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Meet ACON, the trans activist outfit that has infiltrated workplaces, governments, universities and even the national broadcaster to quietly remake Australian society in its own image.

Australians have rapidly adopted transgender ideology not for its merits but thanks to masterful social engineering paid for by their own taxes.

That’s the upshot of two bombshell investigative reports published in recent days by The Australian, which also names ACON — formerly AIDS Council of NSW — as the non-profit spearheading these efforts.

ACON runs the Australian Workplace Equality Index (AWEI), described by The Oz as “the nation’s self-appointed arbiter of ‘workplace inclusion’ for trans employees”.

AWEI commands the participation of “almost every major bank, law firm and university in the country,” according to the national masthead’s Stephen Rice — “alongside officials from government departments up to and including Prime Minister and Cabinet”.

ACON’s Grip on Corporate Australia

In his first report, titled ‘Inside ACON: The lobby group driving Australia’s trans rights revolution’ Rice opens with scenes of the star-studded 2025 Australian LGBTQ+ Inclusion Awards, which was attended by “hundreds of brightly clad executives” in the Grand Ballroom of Sydney’s International Convention Centre.

“Even Australia’s top spy and law-enforcement agencies were there — ASIO, ASIS, and the Australian Federal Police — all in the running for awards ranging from Bronze through to Platinum.”

Rice’s next revelation is staggering: “ACON boasts that more than 500 member employers — covering 25 per cent of the national workforce — have signed up to its trans rights agenda”.

That agenda, enforced through the AWEI ranking system and paraded at the annual awards ceremony, scores every participating company and government agency out of 200 points based on how thoroughly they implement ACON’s policies.

Points are scored, Rice explains, through “everything from [LGBT-themed] cupcake days and gender-neutral bathrooms to paid leave for staff to ‘manage their gender-affirmation’”.

To participate, employers must fill out a questionnaire “that can run to hundreds of pages with attachments ‘proving’ that HR policies are inclusive to ACON’s satisfaction”.

“The success of the project is undeniable,” Rice observes. “Nine out of 10 of Australia’s largest employers are now members of Pride in Diversity [the ACON arm behind AWEI], paying about $12,000 a year for the privilege, although many pay much more for training.”

Rice also details ACON’s other initiatives:

ACON’s Pride in Sport program lobbies clubs to allow male athletes with trans identities to compete in female sports divisions.

Its Pride In Health+Wellbeing brand reaches deep into health departments around the country, advancing ACON’s push for “gender-affirming” medical treatment, including puberty blockers for children.

ACON works to ensure media coverage that reflects and supports its own ideology to the exclusion of contrary views; has successfully lobbied MPs to allow self-ID for anyone wishing to change their legal sex on birth certificates; and has helped ban women-only spaces that refuse to accept biological men.

A Public Sector Under Lobbyist Control

Rice pulls no punches, summarising that “with a mere $20m in taxpayer funding, ACON has effectively co-opted every arm of the state, from classrooms to courtrooms, to enforce its dogma that self-determined gender trumps biological sex”.

The level of buy-in from government departments and agencies is particularly galling.

“Most federal and state employees have to complete mandatory online induction courses straight out of ACON’s training manuals,” he explains.

According to Rice, “It’s almost impossible to work in the public sector unless you agree to at least pay lip service to ACON’s requirements.”

ACON’s reach inside NSW Health in particular became clear when The Australian submitted an FOI request for emails between the two bodies was rejected on the grounds it would require an “unreasonable diversion of resources,” after a preliminary search turned up 14,000 messages.

Even a narrowed request focusing only on emails with former ACON director Teddy Cook was refused, with 6,450 messages still flagged.

Moreover, the conflict of interest is glaring: by advocating for the quack science known as “gender-affirming care” while also helping deliver such services within NSW Health, ACON stands to benefit from the very policies it promotes.

The ABC’s Pursuit of Platinum Status

But The Australian’s most concerning revelation is the trans lobby’s wholesale capture of the ostensibly impartial ABC.

In his second exposé, ‘How the ABC’s pursuit of platinum status with ACON put its integrity on the line,’ Stephen Rice details the lengths to which the national broadcaster went to secure AWEI platinum status.

