Australian Pro-Life Groups Say New PM a Pro-Abort, Feminist Radical
By Hilary White
CANBERRA, August 10, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Pro-family campaigners have warned that Julia Gillard, elected in June as Australia’s new Prime Minister, is a radical feminist whose unqualified support for abortion and the homosexualist agenda is reflected in the constitution of Australia’s Emily’s List, a group that gives financial support to far left, feminist, pro-abortion and homosexualist candidates.
Gillard recently said in an interview posted to the website of Emily’s List that she was asked to be a founder of the group by Victoria state Premier Joan Kirner, and to “use my legal skills” to write its constitution.
In the interview, Gillard praised the group for placing a number of other pro-abortion feminists into significant roles in government, including the cabinet. Among others, she named Jennifer Macklin, the Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, and Nicola Roxon, the Minister for Health and Ageing.
Gillard, a self-described atheist and the first female Prime Minister of Australia, is the head of the Australian Labour party and cohabits with her hairdresser boyfriend, Tim Mathieson. At university, Gillard was a student activist, supporting a broad range of left-wing causes. She rose to be head of the radical Australian Union of Students and acted as a senior official in the Socialist Forum.
John Ballantyne, writing in the Weekly News independent magazine, said that Gillard is not the “mainstream, centrist leader that the media want us to think she is.” Gillard, he said, has “played down” her strongly leftist, socialist and radical feminist former political associations; her bowing to the “right” wing of the Labour party during the campaign, he said, was “all for public consumption before the election.”
Gillard has described Joan Kirner, the Premier of Victoria, as a “mentor.” Kirner was one of the driving forces behind the passage of the state’s 2008 abortion law, which abolished all legal restrictions on abortion up to the end of natural gestation.
Ballantyne also pointed to Gillard’s involvement, until 1993, in the militant left Socialist Forum, which was formed by disaffected members of the Communist Party of Australia and Labor’s left wing.
Babette Francis, head of the Endeavour Forum, a pro-family NGO, said that Gillard’s rise to the PM’s office “is a warning to all of us, but especially to Australian men.”
Francis related one incident involving Gillard from 2000. Francis was with a colleague giving evidence to the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Workplace Relations on the educational disadvantages experienced by boys. In her presentation, Francis gave evidence showing that in education, boys were falling well behind girls and that men are suffering losses in all life statistics such as life expectancy and rates of imprisonment.
Gillard, Francis said, badgered the presenters, reacting “with hostility to this evidence and cross-examined us as if we were the accused in the dock, rather than concerned citizens providing the government with information.”
At Gillard’s urging, her “partner,” Tim Mathieson, was appointed in 2008 as the country’s “Ambassador for Men’s Health,” an unpaid role, after a pro-family community leader, Warwick Marsh, was sacked from the position for having produced a booklet on the natural differences and complementarity between the sexes.
Read related LSN coverage:
Australian Opposition Leader Blasted for Suggesting Girls Save Sex for Marriage
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/jan/10012903.html