton. It is extraordinary that AHPRA appears to be importing the same risks into Australia.

“Single-sex spaces and services exist to protect the privacy, safety and dignity of women and girls. They are even more critical in healthcare settings involving vulnerable patients, intimate examinations and, in some cases, deeply personal histories of trauma. For many women, a female clinician is not a preference but a necessity.”

Ms Wong said Dr Upton was “not only male, he is a male who has openly disregarded women’s boundaries, privacy and consent”.

“He refused to respect his female colleagues’ privacy in their own changing room, and gave sworn evidence that he would treat female patients who had specifically requested a female doctor,” she said.

“That is a direct threat to the dignity and wellbeing of the women he will now work alongside and treat in Australia.

“AHPRA must urgently explain how registering a biological male as ‘female’, in full awareness of this evidence, is remotely compatible with its statutory duty to protect the Australian public.”

Ms Wong accused AHPRA of having been “captured” by gender ideology.

“In addition to its ongoing witch-hunt of doctors speaking out about the harms of youth gender medicine, the regulator – whose core job is protecting patient safety – has prioritised a man’s belief about himself over the truthful information women need to give informed consent. That is not regulation. That is coercion dressed up as inclusion,” she said.

“It is no surprise Dr Upton has chosen Australia. We have become a utopia for men who claim to be women and who expect access to female-only spaces, services and sports – and who are increasingly protected by the law when women dare to say no.”

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Heather Corkhill, legal director of LGBTIQ+ advocacy organisation Equality Australia, said it was “unreasonable” to suggest that someone “who lives as a woman and is legally recognised as such under Australian law should be registered as anything else in their professional capacity.”

“Healthcare settings already manage patient preferences and sensitivities every day, including requests related to gender, culture or personal history,” Ms Corkhill said, in response to a question about the implications for vulnerable female patients requiring treatment from a female practitioner.

“The priority must always be ensuring patients feel safe and receive appropriate care, while also respecting the professionalism and expertise of qualified practitioners.”

Asked about the appropriateness of Dr Upton’s registration as a medical doctor who does not appear to believe in the concept of biological sex, Ms Corkhill said: “Doctors undergo years of rigorous training in human biology, including anatomy, physiology and hormones, equipping them to treat patients based on clinical need regardless of their gender.”

Ms Corkhill said conflicts between gender identity and sex-based rights were “best navigated through clear workplace policies, professional standards and respectful communication.”

“The focus should always be on ensuring patients receive the best possible care and that staff can work in safe, respectful environments,” she said.

Helen Joyce, director of advocacy at UK sex-based rights charity Sex Matters, said: “Male doctors should never practise as female and medical organisations should never, under any circumstances, record doctors as the sex they are not.”

“Doing so sets the scene for patients’ rights to be breached, since some patients may consent to a procedure only if it is carried out by someone of the same sex as them, or require a chaperone of their own sex if they are seen by a doctor of the other sex,” Dr Joyce said.

“We can only hope that the Australian hospitals do a better job of protecting their female staff than NHS Fife. That will require workplace policies ensuring that no matter how a trans-identifying man like Dr Upton is entered on the medical register, he is not given access to female-only changing rooms and toilets.”

Ms Peggie declined to comment through her lawyer.

NSW Liberal upper house MP Susan Carter said Dr Upton’s case “demonstrates the problem with assuming there is nothing more complicated about changing sex than changing paperwork”.

“And it also underlines that changing sex is not simply a personal decision but has impacts for those around us,” Ms Carter said.

“If a woman specifically requests a female doctor, there is a reason –- and her choices and her agency should be respected.”

Start-up founder Sall Grover, who is fighting an Australian Federal Court battle against transwoman Roxanne Tickle over access to Ms Grover’s women’s app, Giggle for Girls, posted: “A lot of Australian women in regional New South Wales are about to find out that men can, currently, be women in Australian law.

“But never forget: sex doesn’t change but laws do.

“This is where the rubber really hits the road: a female patient’s want of a female doctor over a man’s (supposed) right to call himself female. Who wins? The woman or the man? Truth or lies? Reality or ideology?”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/trans-doctor-beth-upton-at-centre-of-uk-dispute-now-working-in-australia/news-story/22f7df294aac8587b87eeb610fa55d2b

https://x.com/salltweets/status/2046333670991221084

https://x.com/salltweets/status/2046370758130274311

https://qresear.ch/?q=Sall+Grover

https://qresear.ch/?q=Roxanne+Tickle

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>>24578972

>>24578982

Peak medical regulator ‘compromised’ by partnership with trans lobby group

STEPHEN RICE - April 22, 2026

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Australia’s peak medical regulator faces claims it has been hopelessly compromised in a string of controversial decisions because it is a signed-up member of Australia’s most powerful trans lobby group, ACON, which promotes gender-affirming medical treatment for children and teenagers.

Documents released under FOI reveal how the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency developed an LGBTIQA+ strategy based on adherence to the gender ideology of ACON, extending to the way it regulates health practitioners.

In correspondence obtained by The Australian, AHPRA boss Justin Untersteiner states that the regulator’s engagement with ACON and accreditation group Rainbow Health Australia guides “the way we regulate and fulfil our purpose of ensuring the preservation of public safety”.

The revelations follow claims Australia’s medical complaints system has been weaponised by gender activists using a compliant regulator to intimidate psychiatrists who speak out against gender-affirming treatment such as puberty blockers, while shielding doctors who promote them.

In recent decisions AHPRA has:

• Gagged Queensland psychiatrist Andrew Amos, banning him from making online statements about gender medicine and barring him from having direct clinical contact with any patients.

• Launched an investigation into prominent child psychiatrist Jillian Spencer for sharing on social media an article from The Australian that quoted her concerns about gender-affirming medical treatment for children.

• Registered as “female” the transgender doctor at the centre of a landmark UK legal dispute over women’s spaces, Beth Upton, allowing the emergency medic to work in two NSW hospitals.

• Dismissed a complaint against Michelle Telfer, chief of medicine at the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne, who pioneered the contentious gender-affirming treatment approach in Australia, following adverse findings against her by a Family Court judge.

Despite mounting concern from dozens of registered health professionals over AHPRA’s partnership with ACON, the National Health Practitioner Ombudsman has refused a request to launch an investigation into “serious concerns about perceived impartiality”.

Compounding the lack of transparency, AHPRA has also fought to keep key documents hidden from the public, partially refusing FOI requests to protect its deliberations with the lobby groups.

Code of conduct

On its website AHPRA advises that all registered health practitioners must adhere to a code of conduct, explicitly stating that good practice includes respecting diverse gender identities.

AHPRA declares it is “working with Pride in Diversity to ensure LGBTIQA+ inclusion in our workplace and participate in the Australian Workplace Equality Index”.

Both Pride in Diversity and the AWEI are arms of ACON, formerly known as the NSW Aids Council.

As the nation’s self-appointed arbiter of “workplace inclusion” for trans employees, ACON boasts that more than 500 member employers – including Australia’s largest government agencies, public and private companies, universities and research organisations – have signed up to its trans rights agenda.

