On front doorsteps in Brisbane’s middle suburbs, Liberal National party candidates campaigning for the upcoming Queensland election have started getting questions about abortion.
“It’s becoming an issue … in places we thought we might win,” says one party member.
Two weeks ago, as the Queensland election campaign began, Labor social media posts suggesting the LNP had a “secret plan” to limit abortion rights and access were dismissed as a scare campaign.
The LNP leader, David Crisafulli, says his party has “ruled out” changes to Labor’s 2018 laws that decriminalised abortion.
Abortion is, as Crisafulli says, “not a priority” for the LNP. But it has quickly become a problem.
What might have started as a last-ditch Labor tactic has now become a mainstream issue, which LNP moderates say is damaging the party’s chances of regaining a footing in more progressive Brisbane electorates.
This week the crossbench MP Robbie Katter pledged he would trigger a conscience vote to restrict – and possibly even criminalise – abortion.
Crisafulli, whose ticket includes the former Christian right-backed senator Amanda Stoker and other MPs and candidates who are on record opposing abortion, has now been asked about the issue for five straight days.
On Wednesday, he batted away 39 separate questions about the issue. Every question gets the same answer. The attempts to deflect are only adding fuel to the fire.
‘Divisions are still there, they haven’t gone away’
Soon after Crisafulli became LNP leader in 2020, he struck a sort of informal stability deal with his party room to put internal fights to one side to bolster the LNP’s chances of taking back government.
At the 2020 election, the LNP’s internecine bickering contributed to a weak result. Party members referred to unpopular office bearers – who tried to roll the leader, Deb Frecklington, just weeks before the campaign – as “the cabal”.
The party’s identity crisis was writ large in an email from the then president, Cynthia Hardy, who said a review of the 2020 loss would seek to define what the LNP stood for. “What is our raison d’etre?” Hardy asked members.
The four-year rebuild has now put the LNP in a position where, according to the polls, it is on the verge of winning government in Queensland. Sources say key to the success has been the informal stability arrangement – MPs from the moderates, conservatives and the Christian right all agreeing to drop their personal crusades and focus on a singular goal. The party found a unifying purpose: beating Labor.
“But those divisions are still there, they haven’t gone away” one LNP source says.
The shift in the campaign to focus on abortion rights, and the prospect of a conscience vote, serves to highlight those divisions in a way that can cause significant damage to the party, just weeks before voters go to the polls.
The issue is so vexed for the LNP because it divides the party – the majority of its grassroots members, its platform and its MPs – from more progressive views of the electorate.
Social reforms such as abortion and voluntary assisted dying have been key to Labor’s electoral success in Queensland, but particularly Brisbane where the LNP holds just four seats. Both of those reforms were progressed cautiously – drafted by the law reform commission and ultimately backed by polling that showed overwhelming support.
And Labor has sought to exploit those sorts of social policy debates, knowing they harm the LNP in city areas where the party is eager to re-establish a presence.
With the LNP cruising in the polls, moderates had held out hope of beating Labor in middle suburban seats – Ferny Grove, Stafford, Mansfield, Mount Ommaney and Aspley – areas beyond the reach of Greens insurgency, but still places where votes have more “small-l” liberal values.
Many of these areas vote for the LNP at local and federal elections but are Labor strongholds in the state parliament. A Labor source says the reality is the state LNP is “way too wacko for Brisbane to stomach”.
The added concern for LNP moderates is the potential makeup of the LNP party room after the election, if the party wins regional or city fringe seats but not Brisbane ones.
“We need moderates in the next parliament,” one party member says.
Prospect of a conscience vote
Party sources say the “Christian soldiers” grouping within the LNP has relatively little influence within the current state parliamentary team.
There are really only two hardcore members of the Christian right in the LNP party room – the retiring rightwinger Mark Robinson and the veteran Sunshine Coast MP Fiona Simpson. Others often attributed as being associated with the faction, such as Tim Mander or Christian Rowan, are more neatly aligned with Peter Dutton’s mainstream conservative grouping.
But before elections, factions always battle for influence. Robinson is handing his seat to Stoker, the former federal senator and figurehead of the Christian right.
