MEDIA RELEASE

Family First’s Jane Foreman says the Victorian Government has put $10,000 into an after-school program built around the sexual identity of children aged six to twelve, run by a Northcote charity the charities regulator records as more than 80 per cent government funded, and is committing Family First to a full audit of every program of its kind.

Jika Jika Community Centre is advertising for a paid “Qwids Project Officer” to run weekly sessions during school terms. “Qwids”, short for “Queer Kids”, is described in the centre’s own position description as a “groundbreaking, child-designed after-school program created by and for LGBTQIA+ children aged 6–12”, and the centre says it began with a request from “a non-binary ten-year-old”. The program took $10,000 of the Victorian Government’s HEY grants, and Darebin ratepayers funded it again through a council youth grant. The officer is asked to promote it in local groups and schools.

“A ten-year-old is not non-binary. A ten-year-old is ten,” said Mrs Foreman.

“Six-year-olds do not arrive with an identity that needs a community built around it. Adults hand them one, and then fund a program to keep them in it.”

The charities regulator records 80.23 per cent of the centre’s funding as government money. It is endorsed as a public benevolent institution with deductible gift recipient status, so every donation on top of that is subsidised by every other taxpayer.

“Eighty per cent of this centre’s money is government money. This is not a private group doing its own thing. This is the state,” said Mrs Foreman.

“Parents who would never send their child near this are helping pay for it, and nobody asked them.”

This is not one community centre. It is a funding chain running from a state department through a peak body and a council to a Tuesday afternoon with six-year-olds, and not one link in it stopped to ask a Victorian parent.

“Which minister signed off on ten thousand dollars to sort six-year-olds by sexual identity?” said Mrs Foreman. “Victorians are entitled to a name.”

“Children this age need to be left alone to be children. What they are being handed instead is an adult political movement with a snack table.”

Family First is committed to protecting children from gender queer theory and harmful LGBTQIA+ gender fluid ideology by removing such material from all school and early childhood curriculum, to cutting public funding to events which support gender ideology and harm family resilience and stability. Mrs Foreman commits Family First to a full audit of every taxpayer funded program of this kind in Victoria, and to genuine support for children and families in their place.

Mrs Foreman says a state-funded program organised around the sexual identity of six-year-olds is further proof Victoria needs Family First’s genuinely independent voice holding governments to account, because parents are entitled to a Parliament prepared to say that childhood is not a cause.