Better get a lawyer Minns: You have publicly defamed Dr Joanne Howe - bad move

The Greens, with Labor support, introduced the world's most extreme, cruel, masonic, full-term abortion bill. Dr Joanne Howe and Co gutted it.

May 16, 2025

Dr Joanne Howe: The fact that (NSW Opposition Leader) Mark Speakman gets up in parliament with this bow kind of strength and says "I will not be cowered by bullies," when I'm like this 5 foot petite lady who literally has no power and privilege at all compared to him. He's an elected representative paid over $200,000 by us to stand in parliament to represent us. This is a representative democracy.
I'm just one citizen who over the last two and a half years, has run a public advocacy campaign against all of the odds and all of the intimidation and all of the gatekeeping and all of the accusations and investigations and attempts to get me cancelled. And I'm the one that's the bully, somehow, just because I want to use my voice, and I'm telling him that I'm going to do that. It is just insane.
But then you get the headlines in the paper, you get the news stories and you see what they're trying to do. They're just trying to shut me down and the funny thing is, I think you think he's got some real gotcha moment there on me. He's reading out this email that I wouldn't want him to read. I wrote the email knowing that there was a very good chance he would do this but I didn't care because I'm going to do this.
In voting for the bill, Mark Speakman, I'm going to do exactly what I said I would do in the email. In fact, I've been on the phone all day to various campaign outfits to go, how do we get rid of the Liberal Party, of these woke toxic liberals, with Speakman as our number one target?
...Mark my words - this guy is not going to be Liberal leader for much longer.
Now, lets move on to Minns. Because it didn't end there with Speakman. Chris Minns fronted up to a press conference today and once again I became the topic of the conference.
It’s quite remarkable to be the subject of the opposition leader and the premier's rage
It's just quite remarkable, actually, to be in a situation as someone campaigning against abortion up to birth in this country and to be the subject of the opposition leader and the premier's rage. It shows we've ruffled feathers it shows we've actually been successful.
In fact, you guys have been putting comments down saying, You're clearly above the target Jo because they're coming for you. And that's actually really exciting to see that we are really getting to them in what we're doing and that shows us that we're making progress.

Dr Joanne Howe - NSW Premier & Liberal Leader attack me for bullying?

15 May 2025 - Runtime 27 mins

Transcript Notes about the NSW full term abortion bill

NSW Premier Chris Minns: I mean, I have to say in relation to that particular advocate, there's enormous amounts of misinformation and lies that have been spread by her on social media and it's whipped up a lot of good people in the community believing that the reform changes the legislative changes are far more extensive than they in fact were

Dr Joanne Howe: First of all, that's just a crazy thing for him to say. He said, I whipped up people in the community to think these changes were far more extreme than what they in fact were. The Greens, with Labor's tacit support behind the scenes, had introduced a bill that was literally the most extreme abortion bill anyone in the world has ever seen. It gave the Minister for Health a power to order public hospitals to perform abortions and those hospitals had to comply.

It also trampled over the conscience rights of doctors, so for Minns to say that I'm responsible for all this misinformation, whipping up this hysteria, people needed to be hysterical about this bill.

Extreme (attempted) takeover of our country

This was an extreme radical takeover of our country. I believed it could have been the beginning of the end of religious freedom. If they could do this - and we know that Labor and the Greens took over a Catholic hospital in Canberra (Calvary Public Hospital) because it wouldn't perform abortions - and so this is clearly what was going to happen here.

The Greens are on the record saying that all public hospital funding should be conditional upon abortion. Labor took that policy to the polls federally in 2019 and they lost dramatically. After that, they scrubbed it from the record but it's clearly been part of their agenda.

NSW Premier Chris Minns: I had a lot of constituents in my community coming and saying for example the provision that has remained for nurse practitioners to be able to distribute medication in line with TGA guidelines. The rumor that was circulating, I'm not saying it was necessarily spread by this activist, but it was certainly going around the community was that they would be compelled to do it and if they didn't do it then their license would be yanked, and that conscientious objection did not apply. I mean, that's clearly incorrect.

Dr Joanne Howe: Minns is being very clever here isn't he? Casting aspersions and shade on me while stopping short of actually accusing me of something he knows very well I didn't do. I never said that nurses and midwives were going to lose their license if they didn't perform abortions but I've been concerned. I've been very upfront about this all along. I've been really concerned that nurses and midwives are going to be, in practice, compelled to participate in abortion through giving out abortion drugs. That is a legitimate fear that I've had and I have.

