Black day for SA Libs: don’t mention abortion
While the Queensland Liberals narrowly avoided blowing themselves up over the abortion question on the eve of the state election last month, the SA Liberals are showing just how bad things can get.
The South Australian Liberal Party is providing a dysfunctional demonstration of Peter Dutton’s wise counsel about the dangers of conservative parties going to war over abortion.
While the Queensland Liberal National Party narrowly avoided blowing themselves up over the abortion question on the eve of the state election last month, the SA Liberals are showing how bad things can get when they turn on themselves over social issues.
Both the authority of new SA Liberal leader Vincent Tarzia and the party’s performance in a must-win by-election last Saturday have been seriously damaged by an internal abortion war that has left voters unimpressed and is letting Labor Premier Peter Malinauskas govern without scrutiny.
Even though the Malinauskas government is home to several pro-life social conservatives from Labor’s Catholic Right, it is the Liberals alone who are suffering from conservative MLC Ben Hood’s push to roll back the liberalisation of SA abortion laws under one-term Liberal moderate premier Steven Marshall.
Tarzia has now been Liberal leader for just 12 weeks, taking over after his predecessor David Speirs suddenly quit the leadership ahead of a looming drug scandal that is now the subject of police charges.
Aside from the significant distraction of having his predecessor photographed apparently snorting white powder and holding a tragicomic by-election eve press conference outside the Christies Beach Magistrates Court, Tarzia’s main problem has been a total lack of internal discipline and a complete absence of optimism and belief on the Liberal side.
A key reason for this: Hood’s move to spring a private member’s bill on the party last month to wind back the liberalisation of abortion laws under the Liberal Marshall government.
Both abortion and voluntary euthanasia became a flashpoint for conservative rank-and-file recruitment, much of it linked to senator Alex Antic, who enjoys huge support among traditional social conservatives.
The Right argues that the moves by Hood and others to change the abortion laws are merely a move to push the party back towards the social centre after what they call the “Labor-lite” leadership of Marshall.
Many in the party disagree, not so much because they are pro-choice but more maddened by the fact the party became violently consumed by a protracted brawl over the rights of the unborn when they should have been targeting Labor over power prices, law and order, and healthcare.
The management of the issue for the Liberals has been rendered impossible by the involvement of outside actors beyond the parliament, none more so than anti-abortion University of Adelaide law professor Joanna Howe.
To describe Howe as passionate is an understatement. The law professor has used social media to distribute images of female Labor and Liberal MPs and medical academics who support the Marshall abortion laws, where she caricatured their faces in monstrous cartoon form and labelled them “The Baby Killers Club”.
Her actions demonstrate a truth about the unshakeable internal logic of those at the far end of the anti-abortion debate – they believe this issue is more important than any other, and they believe that anyone who disagrees with them, to use Howe’s language, is a baby killer.
Howe has been upfront in claiming authorship of the social media images and is promising to release more.
“I, 100 per cent, stand by the claim that is made in the imagery and verbiage around the club,” she told ABC radio this month.
“If you are for lethally injecting a child in the third trimester, when that child could be delivered alive instead of stillborn, then you are a member of that club that seeks to kill babies.
“If people feel it’s defamatory then they should put their money where their mouth is and sue me.”
The drama around the late-night vote on the Hood bill became so ugly that Liberal moderate and pro-choice MLC Michelle Lensink – who is battling breast cancer and undergoing chemotherapy – had to drive in from home to vote after an agreement to pair her vote was breached by fellow Liberal MLC Jing Lee.
It then emerged that Lee was fearful the Right was targeting her preselection and that she figured reneging on the deal with Lensink could have helped her save her political hide.
Howe was present on the night of the debate and confirmed approaching Lee ahead of the vote. Other MPs have complained about her conduct and she has now been banned from the corridors and offices of state parliament, with Liberal Legislative Council president Terry Stephens saying members must do their jobs “without interference, intimidation or undue influence from visitors”.
Amid all this internal chaos, the Liberal Party was forced to cobble together a campaign to hold on to Speirs’ seat of Black, where the former leader finally quit politics for good last month after police charged him with two counts of supplying a proscribed substance after arresting him in the SA Riverland.
Liberal supporters staffing pre-poll stations last week told Inquirer that three themes kept coming up from voters in the former Liberal stronghold: unhappiness with the Liberal candidate living outside the electorate; strong support for the leadership of Malinauskas; and a repeatedly stated conviction that “the Libs are a rabble”.
The result spoke for itself. Labor’s Alex Dighton won the seat last Saturday with a staggering swing of 12.8 per cent, leaving the Libs with just 13 of 47 seats in the SA House of Assembly – their equal lowest representation in history.
The result marks a low ebb for a party that only 30 years ago was the model of factional detente in South Australia.
SA was significantly over-represented in the Howard government with the Liberals holding several blue-collar federal seats and senior moderate and conservative figures working productively at the cabinet table.
The days of figures such as Howard era ministers Nick Minchin, Ian McLachlan and Alexander Downer working alongside the likes of Robert Hill and Amanda Vanstone seem an unrecoverable thing of the past.
For his part, the battling Tarzia called his few remaining troops together on Monday at shadow cabinet where he put Hood and others on notice that the unauthorised pursuit of any further private member’s bills on social issues would lead to their removal from the frontbench.
Echoing the warning from his federal leader, Tarzia told Inquirer the abortion debate was “an unnecessary distraction”.
“I am glad it’s behind us,” he said. “We won’t be visiting that again. We will be moving on to what’s really important to the people of this state.”
Whether his own party lets that happen remains to be seen, and based on recent performance would be something of a miracle.
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