Greens co-founder Drew Hutton says ‘transgender cult' has taken over the party and anyone who speaks out is being 'purged'

Sky News AU

6 days ago

A Greens co-founder has hit out at party leader Larissa Waters for failing to stand up to the 'transgender and queer cult' that has taken over the party.
Lifelong environmental activist Drew Hutton has taken to the pages of The Australian to warn that the party he helped create risks going the way of the Australian Democrats if 'purges' are allowed to continue.
Mr Hutton played a crucial role in the formation of the Queensland Greens before co-founding the Australian Greens with former leader Bob Brown in the early 1990s.
However Mr Hutton was suspended from the party's Queensland branch in 2023, and has since been expelled, after he refused to delete a social media post criticising the expulsion of a Victorian Greens member who had expressed dissenting views on the trans rights debate.
'The fact is that the Greens in a number of states have been taken over by a cult - a transgender and queer cult - that has come to control key decision-making positions in the party, such as disciplinary and preselection committees and administrative positions, that give them enormous power, and they use this to influence preselections and expel those who disagree with them,' Mr Hutton writes.
'Consequently, Greens politicians tread very lightly when it comes to policy areas such as gender for fear of losing preselection.'
Mr Hutton declared he had become a "victim of this cult", deriding the party's decisive actions.
'I was expelled from the party, not because I made statements that opposed key beliefs of the Greens but because I refused to censor comments on a couple of Facebook posts that asserted that men were biological males and women were biological females," he said.
He said 'cult position' inside the Greens is that people are whatever gender they define themselves as, and anyone who disagreed 'must be expelled' and cancelled.
'I was, therefore, told I had to censor all such comments from my Facebook posts. I refused on free speech grounds and so my membership was suspended, and then I was expelled when I continued to refuse,' he said
The environmental activist has called out party leadership for failing to address the problem, stating Senator Waters – who he has long supported – 'should have intervened at the start to stop my expulsion" but had instead 'ducked for cover' in the hope the situation would blow over.
But Senator Waters has defended the expulsion, stating it was made independently 'via the governance processes established by the membership' and that 'nobody is above the rules".
Mr Hutton said there were at least 40 members of the Greens who had either been expelled or otherwise forced out of the party over gender related issues, a situation he described as 'a purge of 'green' Greens'.
'Many of those expelled have been great environmental campaigners with decades of loyal service to the party,' Mr Hutton said.
Among those forced out of the party are 55-year-old Gail Hamilton, who has run for office as a Greens candidate three times since joining in 2000.
'I was expelled for arguing that it was appropriate for the principal of a girls' school to not enrol boys who identify as girls… I also objected to our MPs calling women 'uterus ­havers' and 'menstruators' on the basis that it is dehumanising,' Ms Hamilton told The Australian.
The former Greens members said the expulsion process was 'like a kangaroo court' where she was not even given the 'space to defend myself'.
Another was 70-year-old Cheryl Hercus, a proud lesbian who was forced out of the Victorian Greens for sharing articles that were critical of gender identity theory on social media.
'It just became obvious to me that the whole of the party had been captured by this ideology and to try and fight it from within was just huge,' she told The Australian.
Ms Hercus said she resigned her membership before being expelled.
According to Mr Hutton, failing to confront the 'cult' that had taken over the party would lead to half the Greens' supporter base abandoning the party.
'About half are young, relatively poor and likely to look favourably on candidates with radical identity politics. The other half are a little older, a little more prosperous, and have more liberal humanitarian than radical identity views,' he said of the Greens target voters.
'The other half are a little older, a little more prosperous, and have more liberal humanitarian than radical identity views.
'The former will possibly stick with the Greens despite their authoritarianism; the latter will probably desert them and give their votes to one or another of the major parties or, more likely, the teal independents.
'The result will be that the Greens will find their base vote is diminished and find it very difficult to win seats."