If I was in a position to be advising the leader and other decision makers of the Liberal Party of Australia on what to expect in the upcoming Australian federal election, I would be predicting with a high degree of confidence that federal Labor will take note how pathetically the Queensland LNP performed on the question of abortion, and will try to force the issue again using intense dishonesty and broad scare campaigns.

They will masterfully employ maliciously deceitful euphemisms like “women’s health”, “reproductive rights” and will falsely accuse the coalition and every candidate of being “anti women”, “anti choice”, “wanting to control women’s bodies” and “literally from The Handmaid’s Tale”. Every valid counter argument will be predictably labeled “misinformation” by Labor/Greens and the media (excuse the tautology).

The goal of this brazenly Marxist strategy is to force the LNP to embarrass themselves by deflecting the question because they want to upset no one, or to surrender the moral high ground and join the progressive feminists in their valley of moral ambivalence.

There are in fact three ways to respond to the wedge strategy, and the LNP leaders and advisors enthusiastically embraced the two worst options. That they won by half the majority they were predicted to is not evidence it worked, but that Queeslanders really didn’t want another four years of Labor, let alone the pugnacious Miles.

First Crisafulli tried to pivot and deflect:

“We’re taking forward a plan to the election. It’s not part of our plan.”

Dodge and deflect is the correct way to deal with unwanted media questions, but it doesn’t work forever! Even though it works for a while, voters subconsciously hate it. Do it too much, and they start consciously hating it. Mr Crisafulli stubbornly said that line more than 130 times in just one week, and it began to look like he was annoyed, uncomfortable and hiding his intentions. LNP polling sank, and Miles looked like a genius.

Eventually, the LNP leader guaranteed that abortion laws would not be changed by the next Queensland Parliament and further that he was “pro-choice”, putting himself on the right side of “progressive” feminists and leftists – who will never vote Liberal/National.

When (not if) this happens during the federal campaign, Mr Dutton, who distinguished himself with strategic sobriety and pause on the question of enshrining an race-based bureaucracy in the constitution, will be wise to choose neither of those responses to the wedge, but to instead boldly dare to differentiate the centre-right party as opposed to the extremes of the abortion industry.

There are a lot of confusing, dishonest statistics about support for abortion, conducted by bad faith actors with push polling questions and misrepresented agendas. The primary fact an election campaign can take to the bank is that even among “pro-choice” voters, support for third trimester abortion of healthy babies by healthy mothers plummets to untenable levels.

There can be no credible debate that a baby born alive after a failed abortion is neither human nor entitled to human rights. The mother is no longer pregnant, the baby is no longer located in her womb, and anyone still wanting to end that baby’s life is objectively exposed as heartlessly cruel. That we even need laws to state the obvious about their human rights is an indictment on our society – that we don’t have them: an indictment on every politician and parliament.

Labor/Greens must be exposed as the psychopaths that their extreme abortion policies reveal them to be. The leftists and their harloted media will howl with indignation, but the vast majority of voting Australians will see the humanity, the suffering, the truly barbaric cruelty of ideological extremism, and they will see straight through the synchronised histrionics.

If the media would in fact be so generous as to go too far, their negativity in every area will be increasingly questioned, because the pictures of babies gasping for air with a traumatised midwife crying in the background will be unerasable.

And so they should be.

If Peter Dutton will so boldly claim the moral high ground, the federal Liberal campaign will be unassailable, and will receive such support from right thinking people: members, donors, and not insignificant conservative advocates and lobbies.

In fact, many naive lefty Christians – the bleeding heart but socialist inclined Labor-voting kind – will be persuaded that a blood-thirsty, kill-‘cause-the-mother-said-so policy platform is unsupportable.

Every Australian should know (and can do when Labor makes this an election issue) that by the time the mother is 23 weeks (6 months) pregnant, the late term abortion procedure always involves delivering the baby after a painful injection to the heart of potassium chloride. Even American death row prisoners get prior pain relief, but not innocent Australian children.

In most if not all states and territories in Australia, any healthy mother pregnant with a healthy baby can get two abortionists to agree for her to deliberately end the life of her baby for the worst of reasons, including gender selection, partner coercion or for any emotional or social reason, right up until the due date, legally.

Late term elective abortion numbers in Queensland alone have doubled since Labor “decriminalised abortion”.

Late term abortion-on-demand is entirely illegal in England, Wales and Scotland. No one is opposed to triage, and when the mother’s life is at imminent risk, the quickest and safest way to end the pregnancy is a caesarian section. The premature baby is highly likely to survive with the same care any other person at that stage of development can expect to receive, so the ethical decision is entirely clear to anyone not actually just wanting the baby dead.

Rusted on Labor/Greens voters and the media (but I repeat myself) will never free themselves from the shackles of calloused consciences, but the undecided voters, that middle third of Australians in the centre are not ideologues, and will fee human horror at the simply explained extremes of extant abortion policy.

Under international human rights covenants, this is not honestly dismissable as solely a states’ issue. This is a human rights issue, and no child past 23 weeks gestation needs to be deliberately killed so the mother can choose to not be pregnant any more – unless murder is the intention.

Mr Dutton, here’s how you dramatically increase your prospects to win the next election.

Prepare every anti-woke, right-thinking member of your cabinet now to prosecute the world-worst, barbaric extremes of Labor abortion policy.

Prepare to pass legislation protecting “Babies Born Alive”, and familiarise yourselves with the extraordinarily easy, universally moral arguments for them.

You will get the mandate to end the barbaric suffering of too many Australian citizens, and you will turn the cynical exploitation of vulnerable women and children for political points by Labor against them to devastating effect.

Let’s show the Liberals and Nationals – and Labor – how much political support there is for ending the immoral neglect of babies born alive after failed abortions with an enormous list of names. If you would like to send Peter Dutton and his federal colleagues a message of support for a campaign to care for babies born alive, please add your name to the petition below.

Dave Pellowe is a Christian political educator & commentator, founder of The Good Sauce, convener of the annual Australian Church And State Summit and host of Good Sauce’s weekly The Church And State Show. Since 2016 Dave has undertaken the mission of arming Christians to redeem culture through events from Perth to Auckland, videos, podcasts and articles published in multiple journals across Australia and New Zealand. [more]

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