Stop the Greens'
"Conversion Practices" Bill

URGENT: Ask the Tasmanian Parliament to protect young people and religious freedom

Imagine your child comes to you wanting to talk about their sexuality or gender, looking for your guidance as their parent. Or a friend, struggling with theirs, asks you for advice or to pray with them about it. Under the Tasmanian Greens’ draft Conversion Practices Prohibition Bill 2026, that ordinary moment of care and conversation could be treated as a crime. If a child is involved, it could be labelled child abuse in law.

You’d expect a bill like this to be about stopping coercion and genuine abuse. But read the text closely, and this is the most severe conversion practices law Australia has seen, going well beyond the South Australian and New South Wales laws it claims to follow. Those laws require proof of serious harm. This one doesn’t require proof of any harm at all.

Read plainly, the draft requires no program, no pattern, no coercion and no harm. A single conversation or prayer is enough. Consent doesn’t matter either: an adult who freely asks anyone for advice or prayer is still caught.

Other problems with the bill:

• “Protects” parents and prayer only when they’re “not part of a conversion practice”, a circle that protects nobody
• Treats one conversation with a child as child abuse, with no injury to prove
• Makes your church, mosque or school criminally liable for a volunteer’s words it never authorised or knew about

It’s still a draft. That means it can still be stopped. Your name on this petition asks Tasmania’s Parliament to reject this Bill in its current form and start again, with genuine consultation with Tasmania’s faith communities.