That fear is well founded because so many nurses and midwives and doctors... lots of health workers, they've come to me and said, the way conscientious objection works in practice, is, you just have to be so bold and so dogged to turn around in the moment and say I'm not going to do it because your employer is saying... we've got a shortage right now, there's a woman that's presented. I just need you to write the prescription for that drug, or I need you to do this, and in that moment, you as a health worker have to turn around and find the courage to say, I'm sorry but I have an objection to participating in abortions. And, you know, the eye roll you're going to get... the attitude you're going to get.

I've shared my interviews with nurses and midwives and doctors who have said that in the real world, this is something that they're in effect compelled to do, and so I knew that. When this part of the bill made its way to the Lower House, while everybody from Speakman to Minns was now saying, oh well, we can vote for this, it's now become very reasonable and moderate. It's just about distributing medication, which is what Minns has just said.

You cannot become complicit in this

In reality, if you are a nurse or a midwife who believes that giving that abortion drug to a woman, RU486, is going to kill an innocent human child who has no voice, you don't want to do it but you're going to be put in this impossible situation. Now for the record, absolutely we should be saying no and we must object. You cannot become complicit in this. It does something to you... it's not good enough to say I was following orders, this was the thing that my hospital or my surgery... I have to do it. I work here, it's my workplace.

In those moments, we actually have to have the courage to turn around and say it, that we're not going to participate but I know what that's like for you guys and you guys have told me. And I have been clear that I do believe that this really erodes conscientious objection. It erodes the very role of a nurse and a midwife, as people who came into midwifery and nursing to care for women and birth babies alive, and it turns them into killers.

Minns misinforms public with misinformation allegation

NSW Premier Chris Minns: When you have a matter as sensitive as abortion it's not helped by putting enormous amounts of misinformation into the debate. As for threatening politicians about what you will and won't do, well that's a matter for activists. Generally speaking, Australian politicians, regardless of their background or ideology, react incredibly poorly to that kind of threat and my experience, particularly in conscience votes, and this doesn't just apply to the Labor Party, is that people come to these issues, make a genuine decision about what's in the best interest of their community and make the call. They'll usually resist that kind of bullying behavior.

Minns must retract and then apologise to avoid legal action

Dr Joanne Howe: Mark Speakman used parliamentary privilege to call me a bully. I think Minns is getting carried away here because he doesn't have the cover of parliamentary privilege and he's just called me a liar and a bully. I think this is something that we're going to be able to take forward in terms of holding him to account, so watch this space. What I've said on social media straight away, is he either needs to retract and then apologise or I am going to have to take legal action because this is outrageous.

All I've ever done is exercise my democratic right to criticize the government, to campaign and to activate the people. That's what I'm doing and so for him to call it threatening and bullying, that just shows he's as pathetic as Mark Speakman doesn't it? It really just shows how fragile these snowflake politicians are, that they can't handle the heat and they're not used to the heat on the issue of abortion.

A conscience vote is a done deal before it even happens

They're used to being able to hide behind this idea of a conscience vote, that they're... really noble and they're agonising over it and they've actually got consciences, they want us to believe. They're saying to us it's really arduous to work out what to do but look at what actually happens.

This is a pro-abortion parliament. Minns voted for abortion up to birth. It's just the reality that these guys know what's going to happen before it even happens. This conscience vote is a done deal before it even happens and you can see that the way all of the Labor members in the Upper House.

They went where Penny Sharp went, by and large. The vast majority of them, 48 Labor members across both houses, supported the bill, only seven against. It's not really a conscience vote. Labor is the party of abortion, just like the Greens is and of the seven that voted against it from Labor, how many of those are really pro-life and how many of those are just Labor MPs in deeply religious electorates? Electorates that voted against same-sex marriage in droves.

And they just know that to preserve their own hide and to still have a job in 2027, the very minimum they had to do was vote against this bill. The only people in Labor who genuinely spoke up for the babies were Courtney Houssos, Greg Donnelly and Hugh McDermott.

The rest of the party, in my view, is hijacked by an abortion agenda - a radical abortion agenda that's out of step with the community and what these guys don't like is that I've exposed it and called it out for the first time, you know. The media is not doing this. We're doing it.

