I knew the other side were cooked when yesterday’s tweets appeared. “Say NO to #safeaccesszones!” isn’t the kind of messaging that wins you popular support. Even if the public has no idea what or where your zone is, “safety” isn’t something anyone likes to say no to.



Denial, however, was the theme of the whole “say NO” campaign – the “access zones” in question are the 150m radii around clinics and doctors’ offices in NSW providing reproductive health and pregnancy termination services. Denying women the opportunity to seek medical care without their personal harassment, bullying and intimidation has been the whole act of the anti-abortion “sidewalk counsellors”. These were the “say NOers” desperately trying to stop the passage of legislation debated in New South Wales parliamentary yesterday drafted to criminalise their outrageous behaviour.

What kind of behaviour? A healthcare worker attending a demonstration in support of the legislation pleaded for the harassment of herself and her staff to stop, picking out an anti-abortionist counterprotestor who’s repeatedly chanted at her that she’s going to hell. They hand out plastic foetuses, photograph clinic patients, bellow that every stage of human fertilisation is a “baby” and get in the faces of anyone seeking treatment for anything from a yeast infection to endometriosis in attempts to guilt and shame anyone who might be receiving a medical termination.

A personal acquaintance described her reduction to tears outside outside a clinic where she was berated with accusations she was a child murderer. She was attending to receive fertility treatment – she’d been struggling to conceive for some time.

As elsewhere – ahem, Ireland! – feminist activism has so thoroughly spoken its fairness values to the reproductive lives of Australians. Tasmania, Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory have already imposed the safe access zones; the new status quo is now one where in NSW it was not merely left-Labor feminist MP Penny Sharpe putting her name to the legislation as a private members’ bill. Its co-sponsor was MP Trevor Khan, from the rural-based, conservative National party.

“This is not a left/right issue” Khan told the gathering of feminist, libertarian, rural, trade union, health worker and Indigenous demonstrators who gathered in solidarity yesterday, about an issue that once upon a time most certainly was.

Safety, privacy, respect and dignity are concepts with powerful loyalty across the ideological spectrum – no more or less in NSW country towns like Albury, where the harassment of women seeking reproductive health services represents the ugliest invasion of privacy in an already small community. The Nationals and Labor again teamed up to back the bill in the lower house. Not even the former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce could sever an alliance so firmly grounded in the moral, although not for the lack of trying.

So fiercely has this particular moral frame been affirmed around these issues that the NOers were reduced to affixing themselves with fauxminist sloganeering as if fresh pink icing could obscure the rotten buns of old attempts at shame, control and woman-hating. “We Support Women” they declare, as if the community standards of fairness and safety could bend in their direction merely with the addition of fresh faces and sweet platitudes. These are, of course, importations of American tactics of dissembling, and ineffective here. “Sidewalk counsellors” somewhat betrays the inauthentic identity of the local movement – in Australia, folks, we call them footpaths.

And it’s with the affirmation of our local values, the popular support, and the extraordinary coalition that provokes the immediate political question in the legislation’s wake. The conservatives allowed themselves a conscience vote on the legislation and the “no” side was defeated by an overwhelming majority of 61-18. The minister for women, Tanya Davies, and minister for family and community services and former sex discrimination minister, Pru Goward, found themselves on the losing side. Their perceived betrayal on free speech grounds has outraged those demanding their right to safety and privacy.

To oppose a bipartisan majority is politically dangerous. To do so against the interests of your direct constituency resembles abject folly. Or plain spite. “Their vote was out of step with community expectations, and also ignored the calls of organisations that work with the women they’re supposed to be representing,” said a spokesperson for safe access campaigners, Fair Agenda, with lethal courteousness.

It’s unlikely that their ambitions will be the only fatality of these events. After the safe access zones decision, and Ireland’s extraordinary rebuff of old body-control politics, abortion remaining as an artefact of the criminal code in both NSW and Queensland is under impending threat. The sidewalk counsellors denied their bully pulpits on our footpaths, the only remaining denial may indeed just be those few politicians as yet unbending to the power of the obvious popular tide.