The founder of the Queensland Greens has been expelled from the party, a casualty of its escalating internal war over gender ideology and free speech, writes Dr John Jiggens.
DREW HUTTON is a founder of both the Queensland Greens and the Australian Greens. He was the lead Queensland Greens Senate candidate for many years and stood for the Greens in many other elections as well. After retiring from politics, he became a founder of Lock the Gate and led an enormously successful campaign against coal seam gas.
However, on 24 June, Drew Hutton, a life member of the Queensland Greens, was expelled from the party via an email from the Constitution and Arbitration Committee that read:
‘Dear Drew, Thank you for your correspondence of 30 May and 1 June. The Committee has carefully considered your responses but finds no cause to reconsider its position on your membership. We have therefore terminated your membership of the Queensland Greens, effective immediately.’
The email finished, ‘Kind regards, Jenny, Kate, Rose & Peter’. Obviously, no need for last names. In this informal, friendly, almost comradely manner, Drew Hutton, a life member of the Greens, was expelled from the party he founded.
Hutton is determined to fight his expulsion. He is appealing his expulsion to the Queensland Greens State Council.
Hutton’s journey to expulsion began three years ago when he heard that the convener of the Victorian Greens, Linda Gale, had been sacked from her job as a convener because three years earlier, she'd written an article saying that the Victorian Greens should look at the policy whether or not biological males who had transitioned to being females should be allowed into women's-only spaces like toilets and change rooms.
Drew Hutton put out a post saying he disagreed with her sacking. It was wrong, he said, because she had been denied her right to free speech.
Then, it seemed as if the whole world descended upon him. He had stumbled unsuspectingly into the Greens transgender shitstorm and was tumbled this way and that, shouted at by those who called him transphobic and supported by others saying they thought his intervention was great. And some told him tales of similar expulsions from the Greens.
The storm produced a complaint that Hutton was transphobic and accusations were laid against him with the Queensland Greens, with the result that the committee, which looked at disciplinary matters, resolved that Hutton never said anything that was transphobic.
But he was told to delete some of the comments made by others on his controversial post. These were along the lines of ‘Women are biological females and men are biological male’, which went against what some people in the Greens believe — that a female is somebody who calls herself a female and a male is somebody who calls himself a male, and biology has nothing to do with it: the raging, ideologue-driven, sex-versus-gender debate in the Australian Greens.
Hutton refused to delete the comments over concerns that it was ideological overreach and because free speech is an important issue for him. As a consequence, he was suspended from the Greens.
The dispute went back and forth over 18 months. Threatened with expulsion, Hutton reluctantly agreed to delete the comments because he wanted to retain his membership. He deleted the comments, but he was still expelled from the Greens, the party that he founded.
When I learned the news of Drew Hutton’s expulsion from the Greens, I was flabbergasted, confused and discombobulated, even. What did the gang of four – comrades Jenny, Kate, Rose and Peter – hope to achieve?
Expelling a founding member is certain to cause a major ruckus in the Greens. I asked Drew Hutton why they weren’t concerned that the committee’s action would cause tremendous harm to the party.
Hutton replied:
I don't think they care about that. There have been over 40 members of the Greens Australia-wide who have contacted me and I'm sure there's many others who didn't contact me, who've either been expelled or forced out of the Greens on this one issue alone, this gender issue.
Forty-plus members of the Greens have been forced out. I'm just one of them. It's not just about me. It's about a purge that's going on in the Greens at the present time of any member, and they're mostly women who've been in the Greens, often for a very long time and have done an enormous amount of work for the Greens.
They have been forced out on this one issue for saying females, biological females, are what women are. It's biological. It's not a matter of whether you put on a dress and call yourself a woman. You're a woman if you are a biological female.
That gets you expelled from the Greens these days and my argument is all Greens members should have the right to free speech. At this stage in the Greens, if you even try to debate that issue, if you even mention it in a meeting or anywhere else, you will be expelled.
Dr John Jiggens is a writer and journalist currently working in the community newsroom at Bay-FM in Byron Bay.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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