Barnaby Joyce has done it again.
Fresh from his offensive comments about people with disability, he has now jumped headfirst onto the latest culture-war bandwagon, this time over a supposed epidemic of sex-selective abortions in NSW.
There is just one problem.
The evidence says there isn’t one.
Reviews by NSW Health have consistently found that abortions performed solely for the purpose of sex selection are extraordinarily rare. Existing safeguards already require doctors to refuse procedures if they know sex selection is the sole reason, except where a woman’s health or safety is at risk.
In other words, the problem Barnaby Joyce is so passionately campaigning for is, by every credible measure available, a non-issue.
Yet here he is, inserting himself into a debate surrounding the Abortion Law Reform Amendment (Sex Selection Prohibition) Bill and presenting it as some great moral crisis facing New South Wales.
This is what modern grievance politics looks like. Find an issue that barely exists, strip away the facts, add a healthy dose of outrage, and pretend civilisation hangs in the balance.
Supporters of the bill argue it is necessary to prevent discrimination against girls before birth. Critics, including medical professionals and women’s health advocates, point out that the bill lacks credible local evidence, relies heavily on racial and anti-immigration assumptions about certain communities, and risks becoming a backdoor attempt to recriminalise abortion by intimidating doctors with the threat of criminal prosecution.
Those concerns deserve serious discussion.
Instead, Barnaby Joyce gave us a Facebook post.
And at the end of it was this line:
“Girls are not as good as boys.”
That was the emotional blackmail at the core of his argument. Pass this law, Joyce argued, “or otherwise we all accept that sex selection is appropriate. Girls are not as good as boys.”
But the irony is impossible to ignore.
There is something deeply misogynistic about male politicians insisting they should have greater power to control what women do with their own bodies while claiming to be defending women.
That is the real message underneath all of this.
Not concern for women.
Not evidence-based policymaking.
Control.
The underlying assumption is that women cannot be trusted to make decisions about their own healthcare without politicians like Barnaby Joyce stepping in to supervise, regulate and criminalise those decisions.
And what says “girls are not as good as boys” more clearly than the belief that women require male political oversight over their reproductive choices?
Opposing this bill does not mean anyone believes girls are not as good as boys.
Opposing this bill does not mean people support sex-selective abortion.
It means they are asking a simple question: where is the evidence that this is actually happening at a scale that justifies new criminal penalties for doctors and greater political intrusion into women’s healthcare?
But evidence is inconvenient when outrage and moral superiority is the objective.
So instead the debate gets reduced to slogans like “girls are not as good as boys”, as though anyone questioning the legislation must secretly support misogyny.
Joyce’s argument is the political equivalent of setting off a fire alarm in a building that isn’t on fire and then accusing everyone else of not caring about public safety.
It is a false choice, a lazy argument and an insult to the intelligence of anyone paying attention.
What makes it even more absurd is that he expects people to take him seriously while delivering lines so clumsy and simplistic that they would embarrass a first-year political staffer.
“Girls are not as good as boys” was meant to sound morally righteous. Instead it exposed the contradiction at the centre of this entire performance: using women’s rights as a justification for giving politicians more control over women’s bodies.
Real leadership is identifying genuine problems and proposing practical solutions.
This isn’t that.
This is a politician spotting a bandwagon, scrambling aboard, and hoping nobody notices there was never a destination in the first place.
Meanwhile, women across Australia are dealing with housing stress, cost-of-living pressures, healthcare access, domestic violence and pay inequality. Those are real issues. Those are problems deserving political attention.
But those issues don’t generate the same outrage clicks on social media.
Barnaby Joyce’s greatest political talent is manufacturing outrage about problems that don’t exist while ignoring the ones that do.
And now, apparently, proving that “girls are not as good as boys” in his view by campaigning for male politicians to have greater authority over women’s reproductive decisions.
Denise McHugh is an experienced educator in Tamworth. She is Chair of the NSW ALP Education and Skills Committee and Deputy President of the Independent Education Union (IEU).
Got something on your mind? Go on then, engage. Submit your opinion piece, letter to the editor, or Quick Word now.