Tasmania’s anti-discrimination chief investigates ‘blocking’ of transgender critics

An anti-discrimination commissioner believes a city council may have discriminated against a trans rights critic by blocking her from booking an event featuring Moira Deeming and Katherine Deves.

Hobart City councillor Louise Elliot. Picture: Kenji Sato

An anti-discrimination commissioner believes a city council may have discriminated against a transgender rights critic by blocking her from booking an event featuring Moira Deeming and Katherine Deves.

Hobart City councillor and critic of trans activism, Louise Elliot, was in September told by council staff there were no dates free to hire the Town Hall ballroom for a “women’s rights and free speech” event featuring herself, Ms Deeming and Ms Deves.

However, Ms Elliot said she then discovered other events were being booked for the same “unavailable” days in November and learned, through Right to Information, that a staffer had been told to “block” her booking.

The Australian has confirmed the state’s anti-discrimination commissioner, Sarah Bolt, has since accepted Ms Elliot’s complaint of discrimination – on grounds of political belief and association – for investigation.

Ms Bolt is understood to have decided there are possible breaches of Tasmania’s Anti-Discrimination Act, if as alleged council staff treated Ms Elliot less favourably due to her political beliefs, associations or activities.

A directions hearings took place on Thursday and it appears the matter will proceed to full tribunal consideration.

“It’s reassuring that the complaint was accepted … and to see impartiality has been appropriately applied,” Ms Elliot told The Australian.

“What the council has done to me, based on the evidence I have, is blatant, direct and appalling discrimination.

“Unless the council is prepared to openly and publicly acknowledge their obvious wrong-doing conciliation won’t resolve the matter.”

She believed a “woke culture of de-platforming and bullying” had permeated the council and was hopeful her discrimination case would address this.

“I don’t believe employees discriminate off their own bat unless the culture permits them to – the attitude that ‘anything you do to Councillor Elliot is justified because our views are so right and her views are so wrong’,” Ms Elliot said.

“The culture is enabling discrimination and breaches of legislation … People are forgetting how to disagree respectfully.”

She understood a council middle manager had been stood-down in relation to the alleged discrimination.

HCC acting chief executive Neil Noye would not comment on whether that was the case, nor on the detail of the anti-discrimination complaint.

“The City of Hobart is taking these allegations seriously and is co-operating with the external investigation, while also conducting its own internal investigation,” Mr Noye said. “It would be inappropriate to comment until these are concluded.”

Ms Elliot faces her own anti-discrimination complaint over comments she made at a rally by British transgender rights critic Kellie-Jay Keen in Hobart last year.

She is currently suspended from the council for a month after a code of conduct decision – the details of which are suppressed – also believed to relate to her views around transgender rights.

Ms Elliot, a member of the Liberal Party understood to be considering a tilt at state politics, said she was challenging her suspension through the courts.

The event with Ms Deves and Ms Deeming she had planned for November last year would proceed in the next few months, she said.

Ms Elliot, Ms Deves and Ms Deeming are all Liberal-leaning politicians who have advocated for the exclusion of transwomen from women’s spaces or sports in some circumstances.

As a Liberal candidate, Ms Deves created controversy during the 2022 federal election with claims that trans children were being “surgically mutilated and sterilised”.

Ms Deeming, a Victorian MP, was expelled from the Liberal Party after attending a Kellie-Jay Keen rally in Melbourne that was gatecrashed by neo-Nazis.