‘Belief Bashing’… That is what some have nicknamed Greenwich Bill sitting before the NSW Parliament. I would argue it is more than that. In my opinion, the Equality Legislation Amendment (LGBTIQA+) Bill is self-destructive to everyone who lives beneath the echelons of power and privilege.

Included in this Bill are a package of legislative changes that begin to redefine who we are as a society. They do this by re-categorising who has power over the lives of our children and what that power might entail.

I use the term ‘power’ instead of ‘authority’ because this proposed suite of legislative changes drives a truck-sized wedge between those who have responsibility and authority for the young (families, communities, and schools) and those who can ignore that responsibility and authority because they hold legislative office.

This situation is illustrative of the warning given to us by writers such as George Orwell. One of the themes he explored was how those in power can change the nature of society through ‘Newspeak’. This was one of the main features of his novel 1984. The spirit of Newspeak is that you can change reality by changing words, and as Orwell described so well, this ‘makes it easy to dismiss as illusion the realities by which we live’. In this treacherous game, reality is replaced by asserted power.

Here are some realities that this legislation would redefine. The following are real-world experiences that would have played out very differently under the new guidelines.

It was a wet and windy early evening. A phone call came in from a distraught mother at the school where I worked. Her daughter had run away. My wife questioned whether I was well enough to go out in the inclement weather, but my concern drove me to where I thought the teen might be and I eventually found them. We sat in the gutter together and talked. We progressed to sheltering in a bus stop, and there, with tears to match the raindrops outside, the runaway declared, ‘I just want my Dad to say he loves me.’ He was, in her mind, too busy making money and being successful to express parental affection. She came back to her home to the welcoming arms of her mother. We all worked together after that.

There was another sitting-in-the-gutter moment after a student hit a teacher. The young boy shouted at me, then sobbed, and after a while we walked back to the school where he was met by the arms of loving parents and police.

Then there was the young woman who did not want to talk to her mother. This was not a neglectful mother, but one whom truly loved her daughter. The young girl raged and threatened to throw a table at me if I rang her mum – I did anyway. She screamed and shouted until her mother walked in the door, said ‘I love you’, and offered an embrace. Her daughter responded in like kind. I left them in my room while they cried and talked together.

As a more broad example, there were those young women in the 1980s and 1990s who declared they were fat when in reality they were dangerously thin. Body dysmorphia and eating disorders were the prevailing social contagion at the time. Should I have tried to change their physical world by agreeing that what they felt was real? Should we allow legislators to instruct us to affirm these thoughts simply because teenagers believe them to be true?

Of course, I could continue with stories of young people wrestling with pre-alcohol and other drug addictions; adults fully addicted; young men in remand centres – the list goes on and on from my counselling psychology and school leadership positions.

Across the decades of experience in helping young people, what I found to be a constant was their need to be supported as a member of their family. Often, their issues were resolved as they grew up (we used to call it ‘becoming more mature’) when they learnt that love both listens and knows when to say ‘no’. Respect, mercy, and doing what is right. That summarises so much of the literature in building healthy young lives, or what is often now referred to as resilience.

Acknowledging that life is more than feelings (no matter how important or dominant they may seem at times) is critical to such growing up. Yes, love of many kinds is expressed in our current era, but not hope. All the instances of helping above were undertaken in explicit faith communities. The whole helping team knew that we were more than operatives acting at the behest of the government.

This Bill before the NSW Parliament considers such depth of exploration – human identity, the role of the family, the role of faith – as something that can be interfered with. It seeks to squeeze faith-based schools into the mould of their State cousins against the wishes of parents.

One principal of such a faith-based school recently said to me, ‘Parents I am now interviewing for a position in our school are asking, Do you have separate boys and girls toilets? That is new.’

Thomas Sowell warned us of the dangers of babies being ‘born into a world as heirs of pre-packaged grievance against other babies born the same day…’ He is talking about race-derived grievance identity theory, but there are other destructive grievances making their way into our schools. This Greenwich Bill adds to the agenda. It places faith communities and families into a ‘for us or against us’ category, compared to those who want to live differently to the biological realities of their bodies. Yes, in our society it is an adult’s freedom to make that choice.

But I would say to Mr Greenwich, Mr Minns, and Mr Speakman that it is not your freedom to force those of us who disagree into your world to comply or fit a progressive mould. That is purely an abuse of power.