This month the ABC was forced to abandon its partnership with ACON, following revelations that the broadcaster’s news and programming had been heavily influenced by the radical agenda of the trans lobby group.

AHPRA has consistently defended its participation in the AWEI and Rainbow Tick schemes by claiming they are designed only to help trans and gender-diverse employees in the workplace.

However, documents obtained under FOI suggest that AHPRA’s functions have been strongly influenced by its relationship with ACON.

Captured

Internal communications show AHPRA actively sought to use the advocacy-run schemes to guide its external operations and policies as a national health regulator.

In a December 2023 “Members Meeting” with Pride in Diversity, the ACON representative recorded a discussion about AHPRA’s “desire as a health regulator to be working on the service delivery/to consumer side of things now that the portfolio has opened to allow access to both Pride in Diversity and Pride in Health +Wellbeing content”.

The exchanges reflect the development of a structured commercial relationship, with ACON’s Pride in Diversity promoting specific training and consultancy packages, membership hours and renewal as part of AHPRA’s strategy work.

In a February 2024 National Executive agenda paper marked “In Confidence”, AHPRA details the development of a “National Scheme LGBTIQA+ Equity and Inclusion Strategy”, revealing the capture of regulatory processes was explicitly planned.

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“The LGBTIQA+ strategy will then form part of the 2025 Scheme strategy and will include reforms of people policies and regulatory processes over a 3-5 year time horizon, with several phases of delivery to correspond with developing maturity,” the document states.

AHPRA states it is “committed to two external quality frameworks – Rainbow Tick and (ACON’s) Australian Workplace Equality Index – to guide its development of a National Scheme LGBTIQA+ equity and inclusion strategy to provide measurable outcomes for LGBTIQA+ people”.

“Recent legislative amendments that seek to enfranchise people of diverse sexual orientation/s, gender identities and/or intersex variations … are also driving the need for AHPRA to consider a strategic approach to LGBTIQA+ equity and inclusion,” the document says.

The document makes it clear that AHPRA’s objective is not simply to embed the objectives of ACON and Rainbow Tick into its internal workplace practices but involve “improving access to the National Scheme, external engagement initiatives and National Board portfolios”.

The decision paper claims – without providing evidence – that “LGBTIQA+ communities are one of the key focus areas identified by Health Ministers as a priority for engagement in their policy directives to AHPRA”.

The paper bases the need for stronger engagement on the highly disputed claim that, compared to the general population, transgender people aged 14-25 are 15 times more likely to have attempted suicide.

There is no record of any consideration of whether participation in advocacy-run accreditation schemes was appropriate for an independent regulator.

‘A partisan actor’

Behind the scenes, a large coalition of registered doctors, psychiatrists and health practitioners has pleaded with AHPRA for more than two years to abandon its ties to ACON.

“Unfortunately, AHPRA’s engagement with Rainbow Health and ACON creates the perception that AHPRA also endorses the gender-affirming model of treatment,” the doctors wrote in a December 2024 plea.

The partnership with ACON and Rainbow Health “positions the regulator as a partisan actor in a contested area of clinical practice”, the doctors said.

In response, incoming AHPRA chief executive Justin Untersteiner said AHPRA engaged with ACON and Rainbow Health Australia to ensure that “lived experiences and expectations of the wide community are reflected in the way we regulate and fulfil our purpose of ensuring the preservation of public safety”.

“AHPRA’s participation in Rainbow Tick and AWEI accreditations – which are internationally recognised and academically researched standards – seeks to promote equity and inclusion,” he said.

“AHPRA is committed to addressing health and access inequalities to communities where historic and systemic discrimination may contribute to sub-optimal health outcomes.”

Shocked by the response, the coalition of doctors wrote to the National Health Practitioner Ombudsman asking it to launch an own-motion investigation into AHPRA’s engagement with the schemes.

Doctors fight back

The 46 signatories asked the ombudsman to investigate whether AHPRA’s participation in the Rainbow Tick and ACON schemes was consistent with its statutory obligations as a national regulator, and whether it created “conflicts of interest or ideological entanglement that may compromise public and practitioner confidence”.

They warned that aligning with ACON destroyed the regulator’s “reputational neutrality” in highly contested clinical areas, such as the treatment of gender dysphoria in minors.

They pointed out that public health authorities in the UK had already withdrawn from the Stonewall Diversity Champions Scheme, upon which ACON’s scheme is largely based, amid concerns of perceived bias and ideological alignment.

The doctors said ACON actively campaigned for the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones – treatments currently under formal review by the National Health and Medical Research Council due to weak evidence.

The ombudsman replied that “AHPRA’s engagement with Rainbow Health and ACON demonstrates its efforts in engaging with all communities” and that it did not consider an investigation “appropriate or in the public interest”.

“Mr Untersteiner has provided a reasonable response to your concerns” the ombudsman said.

The NHPO said it was satisfied that Mr Untersteiner’s response demonstrated AHPRA’s commitment to being a safe regulator and concluded that the participation merely seeks to promote equality.

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The doctors’ attempts to get more details of the relationship were stymied when AHPRA refused to supply key documents requested under FOI, redacting correspondence between itself and ACON.

The regulator claimed that releasing full details of the advice and recommendations shared between the lobby groups and AHPRA would be “contrary to the public interest” because it might discourage parties from providing “unconventional, controversial, challenging or novel” views.

‘Too scared to dissent’

Child psychiatrist Jillian Spencer, who was suspended from the Queensland Children’s Hospital in April 2023 for speaking about harms to children from gender-affirming care, told The Australian the relationship between AHPRA and ACON was “extremely concerning”.

Dr Spencer is being investigated by AHPRA after a complaint that her post on social media platform X “criticised gender-affirming care and encouraged followers to petition against it”.

“AHPRA has aligned itself with one side of a really contested issue, and then gone on to tip the scales in favour of health professionals that believe that it’s possible for people to change sex and believe that children should be given gender interventions,” Dr Spencer said.

“It creates this artificial environment where the public thinks that all health professionals agree, which just isn’t the truth.

“Doctors are now, quite rightly, too scared to express any dissent to gender interventions or ideology in any forum, even private professional groups now, because they just don’t know whether a colleague or a member of the public will report them to AHPRA for something they’ve said or written.”

The investigation – which could result in Dr Spencer losing her medical registration – came just weeks after Queensland psychiatrist Andrew Amos was banned from posting his objections to gender-affirming care on social media.

Gross overreach

Supporters of Dr Spencer and Dr Amos say the investigations and penalties represent a gross overreach by regulators in response to complaints by trans activists, and a serious threat to free speech by the medical profession.

Queensland pediatrician Dylan Wilson told The Australian no lobby group should be involved in the regulation of health practitioners.

“Even if ACON has no defined role in what’s determined to be appropriate or inappropriate in health practitioners’ actions, the perception would be similar to the ABC, that there’s a conflict of interest and that perception does not give confidence in AHPRA’s standing,” Dr Wilson said.

“It makes it very difficult for them to make impartial decisions on the type of comments made by people like Andrew Amos.”

