Already and this is the Daily This is the Daily ohs oh, now it makes sense. Good morning and welcome to the Daily OS. It is Thursday, the twenty fourth of October.
I'm Billy, I'm Zara.
You may have seen some headlines recently about abortion in Australia. Despite the fact that it has been decriminalized everywhere in the country, the issue of abortion has re entered the political landscape and it's being debated once again, specifically in Queensland and South Australia. So what's going on and could abortion laws in some states in Australia actually change. We'll explain in today's podcast. But first, Sara, what is making headlines today?
Tens of millions of people in New South Wales are believed to have been overcharged for the processing of official documents over the past eight years. The New South Wales government said a merchant fee was wrongly applied to vehicle registrations, marriage certificates and driver's license renewals at revenue or service
New South Wales. The average surcharge was roughly ninety two cents per transaction, amounting to one hundred and forty four million dollars from ninety two million unlawful overcharges since twenty sixteen. The government said it's now taken steps to stop any future merchant fees being charged, and has asked the State Ombardsman to investigate what it described as serious maladministration.
Victoria's Premier Jacinta Allen has condemned a group of neo Nazis who interrupted a pro refugee rally in Melbourne, calling them disgraceful cowards. Around three hundred refugee activists have been camped outside the Department of Home Affairs in Melbourne, CBD for several months. On Tuesday, a group of around twenty men dressed in all black gate crashed the rally. Police used pepper spray to disburse the men. Victoria police have not made any arrests and said there were no injuries,
but are investigating the incident further. Premier Allen said the men quote hide behind masks and symbols that are deeply unacceptable to the rest of the community.
US Secretary of State Anthony Blincoln has held high level meetings with senior Israeli officials as part of efforts to secure a.
Ceasefire in the Middle East.
Blincoln and his aide sat down with Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss the importance of ending the conflict in Gaza, returning all Israeli hostages, getting humanitarian aid into Gaza, and mapping a path to peace in the region. According to data sided by the UN, at least forty two thousand Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since last year.
Last week, Israel killed Hamas Leider Yaya Sinhwa during a raid in Gaza, and he was one of the key architects behind the October seven attacks that killed twelve hundred people in Israel. U S State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said Blincoln was urging Israel officials to quote capitalize on Sinwa's death to bring an end to the conflict.
And in today's good news, akockatoo, who was stuck inside a Sydney shopping center for a month, has been freed. Micky the Cockatoo accidentally found himself trapped inside the MacArthur Square shopping center in Campbelltown. He spent weeks living off snacks provided by the center's supermarket before a local bird expert was brought in after twenty failed attempts to get him out. Micky was safely caught and has since been released back into nature.
Now, Billy, I know that on today's podcast we are talking about why abortion is back in the headlines here in Australia. Before we get into that story, though, I do think it's important, I guess to just set up a bit of the lay of the land. So can you just run me through what is the state of affairs when it comes to accessing an abortion here in Australia.
Yeah, So in Australia, abortion laws are decided by the individual states and territories, which is actually similar to what it is in the US now, but we'll get to the differences in a sec Every state and territory in Australia has decriminalized abortion, and that just means that abortion is dealt with as a health issue instead of as a criminal issue. Now, Western Australia was actually the last state to decriminalize abortion, and it only happened last year.
So they passed legislation last year and it came into effect this year.
I will just jump in here though, because I think hearing that it was only decriminalized last year for example in Wa, I just want to clarify that doesn't mean that people in Australia haven't been able to access abortions before then. It just means that it was taken out of the criminal code in each state and then lastly in WA last year.
But it has been accessible before.
Yeah, I don't want to reduce it by saying that it's largely a symbolic thing, but I think the big part of it was that it's no longer in the criminal part of Western Australia's legislation. Now the laws for abortion vary across the country, specifically the gestational limits, and that just means that there are different limits on how many weeks a person can be pregnant to access an
abortion before additional approvals are required. So, for example, the gestational limit in New South Wales is twenty two weeks. In the Act, they actually have no gestational limits, although late term abortions are extremely rare.
So there you can access an abortion at any point. Is that what that's saying.
Yes, But I think in reality the truth is that many women are not accessing late term abortions, and if they are, they're only doing that for very serious medical reasons.
