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AN INCREASING number of Australian children are receiving treatment at a special clinic for gender identity disorder, including hormone treatments to make them feel more like the opposite sex.

Since 2003, a publicly funded clinic at Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital has treated 39 children and adolescents for gender identity disorder – a condition where a person feels trapped within a body of the opposite sex.

Seven of these children successfully applied to the Family Court to suppress puberty so they had more time to consider sex-change treatments in late adolescence or adulthood. Others have court applications pending, while some could not afford the legal costs or wanted to continue counselling.

All seven adolescents who had puberty suppressed went on to receive cross-sex hormone treatments at age 15 or 16 so they felt more like the sex they identified with. Surgery is only available to people over 18.

For biological males, oestrogen treatment encourages breasts and other female characteristics while softening testicles and making them smaller. For females, testosterone suppresses menstruation and encourages hair growth, muscle bulk and voice deepening, with the latter being irreversible. It also increases the size of the clitoris and increases erections.

Negative side effects of the cross-sex hormones are rare but can include migraines and liver problems. The long-term rate of regret with reversal of gender identity for adolescents is unknown, but researchers say less than 1 per cent of adults who have sex change surgery after thorough assessment regret their decision.

Writing in the Medical Journal of Australia, the doctors who run the clinic, Jacqueline Hewitt and Paul Campbell, said all patients received mental health assessments and support, and in cases of unrelenting cross-gender thought and behaviour, hormone treatments were considered. They said puberty could exacerbate distress for children with some expressing revulsion towards parts of their bodies and becoming suicidal.

Growing awareness of the service meant patient referrals had increased from one in 2003 to eight last year and they said the clinic had become the main service for children and adolescents across Australia having hormone treatments. ”We’d like to see clinics in other major cities,” said Dr Campbell, a psychiatrist and director of the clinic. ”It’s important to provide the right support and access to experience.”

A Victorian mother whose biological son attended the clinic at age seven said she felt immense relief to find specialist help for her child, who is now having hormone treatment to suppress puberty. She said that from about 2½ years old, her son behaved like a girl and told her he was a girl.

Her child received many sessions with a psychiatrist before starting to identify as a girl before the age of 12.

”All up, it took about two years for our daughter to make what is called a full social transition, but for her, it was an absolute affirmation,” the mother said.

Raymond Carter at his home in Wyong on the Central Coast. Ray has lodged an official complaint against Senator Heffernan. Picture: Tim Hunter
Source: The Sunday Telegraph

Liberal senator Bill Heffernan is accused of of anto-gay outburst.
Source: The Sunday Telegraph

OPPOSITION leader Tony Abbott’s political enforcer Bill Heffernan is accused of a homophobic attack on a senior Liberal staffer during a Central Coast party meeting.

Ray Carter, 67, has filed a formal complaint to the Liberal Party demanding action be taken against Bill Heffernan after he allegedly hit him at a branch meeting and abused him for being gay.

Mr Carter, who has a heart condition, has made a statutory declaration detailing the incident on May 3 at the Breakers Country Club in Terrigal. His statement is backed by statutory declarations from two Liberal Party witnesses.

A third witness confirmed that Senator Heffernan launched an anti-gay tirade against Mr Carter after the meeting.

Mr Heffernan, a controversial Liberal senator since September 1996, is Tony Abbott’s representative on the powerful NSW Liberal Party State Executive. He was a close confidant of former prime minister John Howard and performed the same duty.

In his statement, obtained by The Sunday Telegraph, Mr Carter said Mr Heffernan was seated three rows behind him when the meeting started at 7pm. Mr Carter left the room briefly for a discussion with his employer, MP for Terrigal and NSW Minister for Resources and Energy Chris Hartcher.

When he returned and was about to sit down, Mr Heffernan allegedly leaned over and hit Mr Carter so hard he was knocked off balance.

One witness heard the thud from the attack and saw Mr Carter grimace in pain.

“Senator Heffernan leaned over and hit me on my left shoulder and said something I did not hear (I am partially deaf in one ear) and tried to grab a sheet of paper out of my hands. I was knocked off balance. I said: ‘Take your hands off me!’ I then fell into my seat,” Mr Carter said in his declaration.

“I was shaken and upset. I said nothing more. At the end of the meeting I was standing near to the exit door leading into the corridor. I was alone though many people were milling about. Senator Heffernan walked up to me and said in a low voice: ‘I didn’t know you were a poofter’. He said this in an aggressive manner.

“Rather than have a public confrontation I left.”

The Sunday Telegraph understands Mr Carter wants serious action taken against Mr Heffernan by the Liberal Party’s state executive.

Mr Heffernan refused to comment yesterday. He said: “Talk to the state director … and be very cautious.”

If the allegation is proven, he could be suspended or expelled from the party.

The alleged assault took place at a meeting of the Robertson Federal Electorate Council convened by NSW Liberal Party president Arthur Sinodinos to explain the appointment of Lucy Wicks without preselection as the candidate in Robertson.

Central Coast state MPs Chris Holstein and Chris Spence were also present.

State director Mark Neeham said he did not witness any homophobic assault.

