A Familiar Thread: What an IDAHOBIT Motion in South Australia's Parliament Reveals

A small, sympathetic motion in the South Australian Legislative Council turned out to be a working example of how regulatory power moves, not through the bills everyone watches, but through the motions that quietly make those bills uncontroversial before they're written.

Where This Begins

Sometimes the most revealing moments in politics are not the ones that make the evening news. They are the ones almost nobody notices at all.

In early June, the South Australian Legislative Council spent roughly half an hour finishing a debate that had opened weeks earlier and been adjourned in between. No law was created. No headlines followed. Most South Australians will never know it happened. Reading the transcript afterwards, I recognised something this series keeps finding wherever it looks, not in the cause under discussion, but in the mechanism sitting quietly beneath it.

I want this piece to do two things, and I'd rather say so plainly than pretend otherwise. The first is practical: most people, including people who follow politics closely, could not tell you the difference between a motion and a bill, or why a chamber spends an afternoon debating something that creates no law at all. The second is analytical: this particular motion turned out to be an unusually clean illustration of a pattern this series has been tracing since The Check We Never Built. Two purposes, one piece.

This is not a piece about whether gay men deserve protection from violence. They do, without qualification or caveat, and nothing that follows should be read as hedging on that point. It is a piece about what else sat inside that motion on a single afternoon in Adelaide, and about how easy it is to miss when the cause carrying it is one almost nobody wants to be seen opposing.

The IDAHOBIT Motion

On 17 May 2026, the world marked the thirty-sixth International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Intersex Discrimination and Transphobia, IDAHOBIT. In South Australia, the Hon. Ian Hunter, the first out gay man elected to the Legislative Council, had given notice of a motion earlier that month. Debate opened, was adjourned, and resumed on Wednesday 3 June 2026. The full text is worth reading slowly, because almost everything that follows turns on the gap between its first eight points and its last two.

That this council:

1. Recognises International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Intersex Discrimination, and Transphobia, observed on Tuesday 17 May, commonly known as IDAHOBIT;

2. Notes that IDAHOBIT commemorates the declassification of homosexuality as a mental disorder by the World Health Organization on 17 May 1990, and serves to draw global attention to the ongoing violence and discrimination experienced by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer people, and all people with diverse sexual orientations, gender identities or expressions, and sex characteristics;

3. Acknowledges the significant progress South Australia has made as a historic leader in LGBTQIA+ rights, including being the first Australian jurisdiction to decriminalise homosexuality in 1975, while recognising that discrimination and violence remain a lived reality for many Australians today;

4. Condemns the recent and deeply concerning increase in violent attacks targeting gay men across Australia, including those facilitated through the use of online dating applications;

5. Calls upon the commonwealth government to investigate the use of online dating applications as a means to facilitate hate crimes against gay men, and to work with state and territory police forces to establish a nationally coordinated response;

6. Urges online dating application companies operating in Australia to take immediate and meaningful steps to improve user safety, including robust identity verification, stronger reporting mechanisms, and active cooperation with law enforcement agencies investigating violent crimes;

7. Calls on South Australia Police to ensure that attacks of this nature are recorded, investigated and prosecuted as hate crimes, and that appropriate victim support services are made readily available to those affected;

8. Requests that the South Australian government engage with the commonwealth government and relevant stakeholders to explore regulatory frameworks that hold digital platforms accountable where their services are exploited to facilitate violence;

9. Affirms that every South Australian, regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or sex characteristics, deserves to live freely, safely and with dignity; and

10. Calls upon all honourable members to denounce hateful acts and discourse directed towards LGBTQIA+ people, and to reaffirm this parliament's commitment to the safety, equality and inclusion of all South Australians.

Read quickly, this looks like exactly what it was billed as: a non-controversial recognition of a day most reasonable people support. Eight of its ten points are precisely that. The two that aren't, points 6 and 8, are easy to miss, because they sit quietly between a recitation of history and a closing affirmation that no parliament anywhere is likely to vote against.

What a Motion Actually Does

Before going further, it's worth being precise about what was actually in front of the chamber that day, because the word ‘motion’ gets used loosely in everyday political reporting and the looseness hides something important.