Okay, so I guess one of the key similarities here is that it is a state by state issue here in Australia and also now in the US deciding when and how abortion laws come into play.
And that is of course in the US of Roe v. Way being overturned.
Yeah, and so I mentioned before there was a key difference, and that key difference is that here it has been decriminalized across the country and that's a decision that every state territory has made. But in the US there is something like twenty one states where abortion has been banned or restricted in the wake of the overturning of Roe v.
Wade, So we've kind of gone in completely different directions exactly.
And that's why it's surprising that it's come up in Australia because there has kind of been this broad consensus across the country that abortion should be decriminalized.
Because it does feel like it's been a while since it was last this kind of big political issue, and that we watched the US and think of that as something that's so far away from the kind of political discourse that we have in this country. That's obviously not the case any longer. Why are we talking about it today?
Yeah, so has suddenly become a big issue in two states, specifically in Australia. In Australia, so in Queensland and in South Australia. I'll go through Queensland first. So there is an election in Queensland this weekend, which I know that we talked about in yesterday's podcast because Harry interviewed the premiere. Now, despite abortion being decriminalized in the state since twenty eighteen, it has become one of the unexpected debate topics on
this campaign trail. So part of the reason for this is because of MP Robbie Catter. When I first heard about this story, I was like, why is everyone suddenly calling Bob Kata Robbie Catter? I was like, have we suddenly decided his name's Robbie. No. Rob Kata is his son and he is an MP in Queensland. During his campaign for the election, he has promised that he would introduce a private member's bill to repeal or amend the
state's abortion laws in the next term of government. Now, a private member's bill is just a piece of legislation that is proposed by someone who is in Parliament but not in government.
It's interesting because I think that so often there are private members' bills that we fixate on because they might be a bit left of center, a bit different. But the thing is that private members bills infamously do not usually get up because, as you said, they don't have the support of the government.
Yeah, many people listening maybe have never even heard of private members' bills. They don't often get a lot of coverage in the media because they're unlikely to get the support they need to become law. And we know that Labor wouldn't vote for these changes being proposed by Robbie Katter because it was under a labor government in Queensland that abortion was decriminalized. So when it all happened in twenty eighteen, that was a labor government that made those
changes to the laws. So then the question became, would the Liberal National Party, who is currently in opposition but is seeking to become government, would they support a repeal of the abortion ban?
And that's important because we know that in the polls they're ahead. Yes, So it's a big question to have asked yes.
So we know that the Liberal National Party has a good chance of being in government after the weekend. And what is interesting about that question is that the leader of the Liberal National Party, David chris A fully voted against decriminalizing abortion in twenty eighteen, so he wanted to keep abortion regulated under the Criminal Code. So that's why everyone is asking, now what is his opinion today?
Right?
So that was six years ago. Is there an answer like, what is his position now?
Yeah, he's been kind of skirting around it, I would say, But on Tuesday night, during a debate with the Premiere, Christoph fully was pretty stern in saying that there will be no change to Queensland's abortion laws under a government he leads. So that sounds pretty simple, right, it won't happen, Well not quite Okay, a little bit more complexity because what isn't quite clear in his answers is whether he
will give his MPs a conscience vote. And that means parliamentarians could freely vote how they want on a particular topic, so they're not bound to support a party position. And this happens on a variety of different topics. It happened on voluntary assisted dying that a lot of MPs could you know, they didn't have to go with the position of their party. They could vote however they personally wanted to.
And so that is the question that he's still not really answering that if he was the Premier of Queensland, would he allow the MPs in his government to go to a conscience vote, in which case perhaps this private member's bill could potentially have enough support to get through.
If so, if there was a conscience vote, you'd vote against it, Karan, There'll be no change, and my team has said for it or against. Well, let me let me answer that. So the premier is talking about the vehicle to get there.
I'm telling you the result.
There will be no change to those laws, and that's what people need to know. There will be no change and my seed if my team has backed that in.
Okay, so we're talking there about I guess a few steps of hypotheticals. We have to first see what happens at the Queensland election, who wins government, and then there would still need to be some sort of decision making from there on. So definitely a really important story to keep an eye on as we watch this weekend to
see what happens in the state. But you mentioned at the top of this podcast that's not just Queensland that is having this kind of state based conversation about abortion, but it's also something that's occurring in South Australia.