“The state president and state director were both present at the meeting of the Robertson FEC on 3 May 2012,” he said in a statement.

“Both the state president and the state director had a clear view of the entire room and all attendees and did not witness any incident, assault or even a minor disturbance during or after the meeting.”

He said there was “no evidence” of a homophobic assault on Mr Carter but that he had “received a complaint from a local state MP”.

Mr Carter said he has been a member of the party since 1973 and worked on every election since. He has been the senior electorate office for Chris Hartcher since 1988.

Mr Heffernan was also involved in the botched pre-selection of Gary Whitaker in the seat of Dobell, which is held by former Labor MP Craig Thomson. Mr Whitaker’s preselection was overturned because he was living in a shed and Karen McNamara was selected for the seat.

Mr Carter and another former staffer of Chris Hartcher, Tim Koelma, are under investigation for allegedly accepting donations from a property developer. Mr Carter has been suspended from his job within Mr Hartcher’s office pending the outcome of the inquiry. He denies the allegations.

Support for Prime Minister Julia Gillard and the Labor party has sunk to just 23 per cent in Queensland. Picture: Mark Calleja
Source: The Courier-Mail

LABOR is set for annihilation in Queensland as voters line up to cast Julia Gillard and her team out of the state at the next federal election.

A new Galaxy Poll, conducted exclusively for The Courier-Mail, shows Labor’s primary vote has returned to rock-bottom at 23 per cent.

That translates into a two-party preferred vote to the Coalition of 64-36 – the same deathly mark that sentenced Labor to one of the nation’s worst election defeats at the March state election.

The poll will send a shudder through Queensland’s Labor MPs as they return to Canberra for a Parliamentary sitting that could decide Ms Gillard’s future as Prime Minister.

No federal Labor MPs would be left in the Sunshine State if this result were repeated at the next election.

And the majority of voters say this humiliation would be just desserts for Labor.

Almost 60 per cent of respondents to the poll said Labor deserved to be reduced to a rump of one or two seats in Queensland.

Under Julia Gillard, Labor’s primary vote has, for the second time, fallen to the lowest level recorded in the history of the Galaxy poll.

The 23 per cent primary vote marks a slump of more than 10 points since the last election.

It’s a decline of seven points since the last state-based federal poll in November and takes Labor back to its low recorded in a Galaxy poll last August.

The Liberal National Party primary vote is now at 56 per cent. This would see Labor crushed in Queensland by 64 per cent to 36 per cent on a two-party preferred basis, assuming preference flows from the past election.

The collapse in support suggests federal Labor has not gained any benefit after voters took out their anger on former premier Anna Bligh in March.

Galaxy chief David Briggs said the dire poll for federal Labor was in line with the two-party preferred figure observed in the state election.

“Support for the federal Labor Party has slumped in Queensland. Voters look like they are prepared to give Julia Gillard’s federal team the same treatment that was meted out to the Bligh government in the recent state election,” Mr Briggs said. The poll surveyed 800 people across Queensland last Tuesday and Wednesday.

It came just over a week after the Government used its Budget to promise $5 billion in new handouts to ease cost-of-living pressures for families and people on low incomes.

In the same week, the Government starting running advertisements promoting its coming suite of tax cuts and welfare boosts designed to compensate for the carbon tax.

But community opposition to the carbon tax appears to be growing stronger as the July 1 start date approaches.

Only 25 per cent of voters supported the carbon tax and 72 were opposed, the poll found.

Among Labor supporters, a small majority of 54 per cent supported the carbon tax. But among the LNP supporters who Labor needs to win over, only 8 per cent backed the tax.

Opinions have hardened in the nine months since a Galaxy poll in August found 28 per cent supported the tax and 67 per cent were opposed.

Primer Minister Julia Gillard faced travel delays when her plane broke down yesterday. Photo: Andrew Meares

PRIME Minister Julia Gillard’s VIP plane broke down yesterday, threatening to delay her arrival in the US city of Chicago for a major NATO summit.

Ms Gillard, who visited Townsville yesterday morning, was unable to fly out of Australia at the scheduled time because of a mechanical failure.

A replacement plane had to be sent from Canberra, although it is understood the delay would not prevent Ms Gillard from missing any scheduled bilateral meetings.

Ms Gillard will meet US President Barack Obama and other NATO and International Security Assistance Force leaders in Chicago for three days of talks about Afghanistan.

Yesterday, Ms Gillard and Defence Minister Stephen Smith visited troops who are about to leave for Afghanistan. Australia has committed to withdrawing most of its troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2013.

Tale of humility … Julia Gillard with the newly-elected secretary of the ACTU, Dave Oliver, speaks at the congress in Sydney. Photo: Michele Mossop

Key players are trying to claim the high ground on industrial relations, writes Deborah Snow.

The politician, the union leader and the business boss all had a story of humble origins to tell this week. In fact, you’d be forgiven for thinking each was trying to out-humble the other.

The BHP kingpin, Jac Nasser, told the Institute of Company Directors that he was no class warrior, just the son of a simple Lebanese man who’d packed up his family to come and live all together ”in a single bedroom” in a house in outer Melbourne.

The Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, trotted out for the ACTU congress in Sydney the tale, yet again, of her modest upbringing in Adelaide, the child of migrants who taught her to ”always, always, always carry your union membership card”.

And the newly-elected secretary of the ACTU, Dave Oliver, describing himself as a ”humble lift mechanic”, confessed astonishment that someone who’d started his working life as a 15-year-old apprentice, skateboarding to his first job, should have risen to the top of the union movement.

”Frankly, I’m amazed to be here today,” he told delegates to the triennial ACTU congress in Sydney – though, in fact, there was no surprise at all in the carefully-orchestrated elevation of Oliver, whose formidable campaigning skills are precisely why he has been put in the job.

The real point to all this faux-humility was the key players trying to stake out moral high ground as the industrial relations debate skidded off into talk of class warfare this week.

The Employment Minister, Bill Shorten, declared that ”we mustn’t let ourselves get fitted up – that somehow we are the class warriors. It has never been un-Australian to back-in the interests of the Australian working people”.

The head of the Transport Workers Union, Tony Sheldon, told union delegates Alan Joyce’s grounding of Qantas last year was a fine example of class warfare and that Nasser’s speech on Wednesday was evidence of ”that war being declared again”.

Nasser, in turn, told his audience of company directors that it was ”personally disappointing to me that part of this debate has become one based on class divisions”.

But he didn’t hold back in spelling out the mining conglomerate’s belief that the ”pendulum” had swung too far the unions’ way with Labor’s Fair Work Act, brought in by Gillard to replace John Howard’s reviled Work Choices.

Management had the right to ”run the business without the constant threat of a [union] veto over operational decision making”, he said, and the government’s current review of the Fair Work Act would be ”an opportunity to move the pendulum back to a more appropriate balance”.

If that didn’t happen, the company had the luxury of choice in deciding the ”geography” of where it might invest – a comment later interpreted by Sheldon as the threat of a ”capital strike”. Repudiating Nasser’s warnings, coalminers in Queensland are now positioning to launch mass strikes against the company.

BHP is not alone in its complaints. Major employer groupings such as the Business Council of Australia and the Australian Industry Group have lodged extensive submissions with the Fair Work Act review team, outlining dozens of areas where they say union powers are too great.

Top of AiGroup’s concerns is the scope it says unions now have to bring issues into the bargaining process that were never part of it before.

”Prior to the Fair Work Act, there was a tighter test of what you could put into agreements,” says the group’s national industrial relations director, Steve Smith. ”[Now] the unions want to be able to bargain over absolutely everything.”

He denies rising employer agitation against the Fair Work Act is ideologically driven and says his grouping just wants it ”sensibly” amended rather than thrown out.

However, Oliver says employers are ”sniffing the political wind” and responding with increasing militancy. ”We are up for a discussion on productivity – always have been, always will be,” he told the Herald. ”But we will give as good as we get.”

The union movement, he says, will not back away from its declared intention this week to campaign strongly against the growing phenomenon of what it calls ”insecure work” – that is, casual work, workers on contract and workers living day-to-day on calls from labour hire firms.

Former Labor deputy prime minister Brian Howe told the union congress there was a growing gulf between those in the ”core” workforce and those on its ”periphery”.

Releasing a report commissioned by the ACTU, he said he’d found ”countless casual workers in low-paying industries like security, contract cleaning, call centres and childcare”, who had unstable hours and ”pay so low that many of them have to hold down two or three jobs to make ends meet”.

Insecure work affected up to 40 per cent of the workforce, he claimed – a figure disputed by employer groups, who say Howe’s estimates include more than 1 million independent contractors with zero desire to become employees.

It’s a battle that will ramp up in coming months, as the ACTU pledges to extend the campaign into the community, backed by Oliver’s determination to set up what he calls a ”permanent campaigning capacity” inside the union body.

Indeed, he made a candid admission this week that the union movement had made a strategic error in pulling back after the success of its anti-Work Choices campaign in 2007.

People back then, he told the congress, ”knew what we stood for – but sadly, it didn’t last”.

”We didn’t keep faith with that campaign after the 2007 election. We thought because we’d defeated one enemy, that we had won all the battles we needed to,” he said.

It’s a mistake Oliver is determined the union movement won’t repeat. Shorten, meanwhile, will receive the report of the Fair Work Act review team at the end of this month. Advance reviews suggest it’s unlikely to give employer groups the overhaul they want. And with an eye on his future ambitions, Shorten won’t want to take apart a piece of legislation so closely associated with the Prime Minister.

The ACTU congress wrapped up on a jovial note on Thursday. Organisers brought the architects of Labor’s 1980s accord with the unions – Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and Bill Kelty – under the same roof for the conference dinner. Hawke belted out the union anthem Solidarity Forever. Delegates sang a ragged Happy Birthday for the outgoing ACTU secretary, Jeff Lawrence, who turned 60 on the congress’s final day.

But it was fighting words Oliver left delegates with at the end: ”No matter what they throw at us, no matter what the challenge, we never have and never will put up that white flag. Now it’s time to get back to work.”