{"id":710608,"date":"2026-06-02T15:21:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-02T15:21:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/710608\/"},"modified":"2026-06-02T15:21:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-02T15:21:09","slug":"barnaby-joyce-rallies-anti-abortion-activists-ahead-of-tight-nsw-vote-abortion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/710608\/","title":{"rendered":"Barnaby Joyce rallies anti-abortion activists ahead of tight NSW vote | Abortion"},"content":{"rendered":"

One Nation\u2019s Barnaby Joyce has joined pro-life campaigners to pile pressure on Nationals MPs to vote to criminalise some abortions ahead of a tight vote in New South Wales<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Anti-abortion activists have threatened to campaign for One Nation against major parties to force new limits on terminating pregnancies on the back of its polling surge.<\/p>\n

Introduced to chants of \u201cNats must act,\u201d Joyce addressed a rally against \u201csex-selective\u201d abortions outside NSW parliament on Tuesday night.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou must keep that fire burning for those people who can\u2019t stand up for themselves, and I call them people, they\u2019re not foetuses,\u201d Joyce said. \u201cThey are people.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPolitically, does this make you popular? Nup, nup. Probably lose half the votes every time you do it. But you know why you do it? Because it\u2019s the right thing to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

He encouraged the crowd to campaign against sitting politiciansn on abortion.<\/p>\n

\u2018The one thing politicians fear is losing their job,\u201d Joyce said. \u201cThey\u2019re very mindful of that. What I see before me here is about 1,500 people who can hand out how to vote cards.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dr Joanna Howe, who organised the rally and invited Joyce, told the crowd the four Nationals members of the NSW upper house were the only people standing in the way of the bill being approved. It would still need lower house approval to become law.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are so close to passing the first-ever pro-life bill through a house of parliament this country has ever seen,\u201d Howe said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe message to the Nats is: if the Nats don\u2019t pass this bill, then One Nation is going to take your seats \u2026 If you don\u2019t vote for this bill, Barnaby\u2019s coming for you.\u201d<\/p>\n

The bill, moved by the Libertarian upper house member, John Ruddick, is a ban only on sex-selective abortion. Howe told the crowd that bill would be just the start of the legislative campaign.<\/p>\n

\u201cBusiness has changed,\u201d she said. \u201cEvery year in this state, we will introduce a bill until we protect all the babies.\u201d<\/p>\n

She told Guardian Australia she next planned to lobby for a ban on late-term abortions.<\/p>\n

Howe said Tuesday\u2019s Sydney rally was her biggest pro-life rally yet and she planned to organise grassroots campaigns in every Nationals-held seat ahead of NSW\u2019s state election in March 2027.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause there will now be One Nation candidates in those seats, we know that we can unseat pro-abortion Labor people, pro-abortion Liberal people and pro-abortion Nationals,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Speakers addressed Tuesday\u2019s crowd from a truck with handpainted banners of two foetuses captioned \u201cEmma and Ruth\u201d, the names Howe attached to an image of what she thought were foetuses but were actually baby sugar gliders<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Joanna Howe addresses protesters outside state parliament in Sydney. Photograph: Dean Lewins\/AAP<\/p>\n

A counter-protest of about 150 people assembled nearby in Martin Place, where a University of Sydney student, Lucy, originally from the US, warned eight states had introduced sex-selective abortion bans like that being considered in NSW before Roe v Wade was overturned in 2022.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey were able to get way with it in America and then they kept going bill by bill, chipping away at abortion rights, chipping away at freedom, until one day, we woke up and our bodies were apparently no longer ours to control,\u201d Lucy said.<\/p>\n

The NSW bill is the latest in a series of attempts to wind back abortion access since it was decriminalised in all states and territories<\/a> almost three years ago.<\/p>\n

The bill will be debated in NSW\u2019s upper house on Wednesday and go to a vote in coming days, and, if passed, go to the lower house. No party has a majority in either house and Labor, Liberal and National MPs have been granted conscience votes on the issue.<\/p>\n

Alex Greenwich, the independent lower house MP, said the vote would be tight, made worse by the suspension of a Labor minister<\/a>, Penny Sharpe.<\/p>\n

\u201cMark Latham and [Liberal] Damien Tudehope now control the upper house,\u201d Greenwich said. \u201cAs such anything can happen.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One Nation\u2019s Barnaby Joyce has joined pro-life campaigners to pile pressure on Nationals MPs to vote to criminalise…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":710609,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,44],"class_list":["post-710608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=710608"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710608\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/710609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=710608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=710608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=710608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}