Abortion, again, threatens to bring Crisafulli’s careful plan unstuck

Coming into the second calendar year of their first term in government in more than a decade, the LNP has been ticking off much of what it came to power promising to do.

Premier David Crisafulli and his team are now well into a thornier patch of events over which they have little or no control – or find themselves backed into a corner.

And not just any events: these are ones that pick at the ideological and pragmatic stitching holding together its party room members and their promises to Queenslanders.

One, a response to the Bondi massacre, tore their federal Coalition apart. Another – abortion – has delivered the first public rupture in the facade of unity since the state election.

A major anti-abortion lobby group then fired up its own social media channels to put the spotlight on similar claims said to have been made privately by some of Dalton’s party room colleagues.

While Labor jumped on this as more evidence of barely papered-over LNP desires to unwind the state’s recent abortion reforms within Crisafulli’s ranks, this came in a parliamentary week parallel to CFMEU inquiry evidence of former minister Mark Bailey’s directions around talks with the union.

Asked in question time on Thursday about Oodgeroo MP Amanda Stoker’s reported statements on abortion, Crisafulli fired up through a series of interjections to accuse Labor of trying to “run a scare campaign again”.

Later, amid more interjections, Crisafulli called out Opposition Leader Steven Miles for not holding a media conference while the inquiry was running this week and “not even going out to face the music as to what is going on in his own backyard”.

At the centre of the abortion debate issue, though, is Robbie Katter, the Traeger MP and eponymous party leader who provided a heaping of the election campaign pressure on the LNP and has made little effort to hide his anger at the party’s campaign tactics then and in the recent byelection loss.

Katter provided the fuel for Dalton’s rebellion in his motion which, while failing to lift the ban on abortion law debate in parliament, succeeded in reigniting broader public debate about the issue.

In light of that, you can expect it won’t be the last Katter effort to poke at the LNP’s fault lines. And One Nation leader Pauline Hanson, currently riding the shine rubbing off from the federal Coalition, is joining in.

Polls suggest One Nation’s rise is not yet playing out at a state level. But they have shown falling support for Crisafulli and his party. At some stage, carefully kept plans may need to be altered.

Alternatively, further events might force them to be.

Heads up

• While the state’s corruption watchdog did not get a chance to air its concerns and suggestions around government’s unpicking of a developer donation ban and quadrupling of the donation cap at a public hearing last month, its boss is likely to face MPs at a regular parliamentary appearance on Tuesday.
• It’s due to be a busy week for committees, with at least one hearing also scheduled for MPs to probe gun control and antisemitism laws set for Thursday.

Catch up

• This week, parliament also passed the government’s bill to give the option of electronic monitoring for youth offenders as young as 10, with Labor even lobbing a bill this week to introduce a daily five cent cap on fuel price increases (the LNP opposition didn’t introduce its first in the last term until three years in).
• Meanwhile, the Child Safety inquiry has agreed to shave six months off its November deadline to give the government suggestions to fix the “broken” system it can feed into its budget deliberations. Labor has accused minister Amanda Camm of prematurely cutting off the probe before it could look at a troubled IT system rollout.

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