AHPRA told The Australian it “rejected any suggestion that engaging with community organisations creates bias in our regulatory processes”.

“AHPRA’s legislative mandate, governance structures and decision-making frameworks are specifically designed to uphold impartiality and fairness,” a spokesman said. “Any regulatory action taken is based on the available evidence and the public safety risk.

“AHPRA engages with a broad range of community and professional organisations to help ensure the regulatory system is safe, inclusive and responsive to the needs of all Australians.”

ACON has strongly denied it exerts any influence beyond its role in the workplace.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/peak-medical-regulator-compromised-by-partnership-with-trans-lobby-group/news-story/85d0d559b0ab8bfbd03f5c26b04057cc

https://qresear.ch/?q=Andrew+Amos

https://qresear.ch/?q=Michelle+Telfer

>>24578951

>>24578972

>>24578982

>>24579005

AHPRA accused of ‘ideological capture’ amid calls to sever links with ACON

RACHEL BAXENDALE - April 23, 2026

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Women’s rights advocates and parents of gender-distressed adolescents say Australia’s peak medical regulator cannot be trusted to safeguard the health and safety of the Australian public if it does not cut ties with trans lobby group ACON.

The Australian revealed on Thursday documents released under FOI, showing how the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency developed an LGBTIQA+ strategy based on adherence to the gender ideology of ACON, extending to the way it regulates health practitioners.

In correspondence obtained by The Australian, AHPRA boss Justin Untersteiner states that the regulator’s engagement with ACON and accreditation group Rainbow Health Australia guides “the way we regulate and fulfil our purpose of ensuring the preservation of public safety”.

Women’s Forum Australia CEO Rachael Wong said an institution that had been “captured by an anti-scientific ideology that says human beings can change sex, that men can be women, that children can be born in the wrong body, and that denies biological reality, cannot be trusted to safeguard the health and safety of the Australian public”.

“As we have seen, the consequences of this ideological capture across Australian institutions have been most dire for vulnerable children and young people who have been irreversibly damaged by medical gender interventions, as well as for women and girls whose sex-based rights and protections are being destroyed,” Ms Wong said.

She referred to the cases of psychiatrist Andrew Amos, who in March was banned by AHPRA from making online statements about gender medicine and barred from having direct clinical contact with patients, and fellow child psychiatrist Jillian Spencer, who is being investigated by the regulator after she shared on social media an article from The Australian in which she was quoted regarding Dr Amos’s case.

Ms Wong’s comments also follow The Australian’s revelation on Tuesday that AHPRA has registered as “female” Beth Upton, the transgender doctor at the centre of a landmark UK legal dispute over women’s spaces, allowing the emergency medic to work in two NSW hospitals.

“Rather than taking a scientific, evidence-based approach, AHPRA has instead persecuted doctors trying to raise the alarm about the harm being done to children and young people, and has registered multiple trans-identified male doctors as ‘female’ knowing full well the issues this raises for single-sex spaces and care, and the privacy and consent of female colleagues and patients,” Ms Wong said.

“Its approach has contributed to a chilling effect on legitimate clinical debate.”

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She called upon AHPRA to do as the ABC did this month – following revelations by The Australian that the broadcaster’s news and programming had been heavily influenced by ACON’s radical agenda – and cut ties with the lobby group.

“AHPRA must urgently cut ties with ACON if it is going to regain its independence and the public’s trust,” Ms Wong said.

“The ideological capture of our institutions is why gender ideology has been allowed to fester in this country at the expense of women, children and our broader culture. It must end now.”

A spokeswoman for Parents of Adolescents with Gender Distress said it was clear that AHPRA’s guidance from ACON had affected its ability to act impartially on the issue of gender-affirming care.

“Gender clinicians who publicly advocate for these controversial interventions face no restrictions, while practitioners who voice valid critique have been unduly penalised,” said the spokeswoman, who The Australian has chosen not to name to protect her child’s privacy.

Last month, PAGD wrote to AHPRA, expressing their concern at the treatment of Dr Amos and arguing that it represented “apparent regulatory bias, suppression of legitimate clinical criticism, and risk of harm to the public and vulnerable young people”.

In a half-page response a month later, AHPRA’s complaints officer stated that legal confidentiality provisions “restrict us from commenting on any individual regulatory matter except to the extent that information is available on the online public register of practitioners”.

“AHPRA’s response to our concerns regarding their silencing of medical professionals failed to meet their own principles of open process and acting in the public interest,” the PAGD spokeswoman said.

“They have also failed to explain how the regulatory decisions they have made are ‘protecting the public’, when public debate has exposed the flaws and grave safety issues associated with gender medicalisation.

“AHPRA owe it to the public, the families and the vulnerable young people being asked to provide ‘informed consent’, to encourage healthy public debate, not attempt to shut it down.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/ahpra-accused-of-ideological-capture-amid-calls-to-sever-links-with-acon/news-story/c942996e69eb19535ba514944726cbb9

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‘Take my treatment as a warning’: Psychiatrist Andrew Amos suspended for opposing youth gender treatments

STEPHEN RICE - April 24, 2026

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Australia’s peak psychiatry body has suspended prominent Queens­land psychiatrist Andrew Amos over his public statements opposing gender-affirming medical treatment for children and teenagers, in a move that has sent shockwaves through the medical profession.

The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists has withdrawn Dr Amos’s membership just weeks after the Medical Board of Australia and the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency gagged him from making online statements about gender issues and barred him from clinical contact with patients.

In a measure of the split now dividing the profession on gender issues, the National Association of Practising Psychiatrists wrote to the RANZCP on Thursday asking it to support Dr Amos and defend his freedom of speech, only to discover that the college had ­already suspended him.

The upheaval comes after The Australian revealed claims that AHPRA’s membership of trans lobby group ACON compromised its ability to deal fairly with doctors who oppose gender-­affirming medical treatment for young people.

Dr Amos, an academic psychiatrist at James Cook University, said the RANZCP board gave him no warning of their decision to suspend his membership or ­opportunity to discuss it, “so I have no idea why they did it”.

“They had the authority to suspend me, but they also had the responsibility to provide procedural fairness, which they utterly failed to do.”

The board had not asked for his side of the story, Dr Amos said, “which proves they had no interest in a balanced decision.”

“Every psychiatrist who is a member of the RANZCP should take my treatment as a warning that the board cannot be trusted to honour its commitments to members.”

Dr Amos said one week after signing an agreement with him to resolve their differences, the board suspended his membership without warning or discussion, “which allowed them to avoid fulfilling their obligations to me”.

The suspension strips Dr Amos of the right to use the letters FRANZCP – Fellow of the RANZCP – the prestigious notation that he is qualified to practice as a specialist psychiatrist and has met rigorous standards of trust and clinical leadership.

A spokesperson for the RANZCP said the board had suspended the membership of Dr Andrew Amos “in response to significant restrictions placed on his right to practise by the AHPRA”.

“Under the college’s constitution, the board has a responsibility to act where a member’s right to practise is subject to regulatory restriction. This is an interim governance measure, taken to protect the integrity and standards of the college pending further review.”

