Governments Spent $224 Million of Your Money to Fund the Trans and LGBT Lobby
A new breakdown of government grants shows Australian taxpayers handed $224 million in five years to trans and LGBT advocacy groups, with a further $151 million flowing to abortion and women's advocacy bodies pushing the same broadly progressive line. Anyone who disagrees gets nothing.
The Numbers Governments Don't Want You Adding Up
The Institute of Public Affairs has released a new report, Stacking the Deck: How Government Lobbies Itself and Funds the Distortion of Democracy, tracking government grants to 100 advocacy organisations across five policy areas between the 2021 and 2025 financial years. The total bill to taxpayers: $2.2 billion. The single largest category — $1.039 billion — went to what the report calls “diversity and multiculturalism advocacy,” and it's inside that category that the trans and LGBT sector sits.
Pull those organisations out and add them up. ACON Health took in more than $99 million. Thorne Harbour Health, formerly the Victorian AIDS Council, received over $70 million. LGBTIQ+ Health Australia, the national peak body, received more than $34 million. Behind them sit The Gender Centre ($6.5 million), Open Doors Youth Service ($5 million), Transgender Victoria ($4 million), Transcend Australia ($2.2 million), and the Minus18 Foundation ($1.9 million).
Then there's the Diversity Council of Australia (DCA), the peak body behind 2018's leaked push to have Qantas staff avoid “gender inappropriate” words like “wife” and “husband.” The DCA received $1.69 million in direct government grants over the same period. But that figure understates its real reach: 317 of the DCA's more than 1,200 paying members are government departments and agencies, which contribute an estimated $1.86 million in annual membership fees — a recurring, largely invisible subsidy that buys government a formal seat inside the very organisation lobbying it.
Add the direct grants together, and government funding to the trans and LGBT advocacy sector alone comes to more than $224.7 million in five years — before counting a cent in membership fees. As the report's author, Jordan Abou-Zeid, put it, taxpayers are bankrolling “a progressive advocacy network that is crowding them out of public debate” — hundreds of millions of dollars a year, flowing in one ideological direction only.
When Taxpayer Money Fought the Government's Own Child-Safety Pause
The clearest illustration of what this money buys played out in Queensland. In January 2025, the state government paused the prescription of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to new patients under 18, pending an independent review, a precaution that followed the UK's Cass Review, which had already urged caution over these treatments for minors.
Transcend Australia, having received around $2.2 million in government funding since 2020, didn't stay quiet. It joined a coordinated campaign against the pause, mobilising supporters to pressure the government and demanding puberty blockers be reinstated for children under 18. A taxpayer-funded organisation used taxpayer money to fight a government's own attempt to exercise caution around irreversible puberty blockers for children.
Also read: NSW Funds New LGBT Legal Service to Enforce Gender Ideology
The Same Money Also Funds the Abortion Lobby
The pattern doesn't stop at gender identity. The same report shows a further $151 million flowing to explicitly feminist advocacy bodies over the same five years: $86.8 million to Our Watch; $37.2 million to the Multicultural Centre for Women's Health; $20.8 million to Women's Health Victoria; and $6.3 million spread across the seven federally-created National Women's Alliances. One of those alliances, the Working with Women Alliance, used its taxpayer funding to publish a policy brief calling on the Commonwealth to guarantee full Medicare coverage for abortions.
State governments go further still, funding abortion advocacy directly. In 2024 the Queensland Government handed a further $8 million to Children by Choice, a Brisbane organisation that describes its own mission as working “to improve laws, policies, and pathways that affect access to abortion” — on top of the ongoing Queensland Health funding it already receives. In NSW, the state government committed $9.8 million across the 2023/24 and 2025/26 budgets to a dedicated grant fund for abortion-access organisations. And MSI Australia, which calls itself the country's leading abortion and contraception advocate, draws roughly a fifth of its funding from state governments in the ACT, Queensland and WA.
Not One Cent for Common Sense
Combing through five years of grants data across public health, multiculturalism, welfare, indigenous affairs and the environment, the report's authors say they could not identify a single taxpayer-funded organisation dedicated to advocating for “the biological realities of binary sex,” or any other explicitly conservative or right-leaning cause. Every dollar traced in this analysis — for gender-identity advocacy, for abortion access, for everything else surveyed — flows in one direction, and government departments sit as paying members inside several of the lobby groups pushing it.
Mainstream Australians who think their views on these issues are shared by millions of their fellow citizens are entitled to ask: Why has none of that funding ever come our way?
What You Can Do Now
This is what stacking the deck looks like in practice: your taxes fund one side of the gender and abortion debate, hand it a seat at the table, and leave everyone else locked out — including a state government trying to pause and review a controversial treatment for children.
Share this article. The more Australians who see these numbers, the harder it becomes for governments to keep funding their own advocacy in the dark. If you want to fund the other side of the debate yourself, consider becoming a monthly donor here.
References
1. Jordan Abou-Zeid and Morgan Begg, Stacking the Deck: How Government Lobbies Itself and Funds the Distortion of Democracy (Institute of Public Affairs, August 2026)
2. Institute of Public Affairs, “IPA Research: governments spent $2.2 billion over five years astroturfing Australian democracy” (13 August 2026)
3. Hilary Cass, Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People: Final Report (April 2024)
4. Ally Foster, “Qantas Staff Told to Avoid 'Gender Inappropriate' Terms Like 'Wife' and 'Husband'” (news.com.au, 5 March 2018)
5. Diversity Council of Australia, membership tiers and current members
6. Queensland Government, “Recruitment underway to bolster Queensland's abortion services” (6 July 2024)
7. NSW Ministry of Health, “Supporting Safe Access to Abortion Care Grant Fund”
8. Children by Choice, “About Us”