Last night Gladys Berijiklian's leadership was momentarily challenged by three members of her party angry over her handling of the abortion debate.
According to the last month's Essential poll, only 8% of NSW voters strongly oppose removing abortion from the criminal code, while 71% support the proposed changes.
NSW Liberal party upper house members Matthew Mason-Cox, Lou Amato and Mulgoa MP Tanya Davies announced last night that they would move a spill motion against Gladys Berijiklian -- who won a dramatic state election in March. However, the trio withdrew the motion at 7:38am this morning after they were.
In Sydney's Hyde Park on Sunday afternoon, tensions flared as pro-choice campaigners faced off with pro-life campaigners.
MP Barnaby Joyce was at the rally campaigning alongside former PM Tony Abbott. They spoke in front of signs that read ‘pro-life, pro-woman, pro-child’. Joyce claims to have heard pro-choice campaigners chanting "throw the fetus in the bin":
However, Sydney woman Chloe Barron told BuzzFeed News, "The chant was 'we will fight, we will win, put the bigots in the bin'."
Channel 7 quotes Barnaby Joyce falsely claiming that pro-choice protesters were saying 'fetus' instead of 'bigots' at their rally. Source: The Feed
"I was just really upset that this had been misinterpreted because it cast a message that we didn’t want to send," she said.
Confusion seems to have set in when a pro-life group posted this video of the rally to their Facebook page:
Twitter users claim the video's captions misrepresent what the protesters were chanting:
In his rally speech, Joyce compared the NSW .
“[...] In the United States of America they had slaves, they were merely property; they needed to kill them, they killed them … but they moved on from that.”
Joyce’s daughter Odette Joyce rebelled against her dad on Instagram last month after he led a previous anti-abortion protest in August. She wrote “And once again I do not support you”
across a screenshot of an SBS News story entitled: :
Odette Joyce takes to Instagram to speak out against her father's stance on abortion rights. Source: Instagram
