STATEMENTS BY SENATORS

Senator ALLMAN-PAYNE (Queensland) (13:34): Gender-affirming care is health care. Within hours of the Queensland Supreme Court's decision to overturn the unlawful ban against puberty blockers and hormone therapy for young gender-diverse people in Queensland, the anti-healthcare Queensland LNP government reinstated it. Now young people are banding together, represented by the Queensland LGBTI Legal Service, in a class action to uphold their human rights.

This class action will challenge the power of governments to rip the right to health care from whole groups of people with just the stroke of a pen, and we must all band together to support them, because when governments attempt, on discriminatory grounds, to restrict health care for one group of people, you can bet they'll later discriminate against more of us.

Just two years ago, the very same Queensland LNP wanted to reverse hard-won abortion rights in Queensland. This year the Queensland government has opened a new public hospital in Springfield and, although it's taxpayer funded, it's being run by Mater, who refuse to provide essential care such as voluntary assisted dying, abortion or contraception. These types of decisions are not made with genuine healthcare concerns in mind.

They are motivated by control, transphobia and misogyny. I commend the young people in Queensland who are brave enough to hold the LNP state government accountable through this class action, but it is ridiculous that this fight has to be fought in the first place. Gender-affirming care is safe, it's life saving and it must be protected.