School probe a ‘top priority’

The Government is making an investigation into anti-queer discrimination in schools a ‘‘top priority’’, after concerns were raised that some Christian educators had incorporated policies harmful to LGBTQI students.

Associate Education Minister Jan Tinetti, a former school teacher and principal, said she had asked education officials to urgently investigate schools’ practices and policies on inclusivity, to ensure ‘‘every single student’’ felt safe – regardless of gender identity or sexuality.

‘‘This is my absolute top priority, to ensure all young people are safe in our schools,’’ Tinetti said yesterday.

‘‘When something comes to light in one school, it is the norm that the ministry would look into other schools to see if this is happening elsewhere.’’

Tinetti said she was also drawing up guidelines to ensure all New Zealand schools were inclusive of the rainbow community.

Earlier this month, discriminatory language about marriage and gender was uncovered at Tauranga’s Bethlehem College, a Christian school which also receives government funding.

This week, three stateintegrated Christian schools in Lower Hutt, Palmerston North and Matamata were identified as having similar discriminatory and anti-queer language.

When Sean Curran’s Facebook account was hacked he thought a simple email to the company to get it back would suffice.

But now more than 10 days later the social media marketer’s account is still blocked for breaching community guidelines, and he’s found talking to someone at Facebook, or Meta, is near impossible.

‘‘You’re stuck in this loop where you can’t actually contact Facebook at all – solely relying on them actually looking into what’s happened themselves, which obviously doesn’t happen,’’ he said.

And he’s not alone. Business owners and personal Facebook users have long struggled to get their accounts back from Meta following a hacking.

Sydney-based Dowson Turco Lawyers had represented a number of people who had been hacked and unable to get their accounts back.

Accounts were often not reinstated unless Meta was contacted by the media, which happened to business owner Sarah Chant. Her attempts to get her account back went unanswered, but her account was restored after Stuff asked Meta about the hacking.

Curran’s account was hacked on the evening of June 17, and was shut down for breaching community standards after child exploitation images were posted from his page. He refuted the decision, but did not hear from Meta.

He then tried to contact Facebook through the defamation form, stating that someone had posted explicit content in order to defame him. The response he got five days later was that his case was hacking/phishing and that they could not help.

A link provided to report the hacking took him back to the screen that said his account had been deactivated.

‘‘So my account remains banned. I work in social media marketing so my ability to use Facebook is pretty paramount,’’ he said.

‘‘Meta does absolutely nothing to protect its users and defend them if their platform is