Why reawakened abortion debate won’t help the Liberals or Labor

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