Debates on NSW abortion legislation show Labor won’t fight the right
Progressive legislation allowing nurse practitioners and midwives to prescribe medication abortions has passed in the NSW parliament. Yet the debate over these laws illustrated the abject refusal of the Labor Party to challenge proactively the politics of the right.
The new bill, introduced by Greens MP Jenny Leong and MLC Amanda Cohn, was moved as a response to the postcode lottery that is abortion access in NSW. The 2019 legalisation of abortion has done little to make it more accessible in practice. Only three of the state’s 220 public hospitals are currently providing routine, open access to formal abortion services, according to researchers at the University of Sydney.
A particularly egregious example of the barriers facing NSW women was brought to light by the ABC’s November 2024 investigation into abortion access at the Orange public hospital in regional NSW. Hospital staff were sent a flow chart explicitly banning them from providing abortions where there was “no identified pregnancy complication”. All women seeking abortions for non-medical reasons were to be directed to private providers like GPs or the nearest Family Planning clinic—neither of which provide surgical abortions. Staff reported to the ABC at the time that they believed this was part of an “unspoken ban” on abortion for non-medical reasons due to anti-abortion attitudes “high in the health bureaucracy” of the Western NSW Local Health District.
The new legislation will help provide wider access by allowing a greater variety of healthcare providers to prescribe medication abortions. But that’s no substitute for widespread, free, on demand access to surgical abortions. Medication abortions are generally prescribed only up to nine weeks of pregnancy—there will inevitably be cases in which people either don’t realise they’re pregnant in time or simply change their minds about continuing a pregnancy.
The Greens’ original draft of the bill acknowledged this and included other measures to boost abortion access. The two most important were a requirement for local health districts to ensure that public abortion is accessible to everyone in NSW within a reasonable distance of their homes, and stricter obligations for “conscientious objector” doctors to transfer patients directly to a provider who will give them an abortion. These measures were stripped out of the bill by Labor and Liberal MLCs backing up amendments moved by right-wing crank Rob Borsak of the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers.
Of course, this still wasn’t enough for the anti-abortion right, who mounted a repulsive sexist campaign against the bill. Leading the charge was Tony Abbott, who had the backing of all the usual suspects: the Catholic Church, alongside other ideologues from the religious and secular far right. But the campaign drew attention because of the addition of far-right “anti-abortion influencer” and Labor member Dr Joanna Howe, whose self-proclaimed goal is to “make abortion unthinkable”.
It can seem as though abortion is a settled question in Australian politics. Polling repeatedly finds that a strong majority of people support unconditional abortion access. Attempts to wind back abortion rights are unpopular, as illustrated by the desperation with which Liberal leaders like Dutton and Queensland Premier David Crisafulli ducked the question during recent election campaigns.
But unpopularity has not deterred the right from campaigning stridently to chip away at abortion rights whenever they get the opportunity. As the US illustrates, we cannot be complacent about gains for progressive politics. They must be vigorously defended and strengthened in the fight against a right that show no signs of giving up on their reactionary agenda.
Many in parliament and the media decried the campaign against the bill as an attempt to bring Trump-style politics to Australia. It’s true that Trump has given a fillip of confidence, and something of a political role model, to many far-right ideologues. But sexist, anti-abortion politics and the religious right have a longstanding political home in Australian politics, not only on the fringes, but also in the mainstream parties of capitalist rule.
Labor’s pandering to the religious right is particularly shameful. Labor has a tradition of allowing a conscience vote on laws relating to abortion, meaning parliamentarians are not bound to vote with the official party position. This policy only legitimates anti-abortion politics as a spiritual belief that is above political challenge, rather than what it is: run-of-the-mill bigotry. No comparable exception exists for left-wing opposition to Labor’s line on morally pressing questions like the plight of refugees or Australia’s complicity in the war on Gaza—as Senator Fatima Payman found out just last year. Bigoted and sexist ideas can be tolerated because, unlike left-wing opposition, they do little to disrupt Labor’s enthusiastic commitment to ruling for the rich.
Labor parliamentarians not only worked with the right-wing parties to strip the bill of important measures; even when the bill passed the lower house in this reduced form, five Labor MPs voted against it.
Why does hard social conservatism have such a safe home in the Labor Party? In part, it’s about electoral opportunism. In certain conservative electorates, pandering to right-wing religious institutions by parroting their regressive social politics can help win votes. But it’s also about the political weight conservative religious institutions, particularly the Catholic Church, enjoy in Australian capitalism. The Catholic Church on its own is a massive, wealthy landowning institution, a bastion of conservative politics, and runs a vast network of private schools, hospitals, shelters and charities that function (poorly) to patch holes in the social safety net that Labor and Liberal have taken turns defunding and neglecting.
In the case of the NSW abortion laws, there has been an unholy coalescence of Labor’s internal anti-abortion right with the party’s unanimous, bland, neoliberal unwillingness to spend on making public health care better for ordinary people. Just as despicable as the open bigotry of Labor parliamentarians like Greg Donnelly were the cynical speeches made by the likes of Penny Sharpe, who claimed “[Labor] realise there are issues for women” in accessing abortion, while at the same justifying her vote to strip the bill of its strongest provisions on the basis that cancer and heart attack treatment are not also mandated in legislation.
In the wake of a federal election result that Labor are trying to sell as the victory of the “sensible centre” over “extremism”, we would do well to draw the lesson that Labor governments are no bulwark against the bigoted politics of the right. Indeed, on questions like abortion, the call is coming from inside the house.