The media giant “patiently jumped through every hoop set for it” by ACON, he writes — “and far from being a reluctant bride, the ABC was paying ACON for the privilege”. He continues:

The ABC has spent tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of staff time implementing ACON’s workplace demands, like changing computer systems to allow non-binary titles like Mx, building all-gender bathrooms and offering “gender affirmation leave”.

That’s for the 26 ABC employees who identify as gender diverse out of a workforce of more than 4000, only one of whom has applied for affirmation leave in the past three years.

The real winner, as Rice points out, “wasn’t the organisation receiving the trophy, it was the ­organisation handing it out”.

Indeed, there was no bigger fish for ACON to reel in than the ABC — an outlet that reaches over 12.3 million Australians each week, or 45 per cent of the population, most of whom naively assume the broadcaster they fund with their own tax dollars will uphold its pledge of independence and impartiality.

How the ABC Won ACON’s Approval

The truth, sadly, is anything but.

In its bid for AWEI platinum status, the ABC went to remarkable lengths, writes Rice, including:

• Developing ABC Queer as a dedicated content stream to promote “trans-positive” narratives to an explicitly young audience, which has gone as far as publishing photos of a young woman with double mastectomy scars to celebrate her “greatest act of self-love” after “discovering” she was non-binary

Government funded broadcaster., @abcnews. Your taxes at work. pic.twitter.com/3SCLYJTAhh

— Rita Panahi (@RitaPanahi) April 19, 2023

• Created a Queer Content Lead role to manage ABC Queer and ensure content scored AWEI points
• Participated in the Mardi Gras parade, with then-CEO David Anderson’s involvement winning him ACON’s ‘CEO of the Year’ award
• Built all-gender bathrooms within ABC facilities
• Provided help numbers in LGBT articles
• Ran a Pride Network advisory group to directed staff policies and content language to satisfy ACON standards

The Stories the ABC Refused to Tell

Most alarming is not what the ABC did to score AWEI points, but what it went out of its way to avoid, arguably to the point of reckless negligence.

Even as “gender medicine” scandals have surfaced and trans ideology has been on the retreat globally, the ABC has effectively gagged itself from reporting on:

• The Cass Review in the UK, which prompted major reforms at the world-renowned Tavistock Clinic and ignited global debate on the risks of puberty blockers
• Andrew Strum’s Family Court ruling, which found that leading Australian pediatric gender medicine expert Michelle Telfer had misled the court while giving evidence supporting a mother seeking puberty blockers for her child, after the ABC had spent years platforming Telfer
• Sall Grover’s appeal against a ruling that allowed a trans-identifying male to join her female-only app, with the ABC never reaching out to Grover for comment
• Warnings from psychiatrists like Dr Philip Morris, President of the National Association of Practising Psychiatrists, urging caution against medicalising children suffering gender dysphoria
• Legal and social debates over what defines a woman and the rights of women to single-sex sports, toilets, change rooms and prisons

De-Funding the Manipulation of Minds

In summarising the wholesale capture of the national broadcaster, Rice reported:

Several ABC journalists who requested they not be identified told The Australian that while they had never been instructed to ignore a story that challenged gender affirming medical treatment or trans women playing in women’s sport, it would be almost impossible to do so without infringing the broadcaster’s inclusivity rules — or simply being accused of trans­phobia. “There are no instructions,” said one, “it’s just baked into the culture.”

Not bad for an outlet that is bound by law to “ensure that the gathering and presentation… of news and information is accurate and impartial according to the recognised standards of objective journalism”.

Indeed, the ABC claims on its own website that it “takes no editorial stance” other than its commitments to fundamental freedoms; does not advocate “for any particular outcome in contentious political, policy or social debates”, and “provides accurate, fair and unbiased information” to help audiences “make up their own minds on controversial issues”.

Forgive me if I’m not convinced.

Something is deeply broken at the ABC — something that $1.2 billion dollars a year in public funds is clearly not fixing. In fact, by continuing to bankroll an entity so flagrantly violating its own charter, Australians are underwriting the capture of their news and the manipulation of their own minds.

ACON is a con, and the ABC is all in on the game.

In the interests of decolonisation, it’s time Australians were free of both.