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.

Unlike the 2017 marriage plebiscite, significant Australians are stepping into and sustaining the debate.