From The Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey. It's Wednesday, October nine. Peter Dutton says the Prime Minister is speaking out of both sides of his mouth on conflict in the Middle East. That's after Parliament failed to muster bipartisan support for emotion honoring victims of Hermas's twenty twenty three attack on Israel. A secret report says a powerful union leader was ousted by members who fabricated sexual
assault allegations against him. That exclusive story is live right now at the Australian dot com dot au. It's the election issue everyone's talking about, and abortion is threatening to define the White House run of Republican VP nominee jd. Vance. In today's episode, our Washington DC correspondent gets up close and personal with the combative, enigmatic senator with big ambitions. In twenty twenty two, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe
versus Wade. That was a nineteen seventy three decision by the same court that had become part of America's legal fabric, the idea that the Constitution of the United States contained a right to abortion. The twenty twenty two decision was made by a five to four majority of the court's justices. Those included three judges appointed by former President Donald Trump. There was jubilation, did not.
Enjoy that it was fine, return determination of feeling determination battle is not over.
And devastation and feels like convey doesn't love me in my Miami. As a way, the twenty twenty two decision didn't ban abortion. It handed authority back to the states, meaning it's now up to individual states to decide if and how women can terminate pregnancies. Some states, like Texas, Oklahoma, and South Dakota made seeking or administering abortions a criminal offense, with few exceptions for protection of the life of the mother.
Others like New York, Oregon, and California moved swiftly to protect and even expand abortion access.
So you'll often see in polls of key issues that abortion is oftentimes within the top ten issues of importance to American voters. Now, I think that's very unlikely to be the case in Australia.
Claire Joe Kelly is The Australian's correspondent in Washington, DC.
We tend to think that Australia and America are similar most of the time. They are actually significant and important differences between us and I think this is one of the Kamala Harris has pledged to en trying the protections of Roe versus Way in federal law, and the Trump position is to essentially let abortion become a federal issue and the states will determine their own positions on abortion.
Back in twenty twenty two, when the Supreme Court made this decision to overturn Roe versus Wade, Donald Trump seemed to be pretty clear, and he was at the beginning of his election campaign too, that this was the result of the appointments that he made. He appointed conservative judges knowing that this was their opinion.
Well, I did something that nobody know as possible. I got rid of Roe v.
Wed.
And by doing that he seems to be.
Walked back from that a little bit now. Is that you're a reading of it too.
This is an issue that's torn our country apart for fifty two years. Every legal scholar, every Demo create, every Republican, liberal conservative, they all wanted this issue to be brought back to the states where the people could vote. And that's what happened. It's the vote of the people now it's not tied up in the federal government.
I think Donald Trump wants to ensure that he's got a broad appeal. What he is saying is that it is a fair position to let this issue be determined by the states. And I think one of the problems is if you have a situation where important positions, essentially policy decisions are effectively being implemented by way of court decisions, because it's always open to the court to change its position. I think he's embracing that position to try and ensure
that the Republicans don't scare people on this issue. And that was one of the points that jd Vance made in that vice presidential debate where he actually said that the Republicans had mishandled this issue in the past.
As a Republican who he proudly wants to protect innocent life in this country, who proudly wants to protect the vulnerable, is that my party, We've got to do so much better of a job at earning the American people's trust back on this issue where they frankly just don't trust us. And I think that's one of the things that Donald Trump and I are endeavoring to do.
That was a major concession that he made Claire, and he said that the Republicans needed to win back people's trust on this issue. So this is the formula that they've arrived at to try and achieve that.
Donald Trump's running mate JD. Vance was in August adamant. Trump was not seeking a national ban, so he had veto a federal abortion ban. I think he would.
He said that explicitly that he would.
Last week in a debate with the Democratic rival Tim Walls, Vance towed the party line.
And the proper way to handle this, as messy as democracy sometimes is, is to let voters make these Decisionsans and JD.
Vance says his own position on abortion supportive of type restrictions. After fifteen weeks gestation has evolved following a vote in his home state, and.
The people of Ohio voted overwhelmingly, by the way, against my position. And I think that what I learned from that, Nora, is that we've got to do a better job at winning back people's trust.
But in recent days Vance went off script, apparently revealing the Republicans would defund Planned Parenthood. That's a national provider of reproductive healthcare. Contraception counseling, and in some cases abortions.