NSW Premier Chris Minns: There's a difference between someone saying, "I don't like what the government's doing, I don't like what an MP is doing, I'm going to campaign against them and I'm not going to vote for them at the next election." And that's a healthy part of democracy and we shouldn't be criticising it when you're saying that an individual MP has voted a certain way, when that is clearly not the case. And I want to refer particularly to several members of parliament in this instance, have a long voting history against abortion. It's always been a conscience vote in Labor and... being told on social media that they've got the reverse position, I mean, that is deliberate misinformation and I don't think Australia benefits for that kind of level of political discourse.

Minns stands accused of defamation

Dr Joanne Howe: That's just defamation because I never misled anybody on voting records. I think what he's referring to is the fact that I announced on social media that we were going to letter box 10 Labor seats, and in that bunch, I didn't buy their BS and only go to the seats of people that voted for abortion up to birth in 2019, people like Chris Minns and Prue Car.

No, we went to the seats where I knew it would hurt Labor the most because they actually needed those seats to win government and when I announced that 10 letter boxing campaign, oh my goodness, was Labor rattled. I received so many messages and phone calls trying to lobby me not to go to those 10 seats. How can you be going to... Julia Finn's seat in Granville? They told me she voted against abortion up to birth in 2019.

I never said publicly that Julia Finn voted for abortion up to birth

Now, I never said publicly to you guys that Julia Finn voted for abortion up to birth because she didn't. She's in Granville. She knows the Maronite community, the Muslim community in her electorate would be appalled by that. So I never said she voted for abortion up to birth but what I did tell you guys is that she's pro-abortion because she supports abortion up to 22 weeks which is what she said in her 2019 speech. She said, I'm pro-choice. Which means she's pro the choice of a woman to kill her baby.

Now, just because she doesn't believe in abortion after viability, well, so do most Australians. That's what every reasonable, normal, person believes, that you shouldn't kill a baby late in pregnancy. It's only this freak show of extreme radical politicians in the Labor party like Minns and Carr and Park who believe, and Sharp and Jackson, that you can kill a baby right up until birth and they have no human rights throughout any of it.

So, I stand by calling Julia Finn pro-abortion but I never misled people about her voting record and so that is a clearly defamatory statement right there and you can go back through all of my videos all of my reels…

Minns - It’s just not true

NSW Premier Chris Minns: It's just not true and truth's got to anchor these things. We can have disagreements but when you're saying an MP has a voting record that they don't share, I just think it's lies.

Dr Joanne Howe: Even more defamatory guys, so we'll just say, watch this space.

NSW Premier Chris Minns: I don't want to give the impression that MPs are trembling in their boots and worried about, they're not. That they've really got the... I was going to... what they're really, really irritated by is the misrepresentation of their record and a lot of these votes are difficult and they have to make a decision on the floor... You get criticized either side by passionate supporters on either side of the issue. They're difficult votes for MPs to make. They take them incredibly seriously. To have someone willfully misrepresent that voting record is incredibly frustrating at the least.

Oh, the lady doth protest too much

Dr Joanne Howe: Wow, he's really digging in there isn't he guys? On this whole, I've lied about their voting records which I've never done, so this is good for the defamation lawsuit. Not so good for Chris Minns but you know, the bit at the beginning there, it sort of has that flavor of 'oh the lady doth protest too much.' When he says, oh I don't want to give the impression that we're rattled by this, it's just really frustrating that she's lying so much. It's something Julia Finn said: I don't want Joanna Howe to think that she's got to me. If anything, it would have had the opposite effect.

But the thing is guys, they clearly are very rattled by this or they wouldn't be devoting press conferences to talking about me. They're very rattled indeed and if you truly want to know what a dishonest person is thinking, you don't listen to what they say, you listen to what they do and the fact that everyone from Finn to Speakman to Park to Minns, the premier no less, is spending all of this time trying to take me out, well that tells you we got to them.

Our mission is to take over the Liberal Party

We have achieved a tremendous amount since March 19 when we first learned way back in March that Labor and the Greens had done this dodgy deal to try and ram this radical bill through before the federal election. We slowed that right down. We gutted the bill and although it passed today and it may feel like the end, and it has felt like a long two and a half months campaign, it's been tremendous hard work for all of us.

I want you guys to know this is just the start and up until March 2027 when these guys hit the ballot box and we get to vote, up until that point, our mission is going to be not just to take out Speakman as the leader of the Liberals and to take over that party, it's going to be to educate the electorate on how pro-abortion Labor is, and to make sure that we turn some of those marginal seats. We're going to do this together.

Until next time. Song for Premier Chris Minns - Get a Lawyer.

Get yourself a lawyer, son
You're gonna need a good one to get you outta this one