PAUL MURRAY: Queensland election abortion scaremongering an abuse of both power and the voters

The women of Queensland were disgracefully misused and unnecessarily frightened in the lead-up to last weekend’s State election for the crassest of political motives.

A loose coalition of Labor strategists, a fringe political party and compliant left-wing media managed to craft an abortion scare campaign in an attempt to return the government in a parliamentary minority.

After opinion polls for months had predicted a wipe-out for the hapless premier Steven Miles, that was about the best Labor could expect.

And it was exactly what the main protagonist is this shabby episode wanted.

Robbie Katter’s best electoral outcome was the return of a minority Labor government, which would have made him and his rump party kingmakers in Queensland politics.

It failed, and the Liberal National Party will end up with a reasonable majority after nine years in the wilderness. But it clearly worked enough to stop Labor losing many more seats.

There were echoes there of the Mediscare campaign that Labor ran in the final days of the 2016 Federal election and was designed by Erinn Swan, daughter of former Queensland rooster Wayne Swan, now the party’s national president.

And new Premier David Crisafulli was like a rabbit in the spotlight when abortion came in from left field just three weeks our from polling day. He will have to be a lot more savvy if he hopes to govern competently.

As I pointed out in a column on September 28, the Queensland result would have ramifications for both the upcoming Federal and WA polls and how they are contested.

These are some of the key messages from the Queensland election:

• Labor is much better at politics than it is at governing. Miles ran a more effective campaign than Crisafulli, even if it was totally unprincipled.
• Pork-barrelling works. The precious votes of a certain proportion of the electorate can be bought by offering “free stuff” disguised as “cost-of-living relief”. It helped pull Queensland Labor back from a landslide loss. WA’s Premier won’t be able to resist.
• The Greens have been exposed as political extremists and the backlash cost them one of their two seats, having boasted of winning six. Sensible voters now see them as terrorism-supporting Marxists. Anthony Albanese can no longer credibly preference Greens over Coalition candidates.
• Election campaigns are still important and can create late swings. Which makes early voting highly questionable. Why should taxpayers fund political parties’ campaigns when people can vote before they’ve heard any of the policy arguments?

Back to abortion. There was never any real prospect that Queensland’s laws would change whoever won the election, but it became an issue that transformed the final three weeks of the campaign.

How it was inserted into a political fight about Labor’s performance in office — and who was likely to benefit from its emergence — is worth considering.

The major beneficiary of a minority government in Queensland would have been Katter’s Australian Party, which held four seats in the monocameral parliament, with the Greens on two and one independent.

The abortion scare dragged down the LNP vote from its two-party preferred high of 55-45 to something around line-ball in the last week.

There are many reasons why such an emotional issue gets traction. And no one should underplay its importance. Since this is an opinion piece, I should disclose that I am not anti-abortion and believe it’s essentially a woman’s right to decide.

However, this time the local debate took off against the backdrop of what has been happening in the US.

The Democratic Party’s efforts to fashion the Supreme Court’s overturning of the Roe v Wade pro-abortion ruling into an election-winning issue for Kamala Harris provided an opportunity for Queensland Labor to ride in on the coat-tails of that highly-charged campaign.

In real terms, the SCOTUS decision corrected a glaring constitutional wrong and put in place a situation very similar to Australia’s where State, not Federal law, controls abortions.

What’s lost in the polarised environment is that the overturning decision was based on a longstanding constitutional argument that the 14th Amendment was misused to create the original judgment in Roe v Wade. No country should have its important laws based on a legal falsity.

Crucially important to any consideration of the scare campaign in the Queensland election is that Katter had tried to change the State’s abortion laws last year, on a particular element dealing with babies born alive during a termination operation.

There was no enthusiasm in either major party for Katter’s Bill, which did not even survive the committee stages of its parliamentary scrutiny.

When it failed to pass, Katter put out a statement under this heading: Is the legal killing of babies now LNP, ALP policy?

“It appears the LNP has joined the ALP and abandoned its conservative roots,” Katter’s statement said. “Labor and the LNP colluded to deny Queensland babies of fundamental human rights, collectively rejecting the Termination of Pregnancy (Live Births) Amendment Bill 2024, and recommending it not be passed, in a Committee report tabled last week.”

So why would anyone think that the LNP would embark on abortion reform if it won government?

Abortion was once again used to frighten women who might have wanted to get rid of the Labor government for real reasons.

On October 8, a story popped up on the ABC with the lead paragraph saying that Crisafulli would face “more questions” that day about how he would guarantee no change in abortion laws, but without saying who would be asking them.

Well, the ABC of course. The report noted that the previous day the ABC had asked Katter about abortion and he said he would introduce legislation after the election to wind back the existing laws.

Why did the ABC seek out Katter? There was no mention in the news report that he had attempted abortion law reform in the previous parliament and failed.

But the report quoted Labor’s then health minister Shannon Fentiman saying she was “scared” for Queensland women and girls.

“They are determined to see more MPs elected to wind back a woman’s right to choose and yet David Crisafulli says this is all the Labor scare campaign,” Fentiman said.

Which of course it was. Fentiman and Miles had been active on social media to raise the spectre of “draconian abortion changes” if the LNP won government.

That was despite Katter accusing the LNP and Labor previously of colluding to stop any change to the laws.

But the issue took off and Crisafulli’s protestations that there would be “no change” was weakened by his refusal to answer the ABC’s questions about whether he would deny his MPs a conscience vote on the issue.

The reality is that all members of the Queensland Parliament, regardless of party, have a right to a conscience vote.

Instead of finding a way to put the issue to sleep with some categoric responses, Crisafulli floundered for far too long and basically wedged himself on an issue he didn’t want to talk about.

So it continued to be given oxygen. But why did the ABC journalists ask Katter for his views on October 7? Did Labor put them up to it?

It certainly suited both Katter and Labor for abortion to become an issue. As fate has it, Katter lost one seat to the LNP and will have an even more limited ability to influence parliamentary decisions.

The reality with private members Bills is that they can only progress if the government of the day agrees. So Katter’s threats on the ABC this week that he intends to “test the Parliament” on the issue are fairly empty.

Katter told the ABC he had been asked during the campaign if he would consider a private member’s Bill and said “of course I would, that’s what we do” and expressed surprise “it blew up”.

When asked what his new Bill would seek to achieve — given the failure previously — he responded: “I haven’t worked that out. I’m sorry we can’t give you more detail. I got pulled into the debate, and all I can say is we will be testing the Parliament on it.”

But he then told the ABC — too late for those female voters who got scared — that he was sceptical that LNP MPs, including those previously on-record supporting reform, would support any new Bill.

“I think they were all dog whistling,” Katter said.

“Some of the motivation behind it is all these people going around trying to pretend they’ve got values in one direction when they’ve got no intention of voting against their party, or knowing that a conscience vote isn’t really a conscience vote.”

But he’s pure as the driven snow. No talk of balance of power now.

The bottom line is that abortion was once again used to frighten women who might have wanted to get rid of the Labor government for real reasons.

Politics is debased when the legitimate fears of voters are manipulated to keep a group of politicians in power.