Gladys’ abortion chicken is coming home to roost
It’s extraordinary how politically inept Berejiklian has turned out to be, particularly with her support for the radical NSW abortion bill. But her party room uprising should be no surprise, writes Miranda Devine.
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What a slap in the face to a freshly elected Premier is the YouGov Galaxy poll showing a third of coalition voters would have voted differently had known they known about the Premier’s barbaric abortion bill before the election.
More than 80 per cent of the electorate don’t believe in sex-selection abortion, which the Berejiklian government’s sneaky bill allows, and a majority also are against abortion after 22 weeks, according to the poll conducted for the Australian Christian Lobby over the weekend.
Yet the bill, which the government co-sponsored, farcically, with left-wing independent Alex Greenwich, allows for abortion until birth, with only the fig leaf of a second doctor’s sign-off.
It is so sloppily drafted that critics continue to find egregious, possibly unintended, consequences. This is why legislation of such importance should never have been foisted on the parliament virtually unannounced.
MORE FROM MIRANDA DEVINE: Why is a Liberal government pushing radical abortion laws?
Removing abortion from the Crimes Act is one thing but the replacement law around future abortions needed careful consideration.
It’s not as if the public doesn’t want a say. After the Upper House referred the bill to a committee and allowed a bare four days for public input, more than 14,000 submissions poured in. They came in so fast — three or four a minute — they crashed the parliamentary website.
As Labor MLC Greg Donnelly pointed out in a letter to the Premier on Monday, due process “has been ground into the dust”. He is “dumbfounded” that the Government provided nine witnesses to an Upper house inquiry into koalas, yet not a single witness to the abortion inquiry. Not even the Chief Obstetrician.
The lack of consultation has destabilised the Coalition party room and delegitimised the bill, which now faces a hostile Upper House where the Premier belatedly is realising she will have to back at least some of the very amendments she engineered to be rejected in the Lower House.
MORE FROM MIRANDA DEVINE: NSW abortion bill is simply ‘legal gendercide’
These amendments reflect the community concerns of the weekend’s poll. One amendment prohibited sex-selection abortions. Another protected conscientiously objecting doctors.
Another ensured babies who are born alive after an abortion are given appropriate medical care rather than being left to die, as was the case with 204 babies in Queensland between 2005 and 2015, according to statistics released by the health minister in 2016.
In 2016 in Victoria, 33 babies, more than 10 per cent of the state’s late-term abortions that year, were left to die, according to the 55th survey of peri-natal deaths. All had “suspected or confirmed congenital abnormalities.”
Perhaps they never would have survived. But if it is to be NSW government policy to deny care to discarded infants, the Premier should spell out which lives are deemed unworthy, rather than pretend “live birth abortions” are morally neutral. Take responsibility for the enormity of the legislation.
MORE FROM MIRANDA DEVINE: There’s only one question left: What was Gladys thinking?
It’s extraordinary how politically inept Berejiklian has turned out to be, but her party room uprising should be no surprise to her. After all, she witnessed first-hand how a voter revolt over the government’s highhanded greyhound ban sounded the death knell for her predecessor Mike Baird’s leadership.
She also saw the fate which befell her federal counterparts, Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull, after they failed to anticipate the wishes of their backbench.
Afflicted with a premature case of hubris, Berejiklian took it to the next level, authorising her Health Minister Brad Hazzard to sneak around doing deals with their opponents before springing it on the party room via a weekend press conference where he played backstop to Greenwich.
Any government which imagines itself morally superior to the people who gave it power is destined to meet a sticky end.