MEDIA RELEASE

Family First National Director and NSW Legislative Council candidate Lyle Shelton says research commissioned by the United States Department of Health and Human Services has identified where the threat of political violence actually sits, and it is not with the women being put through Australian courts for their opinions.

The US Department of Health and Human Services this month published the results of a survey by researchers at Rutgers University, the Manhattan Institute and the Network Contagion Research Institute. People who most strongly endorse “gender affirming” positions scored substantially higher on left-wing authoritarianism, and both measures independently predicted a willingness to justify political violence, once the effect of ordinary left-wing politics was stripped out.

The same respondents were asked which groups are dangerous. The stronger a person’s endorsement of gender ideology, the more likely they were to rate Christians, police and men as dangerous, and the less likely they were to say the same of LGBTQ people. They were also markedly more likely to believe a “genocide” of transgender people is under way in the United States.

“The movement that calls Kirralie Smith, Sall Grover and me dangerous has now been measured, and it is the one that cannot tell a threat from an argument,” said Mr Shelton.

“It rates Christians and police as dangerous, it believes a genocide is happening, and it is measurably more willing to justify killing the people it disagrees with. That is the profile of people that Australian governments have been legislating to protect.”

Sall Grover and Kirralie Smith, both speakers at Family First’s national conference, have been threatened with a bullet. Ms Smith was sent a message saying “we are going to put a bullet through your f..king head”, and reported it at a police station carrying rainbow political posters on its walls. An image of Ms Grover was circulated captioned “1 TERF, 1 bullet”, and she withdrew from last Sunday’s rally for restoring the definition of woman in the law.

What the two of them did was advocate for women’s rights. Ms Smith wrote posts about two transgender footballers, and she has been ordered to pay $95,000. Ms Grover developed an app for women. Mr Shelton wrote blog posts in 2020 about drag queen story time and is in the seventh year of a Queensland tribunal case in which the process is itself a punishment.

“Neither of us has ever threatened anybody with violence, yet Kirralie is $95,000 down and I am in year seven of litigation,” Mr Shelton said.

“We saw actual violence in December 2016 when a man drove a van packed with gas cylinders into the front of the Australian Christian Lobby office where I worked and set them off. Police waved it off, but the motivation was clear and those actions align with the results of this research,” Mr Shelton said.

The researchers also measured willingness to turn institutions on dissenters from the trans ideology: legally requiring preferred pronouns, having videos taken down for “deadnaming”, ignoring court rulings on males in women’s sport. It was among the strongest correlates of left-wing authoritarianism in the study, and Australia’s vilification laws are adopting the same approaches.

Family First’s policy commits to “abolish anti-vilification and anti-discrimination law provisions which restrict freedom of speech and religion”. Mr Shelton said that if he is elected to the Legislative Council in March 2027 he will move to:

• Repeal the vilification provisions of the NSW Anti-Discrimination Act 1977 under which damages can be awarded against a person for a political opinion
• Require NSW Police to report each year on threats of violence made over political or religious belief, and on what was done about them
• Remove political campaign material, rainbow posters included, from police stations and other public buildings

Family First is calling on NSW Police to investigate the threats made against Kirralie Smith and Sall Grover, and to say publicly what has come of them.

“A bullet is a threat. A blog post is an opinion,” Mr Shelton said. “The research now tells us which of those two the law should be worried about, and it is not the blog post.”