The college did not respond to questions about why Dr Amos had not been given the opportunity to discuss the decision, or whether it was using its authority to silence legitimate concerns within the profession about psychiatric practice.

NAPP president Philip Morris said he had written to the RANZCP asking whether it had made attempts to support or defend Dr Amos, but did not want to provide details until the college had had a chance to reply.

Professor Morris said the RANZCP “has its head in the sand on these issues”.

“The college doesn’t want to touch it because it’s too frightened that it’s going to offend the pro-trans people. And it’s also frightened it’s going to offend the more conservative people, so it’s basically given no real guidance.”

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The NAPP has also written to the Medical Board about steps taken against psychiatrists who have challenged gender-affirming care.

“We believe that if the Medical Board takes action against the doctor in this situation, such as censure, such as limiting their ­licence or even removing their ­licence, that this raises the question of whether the board has taken a view about this controversy and whether they’re denying doctors who don’t agree their ability to make comment,” Professor Morris said.

He said it was “totally inappropriate” for APHRA as regulator of the medical profession to be in partnership with ACON, and it must withdraw from it to avoid any potential conflict of interest.

“The area of gender medicine, particularly for children and adolescents, is not settled and you’ve got areas now of the world that have outlawed the use of these puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for children. Yet, the Medical Board and AHPRA have decided to get in bed with a group that says medical affirmation is the only treatment for children with this sort of problem.

“Therefore our question is: have the Medical Board and AHPRA taken a view on this contested area of medicine, such that they’re preventing doctors who express a different view with threats of deregistration?”

Professor Morris said NAPP had published guidelines advocating a cautious approach. “We haven’t ruled out entirely that some children may get puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. We’re not ideologues trying to stamp it out, we’re just saying doctors need to be aware of the issues, and that there’s not a lot of evidence to say that this sort of affirmation treatment is particularly effective.”

Professor Morris said it was vital that any patient was capable of understanding the consequences of treatment.

“There are 10-year-olds who want to be given puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones because they want to change from being a boy to look like a girl. “Do they know that they’ll never be able to produce sperm, they’ll never be able to have children?”

Fellow Queensland psychiatrist Jillian Spencer, who has been suspended from Queensland Health since 2024 after questioning the gender-­affirmation model used to treat children at the Queensland Children’s Hospital, told The Australian she was “absolutely disgusted” by the College’s decision.

“It’s devastating because Andrew has so much to contribute to the college,” Dr Spencer told The Australian. “He’s been the only person brave enough to challenge dogma within the college on not just the gender front, but others as well, which is why the college is so keen to kick him out.

“If there’s anyone who’s got integrity and courage, it is Andrew Amos.

“The public wants doctors to speak out when they see harm to patients, but the consequences are just too great if they’re going to treat people like this.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/take-my-treatment-as-a-warning-psychiatrist-suspended-for-opposing-youth-gender-treatments/news-story/ff5c8b373daff044b4187e0d6f22319c

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APS board member accused of ‘intimidation’ after questioning mother of detransitioned son

RACHEL BAXENDALE - April 27, 2026

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The Australian Psychological Society is reviewing the correspondence of one of its own board members, after he suggested a mother who had expressed concern about the peak body’s controversial position on the treatment of transgender patients may have been preventing her son from receiving appropriate support.

The mother, whose 22-year-old son began medically transitioning with hormones at 18 but has decided he is not transgender, has accused APS board member Andrew Chua of “intimidation”.

She said his “completely outrageous” emails had insinuated that parents who dare to question the gender affirmation model “are to be viewed as potentially abusive and dangerous to their children”, and left her feeling “unsafe”.

Earlier this month, the APS issued a position paper which represented an about-face on its previous recommendations for a more evidence-based approach to dealing with gender dysphoria, deleting references in an earlier draft to the groundbreaking UK Cass report and more than a dozen other studies that cast doubt on the mental health claims of the gender-­affirming treatment model.

In response, the mother wrote to the APS board on April 11.

Key among her concerns was the society’s support for gender-affirming care for children and teenagers, which in her view denies patients and clinicians the ­opportunity to neutrally explore their feelings about their gender identity, and puts them on a path towards irreversible medical treatment, such as the hormones her son received.

Mr Chua responded to her email on behalf of the board, stating that a “common misunderstanding in this space is that ‘affirming care’ assumes we accept all information provided without critical questioning”.

The pair then exchanged a series of emails, with Mr Chua at no stage explaining how it was possible for a psychologist to engage in the “critical questioning” he had described when the APS position statement advises them that they must affirm a patient’s self-diagnosed identity.

In his third and final email to the mother, Mr Chua asserted: “It sounds like you chose to prevent (your son) engaging with appropriate medical or psychological care in Australia.

“You have not supplied any details of how he has been treated and what his current state of wellbeing is (now as an adult) and whether he feels supported with sound community around him now,” he wrote. “Your comments have raised my concerns that he might not have the appropriate support he deserves at this time.”

Mr Chua signed all emails “warmly” noting “he/him” pronouns and his location “on Wurundjeri Country”.

The mother wrote to the board to complain about Mr Chua, saying he had left her “feeling unsafe”.

“In response to my entirely natural frustration at the APS’s recent position statement, Mr Chua has chosen to suggest that my child is at risk because of me,” wrote the mother, whom The Australian has agreed not to name to protect her son’s privacy.

“This is not professional discourse; it is intimidation. It sends a clear message to every parent of a detransitioned or desisted child that raising concerns about the affirmation model may result in their parenting being questioned or reported as a safeguarding issue.

“Not only are Australian psychologists being warned away from offering truly neutral, exploratory therapy, but apparently parents of children who have desisted or detransitioned, and who dare to question such a model, are to be viewed as potentially abusive and dangerous to their children. This is completely outrageous.”

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The mother asked the board to review Mr Chua’s correspondence and assure her that his statements did not represent the position of the board, as well as providing a substantive response to the concerns she initially raised regarding the position statement.

As of Sunday, she had received no response.

In response to questions from The Australian, APS president Kelly Gough said the society took the concerns of all people who contacted it seriously.

“We expect respectful and professional engagement from APS representatives in all interactions, particularly when people are raising personal or sensitive matters,” Dr Gough said.

“The correspondence in question will be reviewed, and the board will consider whether any follow-up action is required.

“It is not the APS position that parents who raise concerns or seek support for their children are to be viewed disparagingly. We recognise that families often navigate complex situations with care and concern, and that they deserve respectful engagement.

“The APS’s policies and position statements are developed through consideration of available evidence, professional standards and member input.”

Recently retired clinical psychologist Sandra Pertot, who treated trans patients throughout her 50-year career and has previously expressed deep concern about the affirmation model, said Mr Chua had made a “basic mistake” in his email conversation.

“He didn’t ask the critical question: ‘I understand you are upset, what is the best thing I can do to help you right now?’,” she said.

“Instead, he chose to turn the problem back on the parent … which I consider highly inappropriate and the reason why I am prepared to comment.

