As One Nation rises, Victoria’s Labor and Liberal parties promise to make abortions free. Is the timing pure politics?

Pauline Hanson (centre) and One Nation’s Victorian leader Warren Pickering (right). Hanson has said she is not against abortion in the first trimester, but the party’s national policy says it will ‘seek every opportunity to roll back brutal and extreme abortion law’. Photograph: Joel Carrett/AAP

The Victorian Labor party has spent more than a decade successfully wedging its opposition.

From the Safe Schools program and abortion clinic buffer zones to voluntary assisted dying and the ban on gay conversion practices, Labor’s progressive social reforms, in particular, have exposed the ideological fault lines running through the Liberal party room and its base.