Yeah, so this happened a bit over a week ago now that a law to a strict abortion was narrowly rejected in South Australia's Upper House. Now, that law, if it had passed, would have required anyone seeking an abortion from twenty eight weeks to give birth instead. So at the moment, abortions in South Australia are allowed up to twenty two weeks and six days of pregnancy, and late term abortions are allowed if they have sign off from
two medical professionals. Now, the bill that was proposed wanted to amend that law by adding the following sentence. It said, a medical practitioner may only intervene to end the pregnancy of person who is more than twenty seven weeks and six days pregnant if the intention is to deliver the fetus alive. So they're basically saying you'd have to give birth,
you couldn't have an abortion. Now, like I said, that was ultimately voted down, but it was only voted down ten to nine, so it came down to just one vote.
Yeah, I think quite a lot of people were surprised by the margin. You know, one vote is not by any means a significant kind of position one way or the other.
So again, a really interesting story.
In the last couple of days, I've also seen this abortion conversation really filtering onto a national stage as well.
Yes, which is another surprising factor of this story, because, like we've been saying, abortion is a state issue in Australia, it's not something that is dealt with at the federal level.
Yeah.
Nevertheless, Coalition Senator Jaciner Price said this week that she wants abortion to be on the national agenda. So she said that there should be more laws put in place to stop late term abortions. Again, something interesting about the debate about abortion in Australia is that a lot of the debate surrounds late term abortions, which, like I've said, they are very rare. Most people are getting abortions way before that. I think it's about one to three percent
of abortions that are late term abortions. Interesting, but she's not alone amongst her coalition peers in thinking that this should be addressed at the federal level. Coalition Senators Matt Canavan and Alex Antik have tried to introduce a lot at the federal level to change the abortion laws in Australia.
I do think it's important there just to note that both Matt Canavan and Alex Antik do sit almost on the fringes of the Coalition, so they're not necessarily kind of the mainstream broad.
Notion generally considered far to the right. But it was actually only in August. I missed this story. But there was also a motion for the Senate to quote recognize that at least one baby is born alive every seven days following a failed abortion and left to die, and that Australia's healthcare system is enabling these inhumane deaths. So there was a motion in Australia's Senate to recognize that statement,
but that was defeated. That did not happen in the end. So, like I said, I missed that story, and these stories have kind of popped up here and there, but they haven't got a whole lot of attention because it has always been shut down quite quickly, and.
That motion wasn't introduced by either the government or the coalition. That was by a minor party member. So again going to this thing about you know how much weight do we give motions or ideas or you know, laws that won't really ever be realized in Australian Parliament.
Exactly, and just Enterprice's requests for this to be something that is considered on the national agenda was also shut down yesterday when Liberal Senator Jane Hume was quite strong in her words and saying that the coalition has no plan to make abortion a federal issue. So she said, quote, there are no plans for a coalition government led by Peter Duttan to make any changes to women's reproductive rights right.
Not leaving much room there at all for further discussion exactly.
So I think we can say that mostly at the federal level and also in South Australia the debate has kind of been settled now, but the one debate that is still ongoing is the one in Queensland because, like I mentioned, Robbie Catter is planning to introduce that private member's bill after the election, and so it kind of depends who gets into government to see where it goes.
But like I mentioned, I think it's a really important thing to note that the opposition who are trying to get into government have said that there will be no changes. So they would argue that it doesn't matter who gets into government, nothing will change. Obviously. Others think otherwise.
Time will tell an extremely interesting conversation to be had. And I think when there are all these different stories happening kind of across the country, when you pull it all together in one place, I really try to make sense of it.
It is quite a telling story.
So thank you for explaining that, Billy, and thank you for listening to another episode over the Daily os. If you're listening to this on Spotify or Apple, we would love you to hit follow. That sense a signal to the platform that you like what we're doing and you want to see more of it. If you're watching us on YouTube, hello, and we would love you to hit subscribe. We'll be back again tomorrow, but until then, have a fabulous day.
My name is Lily Madden and I'm a proud Runda Bungelung Caalcutin woman from Gadigol Country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strain island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present,