“Given that he claims ‘a one size fits all’ is not how the (gender affirmative) model works, does he begin a session asking the young person their pronouns and preferred name? What percentage of his clients does he not affirm in the course of his assessment?”

In an opinion piece for online publication Gender Clinic News, published on Friday, Dr Pertot wrote that from the early days of the development of the affirmative model, “advocates have insisted that any young person who states they have gender dysphoria must be supported in that belief, no debate allowed”.

“As a result, an untold number of health professionals have been silenced, had their professional integrity attacked, and some have lost their employment for asking questions or expressing criticism about gender-affirming care,” Dr Pertot wrote. “How can a practice be safe if there is a ban on exploring an aspect of it that is potentially harmful?”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/aps-board-member-accused-of-intimidation-after-questioning-mother-of-detransitioned-son/news-story/cdfc92e458856e28a7b9fe8af4d78848

https://www.genderclinicnews.com/p/a-flawed-model

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Parents plead for change to ‘highly irresponsible’ gender claims

STEPHEN RICE - April 28, 2026

A group representing more than 50 parents of children with gender dysphoria has slammed Australia’s peak human rights body as “highly irresponsible” over explainers it says contain “misleading and inaccurate claims”.

Parents of Adolescents with Gender Distress (PAGD) has written to the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) pleading for an urgent review and revision of the materials to include balanced, evidence-based information.

“These explainers rely on and reference advocacy organisations in preference to independent peer-reviewed systematic reviews and contain misleading and inaccurate claims,” the PAGD says in a letter to AHRC president Hugh de Kretser.

“The highly controversial nature of these interventions is not conveyed, nor are the significant limitations in the evidence base quoted to justify their use.”

The group says that several of their children have now “desisted or detransitioned” and are flourishing after receiving therapy addressing underlying issues like autism, trauma or anxiety.

These benefits have been achieved “without resorting to irreversible interventions with known and unknown health complications”, it says.

“In contrast, benefits to wellbeing and mental health, claimed by these materials, have failed to appear, as families in our group can attest, having witnessed complications, regret and worsening mental health following hormonal or surgical interventions.”

The move comes on the eve of an address by Mr de Krestner to the National Press Club on Wednesday and follows the release in March of the AHRC’s Equal Identities report endorsing gender-affirming care for minors, including puberty blockers.

The AHRC has been embroiled in multiple controversies over its support of gender-affirming treatment and its intervention in legal cases against women’s and lesbians groups seeking the right to female-only spaces.

Acting under the auspices of the AHRC, Sex Discrimination Commissioner Anna Cody intervened in the lawsuit brought by transwoman Roxanne Tickle against Sall Grover’s female-only social app, Giggle for Girls.

The AHRC also tried to prevent a lesbian group banning biological males from attending its single-sex events, a move overturned earlier this month by Federal Court judge Mark Moshinsky.

Last year the AHRC named Melbourne Royal Children’s Hospital director of gender medicine Michelle Telfer as a finalist for its annual human rights award, just four months after a Family Court judge found she had misled the court in a case involving a 12-year-old boy whose mother sought to begin puberty blockers even though no formal diagnosis of gender dysphoria had been established.

Families using the AHRC resources for guidance “will be left with very little understanding of the risks involved, potentially leading to decisions that could have lifelong consequences for their children,” the letter says.

The AHRC had omitted critical information about the serious side effects and long-term risks of these interventions, such as impacts on bone density, fertility, sexual function, neurocognitive development, potential cardiovascular issues and increased risk for multiple health conditions.

Explainers that rely so heavily on unsubstantiated statements from advocacy organisations who support the highly contested ‘gender-affirming care’ model of treatment are “highly irresponsible” and fail to meet the standard of impartiality expected of the AHRC, the group said.

An AHRC spokesperson said the explainer resources were intended to provide clear and accessible information about the human rights of trans and gender diverse people in Australia.

“The explainers set out how Australian law and international human rights obligations apply to trans and gender diverse people, including children and young people. It draws on established clinical guidance and the positions of recognised Australian medical bodies. It does not provide clinical advice or recommend specific treatments.

“As with all the commission’s work, our focus is on ensuring the information is accurate and supports public understanding of the legal protections that apply to everyone.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/health/medical/parents-plead-for-change-to-highly-irresponsible-gender-claims/news-story/709a399f8039576e89b67b7deacce6e1

https://humanrights.gov.au/know-your-rights/rights-of-individuals/lgbtiq-rights/trans-and-gender-diverse-rights-in-australia

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ANALYSIS: Witch hunt against Queensland psychiatrists critical of gender-affirming care rolls on as Australian institutions go all in on free speech crackdown

Australia’s courts and hospitals are more ensnared than ever by a fringe transgender ideology that treats second opinions as heresy and grounds for dismissal, writes Giggle CEO Sall Grover.

Sall Grover, Giggle Founder and CEO - April 30, 2026

In Australia today, women and doctors are being investigated, suspended and threatened with the loss of their livelihoods for daring to state what most Australians know to be true: there are only two sexes, sex is immutable, men cannot become women, and no child is ever born in the wrong body.

These are not fringe views.

They are the most basic facts of human biology.

Yet gender ideology has flipped reality on its head.

Speak these truths out loud and you risk being branded a bigot, dragged through the courts or stripped of your career.

Look at two respected Queensland psychiatrists right now.

Dr Jillian Spencer, a senior child and adolescent psychiatrist with more than two decades’ experience, was stood down from Queensland Children’s Hospital for raising legitimate clinical concerns about the rush to put children on puberty blockers.

She now faces suspension, a termination notice under Supreme Court review, and an ongoing AHPRA investigation, simply for sharing a news article quoting her own views.

Dr Andrew Amos has been suspended by the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists and gagged by the Medical Board.

His offence?

Publicly opposing the telling of dangerous lies to distressed children and the sterilising medical pathway that sometimes follows, as well as complaints made about his social media posts on the subject.

Second opinions, once standard medical practice, are now treated as heresy.

This isn’t medicine. It’s ideology enforced by regulatory capture.

I know the cost.

In 2020 I created Giggle, a woman-only social app.

For refusing to include men who claim to be women, because they’re not biological women, I was cancelled, abused and taken to federal court in Tickle v Giggle, with the Australian Human Rights Commission against me.

Binary spokeswoman Kirralie Smith has been hit with hefty fines, public apologies and apprehended violence orders for defending women’s rights.

Jasmine Sussex has been dragged through a tribunal for comments including that men cannot breastfeed.

Tasmanian councillor Louise Elliot faced an anti-discrimination complaint for saying humans cannot change sex.

Victorian MP Moira Deeming was smeared and defamed for standing with women who know what a woman is.

Many more have lost jobs and been punished in silence.

With the treatment of Drs Spencer and Amos, the medical establishment is ignoring overwhelming public sentiment and basic human instinct: we all know what a woman is and all doctors once knew too.

Other countries have already woken up.

Systematic reviews in the UK, Sweden, Finland and Norway found the evidence for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones in minors dangerously weak.

