Family First National Director and NSW Legislative Council candidate Lyle Shelton has condemned the Albanese Government's latest $10 million funding package for "gender-affirming care" training, saying Australian taxpayers should never be forced to finance the promotion gender conversion therapy to children.
Mr Shelton said the funding, revealed this weekend, showed the Albanese Government was doubling down on an ideology that was increasingly being rejected overseas and questioned by leading medical experts.
"Australian families should be outraged that their taxes are being used to promote an activist model of care that can place vulnerable children on a pathway towards puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and irreversible surgery," Mr Shelton said.
"Family First is fighting to ban taxpayer funding for programs that encourage children to reject the reality of their biological sex, and we will introduce legislation to prohibit puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and gender transition surgeries for all children under 18."
Mr Shelton said the warning from Genspect Australia board director Professor Gary Geelhoed, a former Western Australian Chief Medical Officer and paediatrician, should be a wake-up call for every Australian.
Professor Geelhoed told The Australian: "Affirming care when applied to gender-confused young people is not a synonym for safe care. It is a specific and contested treatment model."
He warned Australians were "entitled to expect that a $10 million Commonwealth accreditation scheme rests on an evidence-based clinical framework. It does not. The scheme should not proceed to accreditation of providers until it does."
Professor Geelhoed further warned the scheme would "exacerbate health and wellbeing risks for young Australians with gender incongruence or dysphoria and channel them towards unproven medical interventions with irreversible effects."
"Those are extraordinary warnings from one of Australia's most respected paediatricians," Mr Shelton said.
"Instead of listening, Health Minister Mark Butler is using taxpayers' money to expand a model of care that he himself has acknowledged is 'contested and evolving' while it remains under review by the National Health and Medical Research Council."
Mr Shelton said vulnerable children deserved comprehensive psychological assessment and treatment for underlying conditions, not automatic affirmation that they were born in the wrong body.
"Children deserve compassion, not medical experimentation. They deserve evidence-based healthcare, not ideology."
Mr Shelton said Family First also believed Australians harmed by these medical interventions should have access to justice.
"As more detransitioners emerge with devastating stories of irreversible harm, they should be able to pursue legal action not only against clinicians where appropriate, but also against politicians who knowingly promoted and funded policies that exposed children to these life-altering interventions despite mounting evidence of the risks.
"Politicians should not be immune from accountability if they have used the power of government and the taxpayers' purse to advance policies that leave vulnerable children permanently harmed.
"Family First will always stand for children's welfare, parental rights, evidence-based medicine and the biological reality that every child is born either male or female."
ENDS
Lyle Shelton is Family First’s National Director, NSW Legislative Council lead candidate.
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