Reborn abortion debate could terminate a viable Dutton government

When Mad Katter the Younger put abortion on the agenda ahead of the Queensland election, did he dream of terminating an unborn government? His words seriously damaged Queensland Opposition Leader David Crisafulli as well as the federal Opposition Leader Peter Dutton.

Robbie Katter, the leader of Katter’s Australian Party, announced he’d consider forcing a vote to recriminalise abortion if the Liberal National Party were to win the Queensland election. Inevitably, Coalition members in Queensland and beyond were asked to declare their stance. Which means that Dutton, who has been a model of messaging discipline as he prepares for the coming federal election, is in danger of being pulled off course.

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has spoken out on abortion. It will not help Peter Dutton’s election prospects.Credit: Dan Peled

This is an unhoped-for gift to Labor. Australians are overwhelmingly in favour of legal abortion. A political party that is perceived to be against legal and accessible abortion would be at a disadvantage among the 82 per cent of the population who, Pew research has found, believe abortion should be available in “all or most cases”.

Dutton knows, as Labor knows, as everyone in politics knows, that if this becomes an election issue, it could significantly harm his chances of scraping into government. Which makes it all the more curious that some in the wider Liberal and National parties are giving the question oxygen right now. It’s worth considering what is going on.

One crazy theory is that someone or some group on the Coalition side is trying to dislodge Dutton. It isn’t unheard of for kamikaze groups within political parties to deliberately cruel their own side’s chances of winning in an attempt to destabilise an internal ideological opponent. Just ask Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull. But the Liberal moderates have no interest in debating abortion. And Dutton is from the conservative faction; it would be a particularly moronic form of self-harm if conservatives were to thwart their own man as he comes so close to national leadership.

Another possibility is what I like to think of as the “Beirut warehouse theory” after the warehouse that exploded in Lebanon in 2020. Hundreds were killed, thousands were injured and tens of thousands of homes were destroyed. The contents of the warehouse were linked to Hezbollah, in particular its leader Hassan Nasrallah. Now, obviously the Beirut warehouse did not explode because it was stashed with humanitarian aid destined for the poverty-stricken people of Lebanon. It exploded because it was full of ammonium nitrate, which had been carelessly kept for years so close to the civilian population. According to this theory, a handful of conservatives have been cultivating explosive attitudes and are now powerless to stop themselves from destroying everything around them after being exposed to a catalyst.

Alternatively, there is a plausible case to be made that the abortion debate is being whipped up on our shores by overseas agents trying to demonstrate global support for their issue, with no care for our local election cycles. In the US, presidential candidate Donald Trump recently indicated that he may be in favour of legal pregnancy termination. Solidarity from across the Pacific would give the US pro-life movement a much-needed morale boost as their candidate wobbles.

Perhaps it is a mixture of all the above, aggravated by a weakened sense of a common reality between left and right. In the first half of this month, a kind of conservative Coachella has descended on Australia: the Conservative Political Action Conference was held in Brisbane at the beginning of October and the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference was held in Sydney this week. An excitable festival-goer could be forgiven for forgetting, among so much in-group affirmation, that there is a big wide nation of voters, with many more mixed ideas, outside the conference centre. It was in front of an ARC audience that Coalition senator Jacinta Price was asked about her views on abortion. Her reply, likening late-term terminations to infanticide, made its way into the news.

This points to a problem that afflicts both sides of politics. Just as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has struggled to moderate extreme progressive attitudes on economic interventionism, asylum-seekers and Palestine in the Labor Party, it’s the task of a Coalition leader to drag the extremes in his ranks into line with the electorate. Indeed, it is only compulsory voting that protects the Australian system from looking as polarised as the US system. Many of the people who join political parties on both sides these days have much more trenchant views on most things than the voters who ultimately decide the direction of the nation.

Which is a damn shame, because the broader electorate now seems more capable of grasping grey areas on many topics than some partisans involved in policymaking. Abortion is one of them.

The “debate”, insofar as there currently is one, has been littered with claims that babies are sometimes born alive during late-term abortions and are then left to die, without palliative care. If this were the case, it would be distressing, even if the fetus had a condition that precluded it from living. Surely a humane society would strive to afford a dignified and painless exit even to those who have never drawn breath.

Similarly, if, as pro-lifers claim, late-term abortions are being carried out on healthy fetuses, it is worth asking how a woman has been driven to such a difficult decision, and how she might be better supported in some way. Late-term abortion is always a symptom of tragedy, not a cure, and it should be treated as such.

These nuances rarely survive the jostling for power within political parties, let alone the desperate simplifications of an election contest. For whatever reason pro-lifers suddenly feel compelled to make abortion a political issue, they should remember that doing so is unlikely to prevent any termination but that of a viable Dutton government.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.

Get a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up for our Opinion newsletter.