Good news (to a degree) out of my native country of Australia! Vision.org.au recently reported that the Queensland Education (General Provisions) and Other Legislation Bill 2024 was recently modified after it received a serious backlash in the form of petitions with over 23,000 signatures when the conservative advocacy group CitizenGo presented its petition to the office of the State Education Minister.
At issue were several mandates, the biggest being that homeschools and/or homeschool parents would have to teach the national curriculum. Other parts of Bill 2024 would have required increasing paperwork and reporting requirements to ridiculously intrusive levels for homeschooling families and having undefined provisions that require homeschooling to be done in the “best interests” of the child with “safety” and “wellbeing” in mind. Knowing how transgender ideology has infiltrated most countries in the Western world, parents were suspicious that this wording could have led to children being taken from home or forced to go into public schools.
As CitizenGo stated in their petition drive release: “While these elements have been stripped from the bill, the Queensland Government says it will continue to consult on the matter, which indicates that they still want to impose new rules on homeschooling families.
We fear that the ultimate aim of this agenda is to dissuade families from homeschooling and force the ones who will still homeschool to conform to the type of teaching that most homeschooling parents don’t want for their children.”
No doubt, they are right to be suspicious, and Vision.org.au also listed some of the reasons they and other grassroots groups united to stymie this bill’s more overt mandates—primarily the mandate that parents and caregivers would have been required to provide a summary of their planned home education program at the time of registering for homeschooling. They even cited AiG’s statement on this subject: “We caution against any approach that ever requires parents to justify why home education is in a child’s best interests; casts home education as generally not in a child’s best interests; or leads to government overreach in determining what is in a child’s best interests in how home education occurs.”
Homeschooling is gaining in popularity in Australia, especially in Queensland. In 2023, 10,048 students were registered for home education in Queensland, up from 3,411 in 2019. Nationally, 43,892 children were registered last year—more than double the 21,966 students in 2019. CitizenGo remarked that the exponential growth in homeschooling “has terrified governments as, unlike in private and Catholic schools which are still subject to a woke national curriculum, the government cannot control what homeschooled children are taught. The sanctity of homeschooling stands as the last bastion of liberty to safeguard our children’s future.”
We couldn’t agree more. As the West continues to abandon biblical principles and authority, it will continue to descend into an “anything goes” mindset, building its foundations on the shifting sand of man’s opinions.
Praise God for parents and organizations in Queensland for coming together and actually keeping their children’s “safety” and “wellbeing” in mind and not kowtowing to a woke school agenda that wishes to influence (really “brainwash”) children into accepting all kinds of anti-biblical ideologies like gender fluidity, Marxism, humanism, and of course, goo-to-you evolution. As I’ve said many times before, “If the foundations are destroyed, What can the righteous do?” (Psalm 11:3).
Now, parents still have to be vigilant. There’s some concerning wording that can still open the door to issues in the future. The secularists won’t be stopped by this, and they will no doubt continue their vendetta against homeschooling—and anything that’s Christian.
