Family First strongly supports Virginia Tapscott’s renewed call for genuine choice in childcare policy, published in The Australian this weekend.

She advocates what Family First has long argued: that families must be supported to have the choice to raise their own children, not pressured to outsource them into an overstretched and ideology-ridden childcare system.

“Labor gave me several reasons not to vote for it,” Tapscott wrote, “For a start, I don’t want more childcare – I don’t want to see my kids any less than I do.”

She went on to condemn Labor’s push to get more children into a “broken childcare system” as “sickening”.

Family First agrees. Childcare subsidies should not be designed to pull mothers away from their children in the name of economic participation.

They should exist to support families in ways that they choose, not ways government ideologues dictate.

Virginia is right to say, “To be fair and give people genuine choice it would be necessary to subsidise a broad range of care arrangements,” including grandparent and parent carers.

Now that’s real support for real families.

Family First backs her call for income splitting, extended paid parental leave, and support for those who choose to prioritise time with their children.

It’s not about being “anti-childcare” – it’s about giving parents the dignity of true choice.

Tapscott’s voice is one among many who are waking up to the cultural pressure cooker forcing both parents into the workplace, not by choice, but by economic necessity.

As Liberal leadership contender Sussan Ley once rightly said in Parliament: “If economic participation is attributed to women having no other choice than to go back to work to make ends meet then this is concerning.”

Family First couldn’t agree more. It’s time for policy that puts families first.

New South Wales Labor has launched an unprecedented attack on parents’ rights, signalling plans that could see homeschooling and private education severely restricted, if not abolished altogether.

Family First stands with parents. We affirm, without qualification, the fundamental right of mums and dads to direct the education of their children — including the right to homeschool — and we will do everything in our power to protect and defend that right.

State Education Secretary Murat Dizdar’s disturbing comments, aired on the ABC earlier this month, reveal a worrying agenda. He described alternatives to government schooling as “unnecessary” and called for a single, centralised “educational pathway” — an idea more fitting for Communist China than a free society like Australia.

Dizdar’s extreme position has rightly sparked outrage from Catholic educators, homeschooling advocates, and many across the political spectrum. Catholic Schools NSW CEO Dallas McInerney called Dizdar’s remarks “outrageously bad and very worrying.” Sydney Catholic Schools Director Danielle Cronin reminded Dizdar that faith-based education has been part of NSW’s fabric for over 200 years, long before the state offered any public schooling.

Yet despite a half-hearted reassurance from Premier Chris Minns, Labor’s actions are speaking louder than words. From 5 May 2025, Labor will shift homeschooling regulation from the relatively impartial NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) to the Department of Education — the very bureaucracy Dizdar oversees.

This is no minor administrative change. As homeschool advocates like VIGIL have warned, it represents a dangerous power grab. Parents who have chosen to educate their children at home — often at great personal cost and sacrifice — now face the real prospect of bureaucratic harassment, ideological interference, or worse.

Family First is committed to resisting this totalitarian drift. We reject the idea that children belong to the state. Children belong to their families, and it is parents — not bureaucrats — who are best placed to decide what is in their child’s best interests.

We support the continued legal recognition of homeschooling under Section 5d of the NSW Education Act and will fight any attempt to narrow or remove this right.

Family First will:

Defend homeschooling rights at every opportunity.

Oppose any government moves to restrict or ban private education.

Champion genuine school choice, respecting parents as the primary educators of their children.

In an era when government schools are increasingly captured by radical ideologies, the right of parents to homeschool their children is more important than ever.

Family First will not stand by while Labor tries to steal this freedom. We are ready to fight — and win — for Australian families.

With parental rights front and centre of Family First’s campaign for the up-coming federal election, Tony Abbott has made a stunning admission about how those rights were first undermined when he was PM.

Writing for Canada’s National Post, Abbott admitted that his ministers were deceived by bureaucrats into introducing programs like the so-called “safe schools” program which told children their gender was fluid.

“An example of this was the introduction, by (Liberal) ministers who had been captured by bureaucrats, of the social engineering, gender fluidity-encouraging Safe Schools program, which was masquerading as an anti-bullying initiative, even though it had been devised under my (Labor) predecessors,” he wrote.

In my view, Abbott is being quite generous to his Education Minister Christopher Pyne.

I don’t believe Pyne was “snowed” at all. He knew exactly what Safe Schools was about and he later became one of the key drivers in the Parliament to remove the gender diversity requirement from the Marriage Act.

As a lobbyist for the Australian Christian Lobby I took material produced by a radical LGBTIQA+ activist group, Minus 18, to Pyne’s Assistant Education Minister Scott Ryan.

Ryan couldn’t believe the advice to children on penis tucking and chest binding.

There was even advice to children to get so-called “gender affirmation” surgery “with or without parental consent”.

Ryan’s staff later admitted to me that material was indeed promoted by “Safe Schools” but our efforts to have it removed under the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison Liberal-National Governments were fruitless.

Countless Australian children are now on sterilising puberty blockers prescribed by child gender clinics throughout the nation.

Whistle blower psychiatrists like Dr Jillian Spencer remain suspended in Queensland, despite an LNP government now in power.

Abbott is not wrong to say bureaucrats take advantage of elected people.

But the flip side of his concern that “conservatives are often in government but not in power” is because too many Liberals have given in to Woke agendas.

That certainly seems to be the case of the Crisafulli Government in Queensland but it is early days still.

This of course is why Family First exists and is fielding candidates across southern and eastern Australia at the up-coming federal election.

And restoring parental rights over what children are taught at school is one of our key campaign themes.

MEDIA RELEASE