Yet here in Australia the institutions double down.

We cannot allow our hospitals, regulators, courts and human rights bodies to be captured by an ideology that treats biological reality as bigotry.

Australian citizens must not be punished for acknowledging basic reality.

At the heart of this is free speech.

If we cannot openly defend the most fundamental truths about human biology without fear of professional destruction, we are no longer a free society.

No one is born in the wrong body.

No one should lose their job, their licence or their reputation for saying so.

Enough.

Australia must stop punishing those who simply tell the truth.

Sall Grover is a women’s rights campaigner and the founder and CEO of the women-only social app Giggle.

https://www.skynews.com.au/insights-and-analysis/witch-hunt-against-queensland-psychiatrists-critical-of-genderaffirming-care-rolls-on-as-australian-institutions-go-all-in-on-free-speech-crackdown/news-story/60229af3ccf38eda8890bfc3d1a095a8

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Tayseer is understood to have also made allegations of abuse against Kawsar Abbas, whom she knew as Um Omar (mother of Omar), and at least one of her adult daughters.

A second Yazidi woman, Sarab, was barely 13 at the time she claims to have spent three days enslaved by the family. She told the ABC in 2023 that the family did not want to buy her and instead returned her to her previous captor.

Both women have said they want those who enslaved and abused them to face justice, and that they are willing to give evidence in a trial – a likely key factor in any decision by the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions to proceed to trial.

As many as 10,000 Yazidi women and girls as young as seven were enslaved and raped by Islamic State caliphate fighters in northeast Syria, and at least 5000 Yazidis were killed in what the UN has since said was a genocide against the Kurdish-speaking, ethno-religious minority.

Ahmad has previously admitted in an interview with the ABC from a jail in Syria that his late son Omar – who pledged allegiance to ISIS – kept a Yazidi slave, but claimed the family treated her as a “daughter”. He denied supporting the terror group.

He also claimed the family moved to Turkey to do humanitarian work with Global Humanitarian Aid Australia, but had become trapped in Syrian ISIS territory after travelling into the former Islamist caliphate to attend Omar’s wedding in 2014.

The charity, affiliated with the larger Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH), was at one time suspected of funnelling money to Islamic State, though that link could be difficult to prove given IHH was more closely associated with ISIS rivals such as Nusra Front.

The federal government says it has provided no assistance to the returning group of 13, who were among a larger cohort of 34 Australian women and their children stuck in al-Roj camp in northern Syria since 2019 at the collapse of the Islamic State caliphate.

It did however provide passports to all 34 earlier this year, which it says it was legally obliged to do.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/isis-brides-returning-to-australia-from-syria-may-face-historic-slaveryrelated-charges/news-story/46410600c9a4eefc9edbb6a505381544

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhlzRJZhiTU

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The extended Abbas family touched down in Melbourne just after 5.30pm, while Safar, her nine-year-old son and a male chaperone arrived in Sydney shortly after. Fellow passengers were asked to remain in their seats as Safar, a former Sydney nursing student, was escorted by four police officers off the plane and onto the tarmac.

The 32-year-old, who told The Australian in 2019 that she did not regret living under the ISIS caliphate, was taken to Mascot police station in the back of an unmarked police vehicle.

In Melbourne, friends and supporters of the Abbas family milled around the international arrivals hall for almost three hours after the extended family group landed.

Kawsar Abbas, her two adult daughters – Zahra, 33, and Zeinab – and their children are believed to have been accompanied by Kawsar’s brother, boxing coach Abraham Abbas, on the Qatar flight to Tullamarine.

Mr Abbas and one ISIS bride, believed to be Zahra, left Melbourne airport after a scuffle involving media and security guards. The group was then driven away in a waiting bus, with Mr Abbas holding his young niece, Layla, as they walked out. The charges against the Melbourne grandmother and her daughter are understood to stem from allegations made by two members of the Yazidi community.

Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett flagged the charges on Wednesday, saying evidence collected by the AFP in Syria since 2015 had been used to determine whether the women breached commonwealth laws, “including terrorism offences such as entering or remaining in declared areas, and crimes against ­humanity offences such as engaging in slave trading”.

ANU international law expert Donald Rothwell said commonwealth prosecutors would face significant legal challenges given it would be the first time the laws had been tested.

“This is novel under Australian law. It’s untested before an Australian court, so would present challenges in terms of witnesses and evidence,” he said.

Riyadh Adi, a former UN investigator into ISIS crimes, told The Australian he connected two Yazidi women with the AFP in 2023, and they were interviewed at length about their experiences in the time they allege they were held captive in the household of the Melbourne family.

One of the women, Tayseer, who briefly lived in Australia, has alleged she spent 18 months enslaved by the family and that she was raped repeatedly by patriarch Mohammad Ahmad, whom she knew as Abu Omar (father of Omar). Ahmad – who is understood to be among 5000 ISIS men transferred from Syria to Iraqi jails earlier this year – has denied the claims.

Tayseer is understood to have also made grave allegations of abuse against Kawsar Abbas, whom she knew as Um Omar (mother of Omar), and at least one of the adult daughters.

A second woman, Sarab, was barely 13 at the time she claims to have spent three days enslaved to the family who, she has said, ­ultimately opted not to buy her and instead returned her to a previous captor. Both have said they want those who enslaved and abused them to face justice, and are willing to give evidence in a trial – a likely key factor in any ­decision by the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions to proceed with charges.

As many as 10,000 Yazidi women and girls as young as seven were enslaved and often raped by Islamic State fighters in northeast Syria and at least 5000 Yazidis were killed in what the UN has since said was a genocide against the Kurdish-speaking, ethno-religious minority.

Ahmad has previously admitted in an interview with the ABC from a jail in Syria that his late son Omar – who pledged allegiance to ISIS – kept a Yazidi slave, but claimed the family had treated her as a “daughter”. He also denied supporting the terror group.

He claimed the family moved to Turkey to do humanitarian work but had become trapped in Syrian ISIS territory after travelling into the former caliphate to attend Omar’s wedding in 2014.

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The federal government insists it has provided no assistance to the returning group of 13, who were among a larger cohort of 34 Australian women and their children stuck in al-Roj camp in northern Syria since 2019 at the collapse of the Islamic State caliphate. It did, however, provide passports to all 34 earlier this year, which it says it was legally obliged to do.

While a Syrian official said this week the Australian government was the “deciding factor” in the group’s departure after two weeks in limbo in Damascus, Defence Minister Richard Marles denied those claims on Thursday.

“We have consistently said in relation to this that the government has provided no assistance here. We are not repatriating these people,” he said. “We’ve also made it really clear that anybody who has been in breach of the law will be met by the full force of the law if they come back to Australia.”