A bill creates law. It amends an Act, establishes an offence, empowers a regulator, or appropriates money, and once passed and assented to, it binds courts, citizens and future governments whether they like it or not. A motion does none of that. Notice the verbs in Hunter's text: recognises, notes, acknowledges, condemns, calls upon, urges, requests, affirms. Every one of them is the chamber expressing an opinion or a wish. None of them creates an offence, empowers anyone to act, or survives the day's sitting in any legally enforceable form. If every member present had voted no, nothing in Australian law would have changed.

‘Adjourned debate’ is the other piece of machinery worth understanding. A member gives notice of a motion, moves it, and speaks to it; debate can then be adjourned, paused, with the member's place in the queue preserved, and resumed on a later sitting day, sometimes weeks apart, as other members are allotted speaking slots. The mover traditionally reserves a right of reply at the close of debate, summing up and responding directly to objections raised in the interim. That convention matters here: it's why Hunter's closing remarks read almost like a transcript of cross-examination, working through Bernardi's objections point by point rather than simply restating his own case.

None of this makes a motion meaningless. It does something subtler and, for this piece's purposes, more interesting: it functions as a kind of soft pre-authorisation. By the time any future bill arrives proposing, say, a regulatory framework for digital platforms or a mandatory identity-verification regime, the chamber will already have voted, months or years earlier, that pursuing something in that direction was uncontroversial enough to pass without a division being called. Nobody is bound by a motion. But a motion can make the next, binding step considerably easier to take, and considerably harder to argue against, because by then it will already feel like old news.

The Floor

The Hon. Michelle Lensink rose first for the Liberal Party, situating the motion inside decades of bipartisan history: South Australia's 1975 decriminalisation, the first in the country, the federal allyship of Liberal Sir John Gorton's 1973 motion that homosexual acts between consenting adults “should not be subject to the criminal law,” and the Marshall government's repeal of the so-called gay panic defence. She drew a direct line, too, from this kind of digital-platform abuse to family violence law, noting government has “managed to get some action on that front” before. She closed in support, calling points 9 and 10 “pretty hard to disagree with on any front by any reasonable person.”

The Hon. Melanie Selwood, the Greens' newly elected member, followed with the personal register this series has come to expect from MPs speaking on this day: a daughter who came out as a lesbian in primary school but didn't feel safe enough to be herself until high school, a description of walking out of the chamber with the Hon. Robert Simms after trans people were compared to an eating disorder in an earlier debate, and a closing line that doubles as a statement of party discipline rather than conscience: the Greens vote for “the interests of the queer and rainbow community, every MP, every vote, every time, not a conscience vote.” Both contributions are sincere, and neither touches the part of the motion this piece is actually interested in.

Three No Votes, and What They Were Actually About

When the council divided, eighteen members voted for the motion and three against: Cory Bernardi, Rebecca Hewett and Carlos Quaremba, South Australian One Nation's entire Legislative Council contingent, voting as a bloc. Only Bernardi spoke to the motion; Hewett and Quaremba left no remarks on the record, which is itself a small lesson in how Hansard works.

A division list tells you who voted which way. It does not tell you why, and for two of these three “no” votes, why is simply unrecoverable from the public record. What follows is Bernardi's stated case, the only one available to examine, and it is worth reading in full rather than inferring from the result.

The Hon. Cory Bernardi, the former Liberal federal senator who left the party in 2017, founded and disbanded the Australian Conservatives, and returned to parliament in March 2026 as One Nation's South Australian leader, called the motion “an opportunity lost,” arguing it could have been “a simple motion to recognise a significant event” but had instead become “a new bid by the mover… to somehow control parts of the internet.”

His objections, point by point, were aimed at identity-verification requirements (“people will fake them, just as children are doing today”), at “stronger reporting mechanisms” as duplicating existing police powers, and most pointedly at point 8's “regulatory frameworks that hold digital platforms accountable”, which he warned was generalised enough to capture “an email service.” His closing position: the law should “apply equally to everybody,” and he opposed “elevating one group above others” through the mechanism on offer, not through the cause it served.

It would be easy to read that bloc vote as the reflexive culture-war reaction of a minor party uncomfortable naming gay men specifically. The Hansard record doesn't support that reading, and Hunter's own closing remarks confirm it: he notes Bernardi “can form a common cause with us on points 1 and 2,” the paragraphs simply recognising the day and the WHO's declassification, and that he “sort of skipped past point 3”, South Australia's 1975 history, without disputing it.

