Suggestion: somebody should pass around a hat to buy NSW Opposition Leader Mark Speakman some long pants. In the lower house debate over abortion, he shared with fellow MPs his distress that he had been bullied by activist Dr Joanna Howe.
Dr Howe has become the leading figure in the campaign against liberalising the NSW 2019 abortion act. She had warned him in an email that she was going to “lead a public campaign aimed at encouraging a grassroots opposition to you as Liberal leader” if he voted for the current bill.
Speakman was shocked by Howe’s micro-aggression.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Speakman made a “powerful” speech to the House. He bravely “stood up to” Dr Howe. “I will not cave to brazen bullying like this,” he said.
But grandstanding as a courageous Zelensky defying the might of titanic Russian forces is ludicrous. He should have worn an olive-green T-shirt saying: “Howe pathetic”.
Threatening to vote against a politician is bullying? I thought that it was called politics.
Only a few weeks ago pro-Palestinian activists told their supporters in Parramatta to preference Greens and Liberal candidates over the ALP candidate. “That ensures that they are held to account for the stances they’ve taken on the issues that we brought to them and they’ve simply failed to act,” said the convener of The Muslim Vote, Sheikh Wesam Charkawi.
Was Charkawi a bully, then, or just a tough political operator who believes ardently in his cause?
“I have a democratic right to advocate for him to vote in a certain way,” Howe told the Herald about her exchange with Speakman. “In fact, it was out of courtesy that I contacted him to tell him I would be campaigning against him if he did not vote in a certain way. That is not bullying. It sounds like Speakman would prefer to live in a totalitarian state.”
A totalitarian state seems harsh, but perhaps Parliament could provide a safe space with soft lighting, beige bean bags, trauma counsellors, and an emotional support puppy.
As Howe said in an online video: “Am I a bully or is Mark Speakman just a precious snowflake who can’t handle the democratic process?”
Speakman needs to toughen up. He will never become Premier if he thinks that posing as the aggrieved victim of a young mum with five kids is a vote winner.
Even Premier Chris Minns, who supports the bill, shrugged off the “threats”. “As for threatening politicians about what you will or won’t do, that’s a matter for activists, but generally speaking, Australian politicians, regardless of their background or ideology, react incredibly poorly to that kind of threat,” Minns said.
Minns, by the way, put the boot into Howe as well. He accused her of spreading lies and misinformation on social media, which she has denied.
The bill originally tabled in the Legislative Council was appalling – it would have removed conscience rights for dissenting doctors. But the amended bill being debated this week still expands the scope of abortion practice by allowing nurses practitioners and midwives to prescribe abortion medications.
A recently-published study of 900,000 women from an American thinktank, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, found that “Almost one in 20 of those women needed hospitalisation or a visit to emergency after they were prescribed with the abortion medication,” Monica Tudehope MP pointed out in the debate.
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“Labelling nurses and midwives as ‘experienced’ does not magically make the drugs being administered safer,” she said.
Killing unborn children is not healthcare. When Speakman and the media whinge about bullying, they aim to create a narrative in which vigorous opposition to abortion will be banned as hate speech before the public can discover how destructive it is for women.
It won’t work.
I suggest that the Opposition Leader watch a 1970s film The Paper Chase, about a student at ultra-competitive Harvard Law School. There’s one memorable scene when he fumbles an answer. The professor tosses him a coin and says – rephrased – “Here’s a dime. Call your mother and tell her there is serious doubt about you becoming a politician.”
