Rodney Hide
Rodney Hide is a former minister and ACT Party leader
When candidates come knocking this election you may care to ask about the “Conversion Practices Prohibition Legislation Act”. It was passed in 2022 because… compassion. Of course, the act is everything but compassionate. It is a direct, brutal attack on parental authority, free speech, and religious liberty.
In a near-unanimous display of parliamentary arrogance, Labour, the Greens, ACT, the Māori Party, and National voted overwhelmingly Aye. Only eight National MPs voted no. Five of those are no longer in our parliament.
The Act criminalises any “sustained effort” with the intention of changing or suppressing a person’s gender expression. A parent who gently but persistently guides their distressed 13-year-old daughter away from irreversible medicalisation – through conversation, prayer, or simply affirming biological reality – now risks prosecution. The family dinner table has become a potential crime scene.
Our MPs voted for that.
The safeguards? Prosecutions require attorney-general approval. Parents should take no comfort. The attorney-general is a politician, not a neutral guardian of liberty. When the activist lobby demands scalps, the politicians will fold.
Meanwhile, schools, counsellors, and state-funded groups face zero restrictions as they push the opposite ideology: ‘born in the wrong body’, puberty blockers, and the erasure of sex-based reality. Parents are forced to fund, through their taxes, the very apparatus undermining their authority over their own children. And to push back is to risk jail.
This law does not protect vulnerable youth. It weaponises the state against the family. It tells loving parents that their natural instinct to protect their child from hasty, life-altering decisions is suspect. It chills open discussion and hands ideological enforcers the power to intimidate.
Parliament did not advance compassion. It delivered authoritarian overreach. The family – the fundamental unit of a free society – is now under surveillance. This disgraceful law must be repealed. Parents, not politicians, not activists, should raise their children.
This article was originally published by Brash and Mitchell.
