Drew Hutton & Libby Connors

Drew Hutton, co-founder of the Queensland and Australian Greens, and Libby Connors, a founding member and historian, discuss their book Over the Rainbow: A Challenge to Cancel Culture (2026). Both have decades of activism in nonviolence, civil liberties and environmental causes. They frame transgender ideology not as a grassroots civil-rights movement but as a top-down institutional capture, a “long march through the institutions” reaching universities, schools, regulators, unions and political parties by way of legislation rather than public debate. Hutton separates harmless adult self-expression from what he calls sinister: the idea of an innate gender essence, children “born in the wrong body,” and state enforcement of speech codes and single-sex space rules. Connors argues the ideology suppresses open inquiry and treats words as violence. Hutton suggests wealthy foundations and funded activist careers helped drive the shift once marriage equality was won. Hutton describes his expulsion from the Greens, later reversed in court, while Connors let her membership lapse. Both say the party abandoned free speech and materialist politics. Hutton argues the left has lost its capacity for class analysis, governed by a university-educated “knowledge class” that looks down on working people, and predicts the populist right will benefit. They stress that the issue concerns democratic norms, human dignity and sex-based rights. Hutton urges readers to see themselves as citizens of a wider society rather than as members of a tribe, and to resist cancel culture while keeping the left’s traditional commitments to equality and materialism.