PURGED FOR TELLING THE TRUTH: Ex-Greens Co-Founder Reveals How Activists Hijacked the World's Left-Wing Parties

A man who spent over three decades building the Australian Greens from nothing was thrown out of the party for refusing to censor the truth about biological sex, and according to his wife, his story is being repeated across the Western world, as activist and lobby groups quietly seize control of social democratic parties and purge anyone who won't go along with them.

A Founder Cast Out by His Own Creation

Drew Hutton co-founded the Queensland Greens in 1990 and the Australian Greens the following year, dedicating his adult life to the party. In 2022, he made the mistake of refusing to delete comments left by other people on his personal Facebook post, comments the party's disciplinary machinery deemed "transphobic." He wouldn't censor them, because he believed the debate itself was legitimate.

That refusal cost him everything. On 20 July 2025, the Queensland Greens state council voted 75–23 in favour of expelling the man who founded it. Hutton didn't hold back: "The only issues the Greens are really interested in are queer and transgender... [there is] not one environmentalist in the room," he said, adding that a "cult" had taken over the party he built.

Months later, the party's own lawyers concluded the process against him had been procedurally flawed, and his membership was reinstated. But the reprieve didn't last. By June 2026, Hutton had resigned from the Greens for good, walking out the same day he publicly declared his support for gender-critical campaigner Sall Grover. Even a legal win couldn't convince him the party was safe for anyone who wouldn't toe the ideological line.

His wife, historian Libby Connors, herself a Greens member for over 30 years, co-authored "Over the Rainbow: A Challenge to Cancel Culture" with him. Speaking to Sky News host Peta Credlin in September 2026, Connors said Hutton's expulsion wasn't an isolated grudge match. It was a pattern.

Not an Isolated Case

"We discovered that there were more than 40 women who'd been expelled or forced to leave the party," Connors told Credlin. "And of course, it wasn't only happening in the Greens, it's been happening around the world. It's happened in different countries of Europe with their Green Parties. It's happened in the US Democrats. It has happened in the Green Party of England and Wales."

The evidence backs her up. The Green Party of England and Wales has expelled or suspended well over 40 women for holding gender-critical views since around 2019, including three former co-chairs of Green Party Women, and is reportedly facing close to £1 million in legal costs from discrimination cases the party has lost or settled. In Scotland, 14 Green members, some with 40 years of service, were expelled simply for signing a declaration stating that sex is a biological reality, and Lothians MSP Andy Wightman quit the Scottish Greens in 2020 after being threatened with suspension for backing a rape victim's right to choose the sex of the person who examined her.

It isn't confined to the Greens, either. UK Labour MP Rosie Duffield says she was "hounded out" of her own party through a sustained "whispering campaign" over her gender-critical views before resigning the whip in 2024. She says she feels "vindicated" after the UK Supreme Court ruled in 2025 that "woman" in law means biological woman, the very position that had made her a pariah in her own party.

The common thread: ordinary members, disproportionately women, raise concerns grounded in biological reality, and the machinery of the party turns on them.

Also read: NSW Funds New LGBT Legal Service to Enforce Gender Ideology

They Avoid the Spotlight

How did this happen without most voters noticing? Connors says it was never meant to be noticed. "Activist groups and lobby groups convinced social democratic parties around the world that this was a good idea," she said. "And they said, 'but for goodness sake, don't have public discussions about it. That will just trigger a backlash. Just introduce them and, you know, everything will be fine and tell everybody it's the kindest way to behave.'"

Australia's own Sex Discrimination Act is Connors' prime exhibit. In 2013, the Gillard government passed amendments replacing the Act's biological definition of "woman" with a self-declared gender identity, following a consultation process run by the Australian Human Rights Commission. Connors says women's groups raised objections during that process, and the Commission simply didn't act on them.

The lack of scrutiny at the time is no longer in dispute, even from the woman who signed the changes into law. Asked at a University of Manchester lecture this year whether she'd considered the "unintended consequences" of redefining "woman" by gender identity, Julia Gillard admitted the issues "were not raised by anyone" during the 2012 debate, because "it wasn't a matter of public debate the way it is today."

"Lobby groups get control of political parties and once they're in control, they suppress all debate," Connors said. "Our freedom to organise and to speak in our community, in our own groups has now been terribly compromised, particularly for women."

When the Law Protects the Offender, Not the Victim

The consequences aren't abstract. In her book, Connors cites the testimony of a former Victoria Police acting senior sergeant, who said discrimination law had turned policing into an exercise in enforced silence: "The laws make male violence unspeakable, because if he says he's a woman and wears a wig, he is a woman and the police will force the victim to shut up or else."

Under Victorian law, and almost every state law in Australia, an arrested offender who declares he is transgender must have that identity respected by police and the justice system, a principle now enshrined nationally under the Commonwealth Sex Discrimination Act.

That is the end point of a process that began, as Connors describes it, with activists telling political parties to keep the changes quiet and avoid public debate. What started as internal party discipline against dissenters like Drew Hutton has become the law of the land. A law that, in practice, can require women, including victims of male violence, to accept a man's self-declared identity over their own safety.

What You Can Do Now

Drew Hutton spent 35 years building a party, and it still wasn't enough to protect him from being purged for defending biological reality. Rosie Duffield was "hounded out" of Labour for saying the same thing. Dozens of women have lost their memberships in Green parties across three continents. If this is what happens to insiders, imagine how little say ordinary Australians have had over a law that redefined "woman".

Parliament still has the power to fix the Sex Discrimination Act, to put biological reality back into the law, so women's spaces, sports and services can't be forced open by a man's declaration and a lobby group's playbook.

Sign the petition here and tell Parliament: Women are women. Fix the law.