NSW Premier Chris Minns and Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan have said the children will need to undertake reintegration programs, likely including an ­element of deradicalisation or disengagement. Board of Imams Victoria sheik Mostafa Sarakibi told The Australian its countering violent extremism programs had previously proven successful and it would be happy to provide any services the new arrivals needed to help reintegrate. But, he added, “The only way it could be done without volunteering is through a court order.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/isis-brides-returning-to-australia-from-syria-may-face-historic-slaveryrelated-charges/news-story/46410600c9a4eefc9edbb6a505381544

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dmiDkECPi4

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Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has vowed to “throw the book” at the newly returned ISIS brides. Speaking to Nova radio Melbourne on Friday, the PM said anyone found to have broken ­Australian law would face criminal charges and “the full force of the law”.

“If it is possible to throw charges at people, then that will occur,” he said. “I have nothing but contempt for people who go overseas to essentially assist … people who want to attack our way of life.”

Mr Albanese reiterated that the federal government did not ­assist the women and children in their return to Australia.

“We actually support the rule of law. Australian citizens are entitled to Australian passports, they’re entitled to come into Australia,” he said. “What we’re entitled to do, though, is to throw the book at them, and that’s precisely what we’re doing.”

AFP Assistant Commissioner for counter terrorism Stephen Nutt said the charges followed an extensive investigation into Australian citizens who had travelled to Syria.

“Australian JCTTs methodically investigated all Australians who travelled to declared conflict areas and will ensure those who are alleged to have committed a criminal offence are put before the courts,” Assistant Commissioner Nutt said.

“JCTTs include some of the most experienced national security investigators and analysts in our country.

“This remains an active in­vestigation into very serious ­allegations.”

Victoria Police Assistant Commissioner Martin O’Brien said public safety was the priority. “Victoria Police will continue to work closely with our law enforcement partners and other agencies to ensure there is no risk to our local community,” Assistant Commissioner O’Brien said.

“We want to reassure all Victorians that anyone residing in our state who has committed serious criminal offences, including those returning from conflict areas, will be held to account.”

During a violent scuffle at Melbourne Airport on Thursday, wild footage emerged of ISIS bride supporters calling a female TV reporter a “slut” at Melbourne Airport on Thursday night during a big scuffle with media.

The expletive came as Mr Abbas and his niece, Zahra, were escorted by black-clad Middle Eastern security guards after their release.

“Why did you marry an ISIS terrorist?” the journalist attempted to ask Ahmad.

“Shut up you slut,” a man in the group replied.

Other journalists and photographers were shoved and hit by the group of men, whom The Australian witnessed boasting about their conduct after the bus carrying the group left.

The Australian previously revealed how the US intervened to secure the imminent departure of the ISIS brides and their nine children, with the Iran war ceasefire creating a brief window for their removal.

After months of stalled negotiations, the breakthrough is believed to have been driven by high-level diplomatic pressure from the US State Department, the UN and Red Cross, despite the federal ­government insisting it was not pursuing repatriation.

The final decision to authorise their transfer was made by Syria’s Foreign Minister, Asaad al-Shaibani, who approved their departure from al-Roj detention camp in the north of the country.

The group’s deportation by Syrian authorities back to Australia marked the first of its kind from Damascus involving Australian-linked detainees since the ­collapse of Islamic State’s territorial control.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/isis-granny-and-daughter-charged-with-enslavement-after-return-from-syria/news-story/70561b26af901a8f8be7c232dd303c2f

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=265Cc3YWzew

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Albanese told reporters in Melbourne on Friday that “one of the things that divides our society from the lawless barbarity of ISIS is that we believe in the rule of law”.

“And the rule of law means if you’re an Australian citizen, you have some entitlements,” he said.

“It is correct that the US government and others urged us to do so. We chose to make our own decisions as a sovereign state and not to provide them with any support because I have absolutely zero sympathy for these people. I do have sympathy for the children though, who are victims of decisions that their parents have made.”

Albanese said it was important the children receive support because of the dire conditions they had experienced in Syrian camps and their exposure to a “terrible, horrific ideology which seeks to destroy our way of life”.

University of Sydney international law professor Ben Saul described the charges against the Melbourne women as “unprecedented”, saying: “In the last 75 years, Australia has not successfully prosecuted any international crimes. These are certainly the first crimes against humanity charges in Australian history.”

As well as providing the specific charges relating to alleged slavery, he said prosecutors would need to show they happened in a broader context of systemic persecution of a particular population.

“If the charges are proven, it will send a message about Australia’s commitment to international law,” he said.

Opposition home affairs spokesman Jonno Duniam questioned why the government had not applied for temporary exclusion orders on the women if there was enough evidence against them to justify their arrest.

“Why then did they not refuse passports under section 14 of the Passports Act, given there are clauses within that section that enable a minister to revoke or not issue a passport on national security grounds or risk to national security?” he asked.

“The government have talked a big game here, talking about the full force of the law. And I hope that the hard-working, honest men and women of the AFP and ASIO have done everything they can, as I’m sure they have, to mount a strong case against these people who have committed, allegedly, these crimes.”

https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/albanese-declares-zero-sympathy-for-isis-brides-as-yazidi-community-lives-in-fear-20260508-p5zv4n.html

https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/families-hope-to-meet-isis-brides-at-airport-as-police-plan-arrests-20260507-p5zukw.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDf6j9pmudw

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‘I want them to be punished’: Alleged Yazidi slave on ISIS brides

AMANDA HODGE - 8 May 2026

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Among the small community of Australian ISIS wives in Syria’s al-Roj internment camp, there had long been rumours that the Abbas family had secrets, things they had done inside the moral void of the Islamic State caliphate they did not want the world to know.

On Thursday night, as Kawsar Abbas, 53, her adult daughters Zahra, 33, and Zeinab, 31, and their eight children landed at Melbourne’s Tullamarine airport on a Qatar flight from Damascus, those secrets finally spilled out as the Australian Federal Police revealed the Melbourne grandmother and one daughter had been arrested on slavery-related crimes-against-humanity charges.

It has taken years and the courage of a woman who has allegedly suffered an unspeakable ordeal – to expose the dark heart of an Australian family accused of keeping a female slave during their time in Syria, and of looking the other way as the family patriarch is alleged to have repeatedly dragged her into a room and raped her.

Just hours before Kawsar and Zeinab faced Melbourne Magistrates Court on Friday to be formally charged, and another ISIS bride Janai Safar was refused bail in Sydney on charges including being a member of a terrorist organisation, the woman from Iraq’s persecuted Yazidi minority spoke to The Australian of the hell she allegedly endured at the hands of a ­couple who claimed to have moved to one of the 21st century’s most brutal conflict zones to do god’s work.

Like many survivors of extreme abuse, she speaks clinically of being used as a slave by all ­members of the household – ­Kawsar, her five daughters and one son – and of the alleged sexual abuse by Kawsar’s husband and charity worker, Mohammad Ahmad.

Now in her 20s and living in Europe, she says she is happy to hear of charges being laid.

“I want them to be punished for what they did to me. I want them to pay for that,” she says.

“But on the other side I am scared because I have seen what they can do and that makes me worried. Because of what happened to me in the past, I am afraid it will happen again in the future.”

Like thousands of fellow Yazidi women and girls, Nareen (a pseudonym) was kidnapped from northern Iraq’s Sinjar region near the Syrian border as a young ­teenager when ISIS fighters ­overran the historic enclave of the Kurdish-speaking, religious minority.

