Source : the age
Barnaby Joyce — lately of the Coalition cabinet, now of One Nation — last week addressed an anti-abortion rally organised by activist Joanna Howe in support of a bill to wind back abortion access in NSW. The former NSW Liberal leader Mark Speakman has called Howe’s campaign the “Americanisation” of politics. He is right that something is being imported, but wrong to think it will help either major party.
The superficial reading writes itself. A populist party turns pro-life; women are flocking to it — first-preference support up from 9 to 28 per cent in under a year, with Pauline Hanson now outpolling the prime minister among women — so abortion must be part of the draw, right? The data says otherwise.
Asked why they moved, they answer much as men do: the cost of living and contempt for the major parties and the sense that no one in Canberra is listening.
We do not have to guess whether an abortion campaign can deliver the female vote because the United States has run the experiment. Twice the Democrats believed a galvanising women’s cause would hand them women: a woman atop the ticket in 2016, and the post-Roe election of 2024. Both times the predicted revolt failed to arrive. Women still favoured the Democrat — but within the same 40-year gender gap, not the landslide strategists banked on. Neither Hillary Clinton’s gender nor the death of Roe mobilised women because women do not vote as a bloc.
In Australia, both major parties are poised to mishandle this from opposite directions. The Liberal temptation is to read the Hanson surge as a values shift and chase One Nation onto pro-life ground. Labor’s is the mirror image: weaponise the same debate, cast a divided right as extreme to frighten women back into the tent. Both make the same error — treating abortion as a lever on a female bloc — and worse, deepening the distrust driving the realignment: voters can tell when a matter of conscience is being handled as an electoral tactic.
For the Liberals, the trap is sprung either way. The party is being hollowed out from both ends — in the regions, one in three former Coalition voters without a degree now favour One Nation. In the teal seats, professional women left years ago, abandoning the social conservatism this fight revives.
Chase One Nation rightward and the teal exodus deepens; hold the line and the base keeps walking. And a woman at the top is no remedy: Hanson moves women not because she is a woman but because she built her own party free of the baggage female Liberals carry. Gender at the lectern was never a successful strategy — ask Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris.
Labor will be tempted in the opposite direction. They will perceive this debate less as a danger than as a gift — a chance to brand the whole right as extreme and herd anxious women back behind Labor’s shield. That is the same instrumentalism in progressive dress, and it will work no better: a scare campaign will not deliver women to Labor. And the government can least afford the distraction.
Its two-party-preferred lead rests on preferences and a splintered right. Its primary is softening, and the disaffection feeding One Nation has been emboldened since its broken word on capital gains and negative gearing. A culture war over abortion is the wrong fight for a party whose voters are leaving over the cost of living, not the conscience vote.
So what should a serious party do? Not find a better lever — there isn’t one — but put it down. Three things follow.
First, refuse to make abortion a party position. One Nation’s real innovation — the genuinely American move — is to adopt it as party policy. The answer is not to match it but to decline it: to keep abortion a question of individual conscience and a free vote. That refusal is itself a signal of trustworthiness that may draw women back: a party will not trade something this personal for a few points of primary vote.
Second — for the Liberals especially — resist the gravitational pull of One Nation. The party cannot win back the regional right faster than it sheds the urban centre, and the female “reward” for going pro-life is a mirage. One Nation cannot be beaten by imitation, only on the one thing it cannot provide: competent, trustworthy government.
Third, abandon the conceit of the “women’s vote” — the notion that women are a single constituency to be addressed with a tailored pitch, not citizens whose views are their own and plural. Women are not waiting to be told what they think. They can tell the difference between being courted and being respected, and after a decade of collapsing trust they are in no forgiving mood.
The trust the major parties have spent will not be earned back by finding the right issue to win women, but by no longer treating women – or any voter – as a bloc to be captured. The lesson of America, and increasingly our own polling, is the same: stop trying to win the women’s vote and you might begin to win women’s trust.
Jane Buncle is a barrister and former member of the administrative committee of the NSW Liberal Party. She is a member of the Liberal Reform Commission led by Senator James McGrath.
Jane Buncle is a barrister and former member of the administrative committee of the NSW Liberal Party. She is a member of the Liberal Reform Commission led by Senator James McGrath.