Bernardi conceded the day, the history and the principle. What he opposed, specifically and only, was the motion's reach into platform regulation. A single vote on a ten-point motion can't tell us which of those points actually moved Hewett or Quaremba; all the record shows is that they voted the same way Bernardi did, on the same motion, for reasons they didn't put on paper.

Whether one ultimately agrees with Bernardi, Hewett or Quaremba is almost beside the point. The more interesting question is whether their objection identified a real structural issue in the wording of the motion, and on that question, this series has made a version of the same objection before, from a very different political address, about a very different bill.

That doesn't make Bernardi right about everything else in his speech, his framing of the underlying issue as people simply “putting themselves in dangerous positions” sits uncomfortably alongside an ABC investigation documenting coordinated, premeditated luring of minors, which is a different category of harm than careless self-exposure.

But on the narrow question of whether “regulatory frameworks that hold digital platforms accountable” is dangerously underspecified language, the objection is sound regardless of who is making it, and a series built on testing claims independently rather than adopting institutional framing wholesale should say so plainly.

The Reply That Names the Mechanism

The Hon. Robert Simms, the Greens, answered Bernardi directly, and usefully, because his rebuttal supplies the documentation Bernardi's speech lacked. The motion's points 4 and 5, he argued, were not abstract: a two-year ABC investigation had documented a sustained pattern of IS-inspired attacks on gay and bisexual men and teenagers in Sydney, lured through dating apps and filmed by their attackers, with police figures showing at least 64 people charged in NSW and Victoria since 2023 over similar app-facilitated assaults.

Simms noted that the NSW Crimes Legislation Amendment (Hate Crimes) Bill 2026 had passed the previous day, creating a specific new offence for luring victims under false pretences via dating apps, alongside expanded ‘post and boast’ offences and higher penalties for hate-motivated violence. He went on to thank both Lensink and Hunter personally for decades of LGBTI advocacy, and reflected on coming out in 2008 as a closeted teenager who “could never have imagined” being elected to the parliament he now sat in.

Hunter closed the debate with the mover's right of reply, thanking each contributor by name and then working through Bernardi's objections one at a time, a structure the convention of adjourned debate makes possible. His sharpest point was constitutional rather than rhetorical: South Australia, he argued, lacks the power to regulate carriage services directly, “which is precisely why” points 4 to 8 ask the Commonwealth to act, since it is the Commonwealth that holds power over the telecommunications networks the apps and platforms run on.

That power is not hypothetical: it is the same constitutional hook already used in section 474.17 of the Commonwealth Criminal Code, which criminalises using a carriage service to menace, harass or cause offence and is regularly applied in domestic violence prosecutions, exactly the precedent Hunter pointed to. He closed by reading point 9 back at Bernardi almost word for word, asking how anyone could object to it, before thanking the chamber for what would be the motion's passage.

Every Person in This Story

I will not pretend, for the sake of this piece's comfort, to hold a view I don't hold. Scripture, from Genesis through Romans 1, places homosexual practice outside God's design for human sexuality, and I don't soften that conviction to make myself easier company. But that conviction has never once licensed me, or any Christian actually reading his Bible rather than mining it for ammunition, to treat violence against the men this motion describes as anything but evil. Doctrine is not a permission slip for brutality.

“Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.”  (Genesis 9:6)

Every man bashed, hunted, or murdered through one of these apps was made in the image of God before he was anything else, before his sexuality, before the label any side of politics wants to put on him. So was every parliamentarian named in this piece: Hunter, who carried the weight of being the first out member of this chamber and who still, by his own account, felt the residue of fear from a childhood spent under criminal law; Lensink and Selwood, speaking from genuinely different places but the same underlying conviction; Simms, who could not have imagined his own seat as a closeted teenager; and Bernardi, Hewett and Quaremba, whose objection I have just spent several paragraphs defending in part, and who are no less bearing that image for having cast the chamber's only three votes against.

A piece that names everyone's dignity except the people it disagrees with hasn't actually understood what dignity means.

The Familiar Thread

This is where the civics lesson and the series converge. The Check We Never Built described a federal misinformation bill that would have had a regulator telling platforms what they were required to police, with the practical effect that an account could be restricted or a post quietly suppressed with “no government fingerprint visible anywhere in it.”