Candidates who have won preselection for winnable LNP seats include several who have a history of opposing abortion rights, or with links to Pentecostal churches.
Particularly concerning to LNP moderates is the recent takeover of a large inner-city party division – and the attempted takeover of another – by the Christian right.
The party’s Griffith federal divisional council – covering Queensland’s most progressive federal seat – is now helmed by Alan Baker, a veteran of anti-abortion campaigns in the state. Baker sent a pre-election email on party letterhead saying the government had been “captured by transgender ideology”.
“Fringe infiltrators can see an election victory around the corner and are desperate to increase their influence,” an LNP source said at the time Baker won control of the branch.
With polls still pointing to a comfortable LNP win, the risk for Crisafulli is that the prospect of a conscience vote – brought about by Katter – serves to highlight internal conflicts that have been paused, rather than solved. The opposition leader won’t say publicly whether he would allow a conscience vote, in line with party convention. The federal MP Colin Boyce said it would be “extraordinary” not to.
Crisafulli’s backers are mostly moderates, and MPs say the opposition has been “remarkably united” during the past term. But they also acknowledge that concern about abortion springs from “legitimate concern about what happens when we get in”.
“It’s also difficult because we don’t have a track record to point back to,” the MP says. “We obviously try not to hark back to the Newman years.”
In more than three decades, the conservatives have only won one Queensland election. After 2012, the landslide win by Campbell Newman, the LNP quickly became unstuck by factional warfare. The party’s MPs went to war with its organisational wing.
The nature of the 2012 landslide also meant the election of new MPs who the party might not have expected to win. A state that voted for Newman, framed as a more moderate Liberal, wound up with a party room that veered more conservative and pushed that agenda in government.
Griffith University political scientist and commentator Paul Williams says he expects those sorts of internal issues to come to the fore within 12 months of an LNP election win.
“Those things are still there in the background,” he said.
‘Not part of the plan’
LNP figures predicted Labor attacks about abortion when Stoker – who lost her Senate seat in 2022 – was preselected to run in Oodgeroo.
Stoker announced herself to the public with a firebrand speech on the Senate floor, describing Queensland’s abortion decriminalisation laws as “barbarism [with] the cloak of civility”.
In 2022, she told the Conservative Political Action Conference the Coalition would be in opposition for a “very long time” if it did not focus on conservative social issues.
But since being announced as a candidate, Stoker has been uncharacteristically quiet as the LNP attempts to stifle intensifying debate about abortion and other social issues, and instead focus on kitchen-table ones.
Her appearances on Sky News and rightwing podcasts and anti-abortion rallies have all been replaced with community breakfasts and visits to small businesses.
Asked on Thursday whether she would support changes to Labor’s 2018 abortion laws, Stoker used the party line: “It’s not part of our plan, the LNP has ruled it out.”
The LNP’s continued refusal to engage beyond its rehearsed line – that abortion reform is “not part of our plan” – now risks backfiring amid ramping pressure from different sides of the debate.
At a pre-election meeting of a conservative Christian group last month, attenders were urged to email, call or speak to candidates and “just ask them the question: how would you vote if abortion came up”.
“The fact you say that puts it in their mind that abortion is an election issue,” the forum moderator said.
The LNP has not responded to the Australian Christian Lobby’s pre-election survey, which includes questions about abortion.
The pro-choice service Children by Choice also sent questions to every state MP asking whether they supported, and would protect, ongoing access to termination of pregnancy. None have responded.
“It feels ominous, it’s a scary position,” says Jill McKay, the chief executive officer of Children by Choice.
“It’s a very simple question.
“We’re not trying to polarise who people vote for, but it is a very deep concern that one of our major political parties is unable to present to Queensland what their policies are.
“Women who vote for the LNP need to access abortion. Women who vote for the ALP need to access abortion. Women who vote for the Greens need to access abortion.”
LNP sources acknowledge that the Katter plan to bring the issue to the next parliament “fucks us”.
“[Crisafulli] needs to come out and say something more definitive,” one party source says.
But another warns that sticking to the agreed lines remains the only tactic that could keep the informal stability arrangement in place.
“The discipline that this whole campaign has been built on would dissolve in a second,” the source says.
