Parents blast Trinity Grammar over its response to Pride Week dildo fiasco

An embattled Melbourne private school has hired the same company used to vet Australia Day honours recipients after its Pride Week speaker’s dildo scandal left parents outraged.

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The principal of Melbourne’s Trinity Grammar told parents the elite boy’s school has hired a company used to vet recipients of Australia Day honours to check the background of future speakers invited to address students.

In an online meeting on Tuesday, principal Adrian Farrer told outraged parents the school was “let down by a trusted provider who put us in a situation where – and I’m not outsourcing the blame, we didn’t vet them – but we had a trusted provider who changed the conversation on us”.

Adrian Farrer told parents it was hiring a ‘top-shelf’ consultant to vet the school’s guest speakers. Picture: David Crosling

The move comes after the $40,000-a-year Anglican school in Kew apologised for allowing a speaker with a sexually charged online presence to address boys from years 7 to 10 at a Pride Week event.

It’s understood that upon ­Googling guest speaker Basem Kerbage, who was sourced for the school by the Victorian Pride Centre, students were confronted with a video of the Queer Arab activist “deep-throating” a sex toy on his publicly accessible Insta­gram profile.

Basem Kerbage, founder of Queer Arabs Australia. Picture: Supplied

Mr Farrer told parents on Tuesday “he wouldn’t have been up there” if the school knew more about the speaker.

Parents were then assured the school was putting in place new measures to prevent a repeat of the incident.

“We are using an external company from today to vet all of our speakers, the same company that vets the Australia Day Honours group, so we’re thinking we’ll go pretty top shelf, and make sure things are good there,” he said, adding that in time the school planned to bring the task in-house.

Speaking to The Australian, one Trinity parent who wished to remain anonymous labelled the announcement “another example of them shirking responsibility to own the vetting process internally. They should be doing their vetting. We pay extremely high fees which should be devoted to teaching, not contracting out their responsibilities.”

The company contracted to vet Australia Day honours is not publicly disclosed but it’s understood it can take up to two years for each nominee to be assessed.

The move came hours after the school announced it would be scrapping its annual fundraising campaign for disadvantaged students after copping backlash for last week’s incident.

Speaking to The Australian on Tuesday, the activist at the centre of the firestorm apologised for the incident, offering his “deepest, heartfelt apologies to everyone impacted by any of the content found on my personal ­social media”.