Point 8 of this motion, “explore regulatory frameworks that hold digital platforms accountable”, is the same mechanism at an earlier stage of its life: not yet a bill, not yet a regulator, just a chamber agreeing in principle that this direction is worth pursuing. The structural risk is the same in both cases: a vague mandate over “digital platforms”, a term left largely undefined in the motion itself, enforced somewhere downstream of any visible decision a citizen could contest. Bernardi's “email service” objection is the same caution this series raised about Australia's Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill 2026, made by someone with no apparent knowledge that the argument had been made before.

A pattern that only ever shows up when one side of politics is doing the regulating is a partisan complaint. A pattern that shows up in a federal antisemitism bill, a state IDAHOBIT motion, and the misinformation bill this series already documented, three different causes, three different governments, begins to look like something structural.

Hunter's carriage-power point sharpens this further. The Commonwealth already regulates carriage services for one purpose, menacing or harassing communications, including in domestic violence contexts. The question this motion quietly poses is whether a power justified for one narrow, demonstrable harm tends to stay narrow once a second sympathetic cause arrives asking to borrow it, and what happens on the day a third, less sympathetic cause arrives asking the same thing.

A Postscript Worth Watching

On 17 June 2026, news broke that Sarah Game, who was elected as One Nation's first South Australian MLC in 2022, who left to sit as an independent in 2025 and then founded and lost her own micro-party, Fair Go for Australians, had joined the revived Family First Party, becoming its first sitting member in this parliament. It's worth pausing on, not just because of who she is, but because the division list for this very motion already contains an answer to part of the question this postscript is about to ask.

The Legislative Council now seats three parties each pitching themselves, in one form or another, as the Liberal or conservative alternative to Labor and the Greens: the Liberal Party itself, with six members, all six of whom voted for this motion; One Nation, with three, all three of whom voted against it, led publicly by Bernardi; and now Family First, with one, Game, who at the time of this division was sitting as an independent, having already lost control of her own short-lived party three months earlier. She voted with the eighteen, not the three.

That single vote doesn't settle anything, but it does complicate the tidy story this postscript might otherwise have told. Whatever moved Bernardi, Hewett and Quaremba to vote together against point 8's regulatory language, it didn't move the woman who would become Family First's only South Australian MLC.

Her own platform leans hard into family-values legislation, and on a pro-life bill that passed the council the night before this piece was finished, she voted alongside the Liberal Party and all three One Nation members. On this motion, she didn't.

Whether that's because point 8 genuinely reads differently to her than it does to Bernardi, or because she simply wasn't weighing it the way he was, isn't something a division list can tell us. It's exactly the kind of distinction this series exists to keep watching for, rather than assume.

Questions for the Reader

I am not asking whether this motion should have passed. I am asking something narrower. If a motion that merely asks government to “explore” a regulatory power is treated as too sympathetic to scrutinise, because the cause attached to it is unimpeachable, and because nothing in it yet binds anyone, at what point in the life of that power does scrutiny become possible without looking like you're scrutinising the cause itself?

And if the answer is “once the bill is drafted,” has the public already lost something it never got to weigh in on, simply because the motion that came before the bill was never controversial enough to notice?

South Australians who would strongly support protecting gay men from being hunted and murdered, which should be everyone reading this, have, as far as I can tell, never been asked a separate question: whether they also support extending Commonwealth carriage-service power into platform-accountability regulation, whatever form that eventually takes. Perhaps they would say yes without hesitation. I am asking whether anyone has actually asked them, or whether the asking happened once, quietly, on an adjourned Wednesday afternoon, attached to a cause nobody wanted to be seen opposing.

“The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him.”  (Proverbs 18:17)

Bernardi was, on the substance of the platform-regulation clause, the one who came and examined, the only one of the three “no” votes who left a reason on the record. If he was wrong, or unkind, or politically isolated on almost everything else he said that afternoon doesn't make him wrong about that. A chamber, and a public, that can only hear an objection when it arrives in a comfortable voice has already lost something a free society needs.

Free societies do not depend on agreement. They depend on the ability to examine ideas before they become powers. By the time a proposal becomes law, most of the important arguments about it have usually already been won or lost. The question this motion leaves me with is whether anyone is still paying attention early enough to notice.

A note on where this sits. This piece is a side thread, not the next numbered instalment. The harder argument, what, if anything, could actually replace the check this site's The Check We Never Built found missing, is still being stress-tested and will follow under its own title when it's ready. Consider this the smaller, local version of the same question, arriving first. Stay tuned.