NSW One Nation leader says party will ‘stop’ abortion rights
One Nation’s new leader in New South Wales says he wants to “stop” abortion rights in the state, saying that if he were elected premier, the existing right to terminate pregnancies would be “ended for good”.
Mike Newman, the investment banker and trade commissioner turned One Nation leader, told an anti-abortion rally outside parliament on Tuesday that One Nation wanted abortion “stopped” while also seeming to confuse the issue with same-sex marriage.
“We want to make sure that same-sex, oh sorry, abortion is stopped. We want to make sure that people have the right to life, and we will vote for you in favour of that,” he said.
Newman, who is the son of multi-millionaire businessman and former ABC chair Maurice Newman, spoke at the rally, organised by anti-abortion activist Joanna Howe outside NSW parliament on Tuesday night. The rally was organised to support a bill put forward by libertarian MP John Ruddick seeking to ban abortions for sex selection. It is almost certain to fail.
When contacted on Wednesday, Newman said he was referring to abortions for the purposes of sex selection, as well as late-term abortions. He said: “One Nation policy is NOT for banning it [abortion] outright”.
But in his speech Newman seemed to go further in his remarks, saying the far-right party would seek to end the right to abortion in NSW if it won power in the upcoming state election.
“We want to support people who want to make sure that abortion rights — we want to stop it,” he said.
“We want to make sure that people have the right to life, and we will vote for you in favour of that.”
Howe is a Liberal Party donor and strident anti-abortion activist who has been accused of attempting an “Americanisation” of the debate in NSW.
The South Australian academic, who has a large social media following, has drawn criticism for what SA Deputy Premier Kyam Maher has described as her “Trumpian” tactics. She has been targeting NSW Nationals MPs in the lead-up to next year’s election.
It is not the first time a One Nation MP has addressed one of Howe’s rallies. Federal MP Barnaby Joyce spoke at a rally supporting Ruddick’s bill in June.
Newman indicated she would be influential if One Nation won power, saying that if he was elected and became premier, Howe “has my number”.
“She can call me at any time because if this [bill] falls tomorrow, you can be sure if we win power, we will put it straight back on the agenda and make sure it passes the right way to make sure that that is ended for good,” he said.
On Wednesday, Premier Chris Minns took a shot at Newman for seemingly backtracking on his comments at the rally.
“It is pretty easy for politicians to, when you’re in front of a big crowd, make a big speech, make everybody happy with what you say. But the thing is you’ve got to be consistent in public life.”
“Particularly when you’re running a government, you can’t change from Monday to Tuesday, from AM to PM.
“You have to say what you mean and mean what you say. And if you don’t, well, I think that’s why people hate politicians because it looks like we’re trying to tailor what we say to please the audience that we’re in front of, rather than what we believe.”
Ruddick’s bill does not have enough support to pass through the NSW parliament. The Libertarian Party MP, who multiple sources said is considering joining One Nation after the 2027 election if his own party’s meagre polling figures continue, put forward the bill, saying it sought to “end the practice of aborting unborn babies based on nothing other than their sex”.
“This is not a debate about the morality of abortion; it is a debate about our cultural attitudes to gender and human dignity,” he said when introducing the legislation last year. Ruddick referred to 2025 research by Edith Cowan University, oft-cited by anti-abortion advocates, which found migrant families from Indian and Chinese backgrounds were more likely to have male children than the rest of the population.
But a 2020 review by NSW Health found that of 15,973 terminations between 2019 and 2020, 13 had been flagged as related to sex-selection.
However, the review found that 10 of those cases were likely to be reporting errors because the pregnancies were terminated within a nine-week gestation period.
Multiple MPs have described it as an attempt to reanimate a broader debate on abortion in NSW. The right to abortion was decriminalised in the state in 2019.
“The bill is the first step in dismantling the framework for ensuring access to reproductive health care for all who need it,” Labor’s leader in the upper house Penny Sharpe said during debate on the bill.
“It seeks to put access to abortion back into the criminal rather than health framework, with no direct evidence that the problem it purports to solve is occurring in New South Wales.”
Sharpe noted that sex-selection abortions had been the subject of intense debate in 2019. Shoe noted that the practice was already subject to restrictions that mean a health practitioner could lose their registration if found to have performed an abortion because of sex-selection.
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