The Liberal National party senator Gerard Rennick and the Brisbane Broncos chairman, Karl Morris, are among the financial backers of a prominent anti-abortion “disinformation” campaign targeting marginal seats ahead of the Queensland election.
Billboards, leaflets and advertisements authorised by the lobby group, Cherish Life, include provocative statements about Queensland’s abortion laws that have repeatedly been found to be baseless.
The campaign material explicitly targets Labor and the Greens. It includes claims – branded “blatant lies” during the 2019 federal election – that “even more babies would die” under Labor.
Guardian Australia can reveal third-party election disclosure documents show Rennick donated $1,000 to Cherish Life this week, for the specific purpose of supporting its third-party Queensland election campaign.
Morris, a stockbroker who is on the board of the Brisbane Catholic Foundation, donated $5,000 to Cherish Life for its election campaign in August. He has subsequently donated $15,000 to the LNP.
Many of the lobby group’s other backers remain a mystery.
Guardian Australia can also reveal that Cherish Life has told donors they can remain anonymous – despite new election funding disclosure rules – by paying large donations into a separate “administration” account.
“If you do not want your donation to be disclosed on the ECQ (Electoral Commission of Queensland) website, please ask us to allocate any amount above $999 to the Cherish Life administration account,” the lobby group’s website advises potential backers.
The electoral commission says third-party campaigns have to declare any gifts or donations given for political purposes over $1,000, but that money received for general administration does not have to be declared.
Cherish Life’s campaign material includes several statements that experts say misrepresent the detail of Queensland’s 2018 termination of pregnancy act, which removed abortion from the criminal code after 119 years.
The laws made abortion legal until 22 weeks gestation, and thereafter with the approval of two doctors who take into account “all medical circumstances” and the woman’s “current and future physical, psychological and social circumstances”.
Cherish Life’s election information erroneously claims the law allows pregnancies to be terminated “for any reason” until 37 weeks, and that the law legalises sex-selective abortions.
The Queensland-based deputy medical director of Marie Stopes Australia, Dr Catriona Melville, said Cherish Life’s claims were “disinformation” and “scaremongering”.
“It’s absolutely not correct that abortions are occurring during late term for no reason. Women don’t seek abortion for no reason,” Melville said.
“After 22 weeks you need approval and assessment by two doctors, but that is exceptionally, exceptionally rare.
“Sex selection abortions are not legal, nobody does that. Really the campaign is scaremongering, it’s just disinformation, it’s shaming and stigmatising.”
The Cherish Life chief executive, Teeshan Johnson, told Guardian Australia in a statement that “the claims Cherish Life makes in our flyers and advertising obviously are accurate”.
The rightwing lobby group’s claim that Labor had legalised abortion to birth for any reason was based on their interpretation of the criteria for obtaining a termination after 22 weeks, which they considered “loose” because it included “social reasons”.
“If a woman wanted a sex-selective abortion past 22 weeks gestation it could be easily obtained under the very loose parameters for abortion from 22 weeks up to birth,” Johnson claimed.
That assertion has been disputed, however, by the leading Brisbane obstetrician Carol Portmann, who told Buzzfeed that the idea a doctor would support a termination for psychosocial reasons or sex selection in the latter stages of pregnancy was a “ludicrous fallacy”.
A 2018 ABC Fact Check of the claims about late-term abortions found they were “baseless”.
Johnson told the ABC this week that abortion was “a big point of difference between the LNP and Labor” and endorsed the LNP as “moving in the right direction” by promising to review some aspects of the 2018 laws.
The LNP leader, Deb Frecklington, quickly changed the subject when asked about her party’s position on gestational limits for abortion this week.
“I haven’t got the details of that yet, it’s not a priority,” Frecklington said.
Rennick and Morris did not respond to a request to comment.
