Kirralie Smith has been awarded the 2023 Australian Mother of the Year Award. The announcement was made on Tuesday, 9 May, by National Director Peter Downie and QLD Director Andrew McColl of Family Voice Australia on Vision Christian Radio’s 20Twenty program with host Neil Johnson.
The Australian Mother of the Year award dates back to 1994 when Barnardos first sponsored it as an opportunity to showcase the women responsible for excellent parenting in the community. Barnardos relinquished the honour in 2020, saying it no longer reflected diverse families. Family Voice Australia proudly took over the awards.
The Beautiful, Sacred Role of Motherhood
Kirralie humbly received the award after being recognised by Peter Downie and Andrew McColl of Family Voice Australia as a hard-working mother of six homeschooled children, three of those foster children and a spokeswoman for Binary Australia.
‘I am feeling overwhelmed and amazed and humbled,’ said Kirralie. ‘I do what I do because I feel called by God to do it. And I have the love and support of an amazing family.’
Kirralie honoured her mother, a single mother throughout Kirralie’s teenage years, who died 25 years ago but left a legacy of excellent parenting. Kirralie said she has many culturally and religiously diverse friends who teach her a lot about motherhood.
‘It doesn’t matter what our political or religious beliefs are, or our ethnic or socio-economic background is; we’re united because we are women and we are mothers. It’s a vital, sacred, beautiful role,’ said Kirralie.
Raising Six Children
‘There is no greater role than being a wife or a mother. I love it. It’s what gets me out of bed in the morning. It energises me in every single way,’ said Kirralie. ‘My husband and I fostered five children in total. We had two very young children, three and one, for about a year or so before we had our own children. And then we took on four-year-old twin boys and their three-year-old sister. It was very ironic. We didn’t know that we were going to be able to have children. We’d lost one child through miscarriage. It was four years into our journey of trying to fall pregnant when we took on these foster children. We picked them up on Saturday, and I found out I was pregnant with my son on Tuesday.’
Kirralie and her husband went on to have two more daughters. Kirralie said all the children are very close.
‘We just adore each one of them so much. It’s been such an utter privilege to be involved in our foster children’s lives and in our own children’s lives.’
Three of Kirralie’s foster children are now adults. The twin boys both got married last year to wonderful women, reports Kirralie, and their foster daughter is getting married this year.
Homeschooling
Kirralie was criticised by some people when she and her husband chose to homeschool their children. They decided to homeschool because they believed that no one would look after their children’s best interests the way they would, no matter how good a teacher they were. Kirralie stated that when there are 30 other children in a classroom, it’s difficult to give individual attention or nurture a child’s strengths or develop their weaknesses.
While Kirralie said they had to make sacrifices to homeschool their children by making ends meet on one income, she believes that putting children into the school system is another form of sacrifice where you are submitting them to bullying and other things such as the gender identity issues that are now happening in school.
Speaking the Truth Regardless of the Cost
Kirralie was an outstanding candidate for the Australian Mother of the Year Award for another reason. She was recognised as a spokesperson for women and families through Binary Australia, an organisation created to protect children from indoctrination, protect women from men appropriating womanhood for personal gain, and stop politicians from instituting ideology over biology. Although Kirralie admits she was an accidental activist, she believes God has given her a large audience and platform to speak the truth.
‘Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, and He is the truth. So speaking the truth is also speaking love because God is love,’ said Kirralie.
Kirralie believes that men are men and women are women, and nobody can change their sex. She believes women and girls’ rights are being eroded, and the words used to describe genders are being erased and hijacked, which she believes will have dire consequences for women in many different spaces and services, including sports, prisons, rape crisis shelters, and education.
The Silencing of Women
As a fearless spokeswoman, she has come across challenges from people coming against her to silence her. She is currently facing two applications for apprehended violence orders in the New South Wales local courts.
‘I am not violent. I have never been violent, and I’ve never advocated violence. And I do not believe that words or truth, such as stating that men are not women, is violence,’ said Kirralie. ‘They’re also bringing some vilification cases against me with the Anti-Discrimination Board in New South Wales. I will vigorously defend myself against those accusations because they are not true, and it’s not acceptable to silence women and girls who simply want to draw boundaries for our single-sex spaces and services.’
Although the decision to make Kirralie Mother of the Year was made before these accusations were made against Kirralie, Family Voice Australia support and admire Kirralie for standing up to the truth.
Sall Grover, Founder of Giggle, developed a female-only app that excluded men. One man took offence, and now she’s in the federal court trying to defend the definition of the word woman.
Moira Deeming is facing expulsion from the Victorian Liberal Party because she went to a ‘Let Women Speak’ event. She was falsely smeared with labels stating she was a Nazi sympathiser.
Louise Elliot, a councillor in Hobart, is now facing a complaint from the Tasmanian Equal Opportunity Commission because she also says that men are not women.
‘There’s a real push in 2023 to silence women who are making simple basic statements about biology, about our safe spaces, about single-sex sports,’ said Kirralie.
To listen to the Mother of the Year announcement with Neil Johnson, click the link below:
