No government is doing less
It turns out that by “doing more” the Premier meant doing more to promote “family and domestic violence.”
This week, his @walabor government is trying to pass a law that will allow men to change their legal sex to female, and self-identify into female-only spaces, like bathrooms and refuges.
Here is the Premier on the day the Bill was introduced, pictured with WA Attorney General John Quigley, alongside the bill’s poster boy, Dani (Dean) Laidley.
Laidley is a man who identifies as a woman, who pleaded guilty to stalking his ex-girlfriend and breaching a family violence order, and who reportedly called her a “slut” and a “c*nt” and threatened to run her down in his car.
They are literally using a man who terrorised a woman, to promote a law that will be exploited by predatory men, during a time where there is national outrage about violence against women in this country. Well, where is the outrage now?
Laidley is a very large man who identifies as a woman. Nothing intimidating about him, no siree.
Dean James Laidley was a successful footballer. He played 151 games at the highest level, including in a winning Premiership team. He also had a modestly successful career as a coach.
At the start of this year, Dean Laidley was considered for the vacant coaching position with the Western Bulldogs women’s team. The Bulldogs were one of the first two clubs to establish a top-level women’s AFL team, today there are 18 such teams.
I have been a Footscray/Western Bulldogs fan since 1958, but had they appointed Dean Laidley, I would have had no choice but to either give up watching the game or take up with another team. It still angers me that he made it down to the final two during the selection process.
When he was arrested for said stalking, with drugs concealed in his bra, a police officer took a picture of him (he was in quite a state) and shared it. Immediately the news was awash with the photo, and the conversation changed instantly to the officer’s breach of Laidley’s privacy, and the apparent “transphobia” of having done so. Laidley’s stalking was barely mentioned after that.