Laws would establish ‘safe access’ around clinics and proposes potential jail time for harassment within zones

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

A bill to establish exclusion zones around abortion clinics in New South Wales is likely to pass the state’s parliament.

The legislation would establish 150m “safe access zones” around abortion clinics and proposes potential jail time for people caught harassing people within the zones.

It would also make it an offence to record or distribute a recording of a person inside the exclusion zone without their consent.

'Safe zones' around abortion clinics don't threaten free speech, Victoria says Read more

The state parliament’s upper house is due to vote on the bill on Thursday and both supporters and opponents said it was almost certain to pass after the premier, Gladys Berejiklian, gave the Liberal party a conscience vote.

“I’m pretty confident that, all going to plan, it will go through,” Labor’s Penny Sharpe told the Guardian.

Labor has 12 members in the upper house and the bill will be supported by the five Greens MPs.

The bill was co-sponsored by Sharpe and the Nationals MP Trevor Khan when it was introduced into the parliament earlier this month and has cross-party support.



It will still need an additional five votes from the seven Nationals and 13 Liberal party MPs to reach the 21 it needs to make it to the lower house but even opponents of the bill conceded it would pass the first hurdle.

Catherine Cusack, a moderate Liberal in the upper house, said she would oppose the bill because of concerns about freedom of expression.

“I won’t be supporting it, a number of us have issues with the freedom of speech problem,” she said. “There are already cases before the high court in other states, and I just really don’t think people should go to jail for praying.”

But she said the premier’s decision to grant a conscience vote meant the bill would “definitely” pass the upper house.

“With Trevor Khan pushing it a lot of the Nationals will support it,” she said.

If it makes it through the upper house, the bill will likely be voted on in the lower house next month.

The Nationals MP Leslie Williams has already indicated that she will introduce the bill if it does and, on Wednesday, Berejiklian indicated that she would support the legislation if it passed the upper house despite saying the bill was “flawed”.

“The bill is not perfect at all,” Berejiklian said. “I also felt it very important to give all of our members in parliament a conscience vote because the bill isn’t perfect. It’s flawed.”

One source from the NSW right told the Guardian that conservative MPs were more annoyed about the politics of the bill than the policy.



“The real thing angering the hard right is that the Nationals have become activists for social issues,” the source said. “The evangelical Christians bothering people outside of abortion clinics are not really the hard-right’s usual constituency. It’s the Nationals’ love-in with Labor and the Greens that’s driving people crazy.

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If the bill passes, NSW would follow Victoria, Tasmania and the ACT in establishing exclusion zones around abortion clinics.



In 2015 Victoria passed a law making it an offence to harass or intimidate women seeking access to an abortion within 150m of any hospital, GP clinic or health services that performs abortions.

Religious picketer Kathy Clubb became the first person to be charged under the act in 2016 after she approached a couple outside East Melbourne Fertility Control Clinic and tried to hand them pamphlets. She was found guilty of one charge of prohibited behaviour within a safe access zone and fined $5000.

Clubb is now challenging the conviction in the high court, arguing that the law breaches her rights because it seeks to prevent anti-abortion political speech by banning communications.

The Victorian government has submitted that the legislation “is not directed to political communication” and had an “insubstantial” effect on it.

Sharpe said NSW had modelled much of the bill on Victoria’s, and said she was “as confident as you can be without being a high court judge that it would survive a challenge”.

“What we have is a clause which is the same as Victoria’s, which is aimed at picking up abuse or harassment of people trying to access an abortion,” she said. “The whole law is about protecting people who are being targeted as they’re going in and out of clinics.”