Look, I mean, our view is we don't think that taxpayers should fund late term abortions. That has been a consistent view of the Drop campaign the first time around. It will remain a consistent view.
There's hyperbole on both sides of this debate. Donald Trump has suggested the Democrats want to kill babies.
Her vice presidential says abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine. He also says execution after birth, it's an execution, no longer abortion because the baby is born is okay.
And Kamala Harris paints Trump as a misogynist.
So he who when he was president hands selected three members of the United States Supreme Court with the intention that they would undo the protections of Roe v. Wade, and they did just as he intended. This is the same guy who said that women should be punished for having abortions. This is the same guy who uses the kind of language he does to describe women.
It's about women, too, isn't it, Joe. It seems to me that the Democrats really think that this is going to be the thing that gets women out to vote yes.
And they keep arguing that the real position of the Republicans is for a national ban on abortion. So that's the argument. They're saying that you can't trust the Republicans on this issue. You can't trust Donald Trump. And indeed jd Vance has somewhat softened his position himself on abortion over the years, like he has on many issues.
Claire coming up, how jd Vance has become the most interesting player in this race. Joe Kelly went along to a jd Van speech on Tuesday at a rally to honor Israeli hostages still held in Gaza.
I'm gonna get a little political here. It is disgraceful that we have an American president and vice president who haven't done a thing. Vice President Harris our messages, bring them home, use your authority to help bring them home.
We can do it. We just need real leadership.
What's your sense of him up close?
I think he's very articulate. He has a sense of easy charisma. I think that he's persuasive. He presents well, but while he's strong in presentation, he's untested in substance. I think essentially what Donald Trump sees in jd Vance has given jd Vance's age. He's so young, at just forty years old. I think he sees someone who will be loyal to him and who could potentially carry the trump Ism torch, if you like, into the future and act as a pillar of resistance against the old Republican
establishment in the years to come. And the criticism of JD. Vans that's been made by Joe Biden and the Democrats is that he is a clone of Donald Trump. And I think you can see that pushback from the old Republican establishment. You see it in the fact that Liz Cheney is campaigning with Kamala Harris at the moment, Dick Cheney does not support Donald Trump, and George W. Bush is not saying how he will vote.
He's, of course, famously the never Trumper. He once compared Trump to Hitler. Now he says that he was mistaken then and that actually now this is the real JD. Vance and he's come to realize that Donald Trump was unfairly misrepresented and he's actually much more of a genius than anyone expected.
I was wrong about Donald Trump. I was wrong, first of all because I believed some of the media stories that turned out to be dinnisionist fabrications of his record, but most importantly, Donald Trump delivered for the American people.
He's in a tough position, isn't he, Joe. He's got to step his way through things that Trump is very passionate about, like, for example, the result of the twenty twenty election, keeping him on side while also not appearing foolish.
Essentially, there are two JD. Van, says Claire. So there's the JD. Vance, who is the exemplification of us exceptalism. He embodies the story of the American dream, pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, growing up in poverty in rural Ohio, his mother struggling with drugs, enlisting in the Marines, going on to attend Yale where he did law, becoming a venture capitalist, and then obviously penning that best selling memoir back in twenty sixteen. So there's that version of JD.
Vans.
And then on the other side there's the criticism. There's the idea that JD. Vans is a political chameleon, that he's an opportunist, that he does what he needs to do to get ahead, transforming from the never Trumper that he was in twenty sixteen when he was releasing that best selling memoir and becoming a Trump loyalist. So apparently this all changed in about February twenty twenty one when he had a meeting with Trump at Mari Lago in Florida.
So there are reports that at that point he apologized to Try, claiming he had brought into a narrative that had been spread by the mainstream media. So now he finds himself in this position where he has to be sympathetic to the core tenets of Trumpism. So this relates
to things like the twenty twenty election being stolen. He has endorsed the idea there was widespread fraud, that there were people voting illegally, And he's also a taken aim at Mike Pence, suggesting that he wouldn't have certified the vote back in January twenty twenty one.
Did he lose the twenty twenty election.
Tim, I'm focused on the future. Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind and the wake of the twenty twenty COVID situation? That is a damning non answer. It's a damning non answer for you to not talk about censorship.
So he's had this unbelievable transformation into a maga populist.
Joe Kelly is The Australian's correspondent in Washington DC. You can read all his reporting, plus the rest of the nation's Best Journalism twenty four seven, at the Australian dot com dot au