As many as 5000 Yazidi men were killed and more than 6000 women and children taken as spoils: the boys to be used as fighters, the girls and women traded on the ISIS slave market in Syria.

To read the 2016 UN report on Islamic State’s genocidal crimes as they were still unfolding against the Yazidis is an extreme exercise in endurance.

It describes how Yazidi women and girls in slave market halls and prisons “would scratch and bloody themselves in an attempt to make themselves unattractive to potential buyers”; it documents cases in which ISIS fighters murdered the young children of enslaved mothers to punish them for resistance, and how girls as young as nine were sold as sex slaves.

Nareen and her sister were the only members of their family to survive the 2014 ISIS genocide.

Enslaved, raped, tortured and traded between 12 ISIS men for the next five years, she had already ­endured hell by the time she says she was bought in 2017 by a broker and on-sold to Ahmad, Abbas and their family.

She tried to be obedient, to avoid the inevitable beatings that would come with defiance, but there was no way to avoid the sexual abuse, she says.

(continued)

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In 2019, Mohammad Ahmad told the ABC from a Syrian prison that his late son Omar had bought a Yazidi slave but that the family had treated her “like a daughter” and it “was nothing”. In 2023, still behind bars, he denied her accusations of rape. “He’s lying,” Nareen says. “When they took me to the house, not long after that his son was martyred. He (Ahmad) had taken me for himself, not for his son. He’s lying.”

It is inconceivable to her – “impossible – that a man she accuses of repeatedly raping her over the 18 months he kept her as a ­family slave could say he treated her like a daughter. But of course he would say that, she then reasons.

“He would not say he had taken me for rape and torture because it would not be good for him in the future,” she said. “But it is the truth. He considered me his sex slave.”

She says no one in the family showed her kindness, alleging that “Kawsar treated me very badly” and that the sexual abuse she ­suffered at the hands of Ahmad — whom she called Abu Omar (father of Omar), only multiplied her problems with his wife.

“Kawsar knew about (the rapes). Of course she knew,” alleges Nareen. “The house was not big and he would tell her when he was coming home.

“When her husband would abuse me she would get very angry with me. Sometimes she accused me of agreeing to it, which I didn’t, and it would make her very angry. She would speak in English at those times but I didn’t understand what she was saying.”

Most of the time, she alleges, the family would speak to her in ­Arabic, ordering her to do chores from early morning to midnight after they went to bed.

The work was relentless, and on one occasion she recalls being “so tired I went up to the second floor of the house to rest”.

“Zahra asked me to do some washing but I told her I had just got upstairs and could I do it in 30 minutes?” she says.

“Abu Omar heard what I said and came upstairs and pulled me down by the hair. He beat me and told me I have to do whatever I am told.”

Eighteen months after the ­family bought her, Nareen was back on the slave market and sold to a Nigerian fighter, she says.

It was only when the ISIS caliphate in northeast Syria fell in 2019 that she was freed, but it would take years before she would have the chance to tell her story to Australian authorities.

She did so in 2023 to an AFP ­officer who has kept in touch as the agency methodically gathered the evidence it now hopes will lead to Australia’s first ever crimes against humanity prosecution.

While legal experts have warned that the evidentiary bar for a conviction will be very high, AFP assistant commissioner Stephen Nutt said on Thursday night he believed they had enough evidence to meet that threshold.

A second Yazidi woman, a key witness in the case who has also given extensive testimony to the AFP, told the ABC in 2023 she was brought to the home of Ahmad, whom she too knew as “Abu Omar”, when she was 13 for a three-day trial.

“If they liked my work, they were going to buy me,” the second woman said.

They didn’t. She forgot to do the dishes and was locked in a room for 12 hours without food and finally returned to her former ISIS captor.

“I was their slave and they could do whatever they wanted to me,” she said. ”My life was controlled by them. It felt like my existence did not matter.”

Both women say they are willing to testify against Kawsar and her daughter, believed to be ­Zeinab, who now face potential maximum jail terms of up to 100 years and 50 years respectively for their alleged roles in one of ­humanity’s most enduring and egregious crimes.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/i-want-them-to-be-punished-alleged-yazidi-slave-on-isis-brides/news-story/551f3f772710ea433a7be71837525594

https://www.afp.gov.au/news-centre/media-release/two-women-charged-victoria-jctt-alleged-crimes-against-humanity

https://www.afp.gov.au/news-centre/media-release/woman-charged-nsw-jctt-allegedly-entering-syria-when-occupied-isis

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Mr Taylor was elected by the party as leader three months ago and, while admitting the Liberals had lost trust in Farrer, rebuffed criticism that he was partly responsible given his role in the leadership spill that saw the electorate’s popular incumbent leave parliament.

While Ms Butkowski paid tribute to Ms Ley and her “dedication” to the people of Farrer, who the Liberal candidate said had voted to show her party failed to provide them a “good enough” alternative , Mr Taylor did not invoke his predecessor during his speech on Saturday.

Instead, he doubled down on his commitment to slash “mass migration that has not worked for this country”, singling out an issue One Nation had also campaigned strongly on.

The Liberal leader was ridiculed by Mr Joyce, who said Mr Taylor’s lengthy address to supporters was “like hearing a victory speech from the person who came fifth in the heats”.

“The Australian people are not dumb. What you saw tonight was not just a result, not just a result for Farrer, but for Australia,” Mr Joyce told ABC, after campaigning against his former party in an election for the first time since defecting from the Nationals last year.

Mr Joyce’s former colleague Bridget McKenzie left the door open to working with One Nation to displace Labor, amid claims the Opposition could not come back to government without including One Nation in the Coalition.

“I don’t care what colour you are, I’m interested in delivering results and building a prosperous and healthy country, and I think we are going in the wrong direction and the results show that,” Mr Joyce said on ABC.

Despite pulling ahead of One Nation during an early count of votes in urban polling booths like Albury East, teal independent candidate Ms Milthorpe was ultimately unsuccessful in her contest for the seat.

Speaking through tears to supporters, Ms Milthorpe urged for the momentum behind her campaign not to “dissipate” and for the teal movement to “keep fighting”.

Indi independent Helen Haines said the timing of the Farrer by-election had been “perfect” for One Nation.

“This is an electorate that says ‘we’ve been giving the coalition so much over such a long period of time’, they want a change and they are demonstrating it tonight,” she told Sky News.

“Michelle Milthorpe, a community independent who came very close to defeating Sussan Ley just one year ago, now I think once the Albury booths come in … her primary vote is going to be greater than the Liberal National Party vote combined.

“Mr Farley may well prevail, but that’s an extraordinary achievement.”

One Nation claimed more than 60 per cent of party first preferences in 25 seats, according to the count at 9.30pm, while the Liberals’ were only able to exceed 15 per cent of the vote share in eight seats.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/dancin-hanson-libs-left-on-12pc-in-one-nations-farrer-landslide/news-story/8ab174d3b48829b0bf22f5bcf8eaae4f

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIDIrTpgiDM