Family First National Director and NSW Legislative Council candidate Lyle Shelton says the Minns Government's health bureaucracy has quietly awarded itself, by departmental directive, the power over conscientious objection that the New South Wales Parliament expressly refused to legislate little more than a year ago, and is demanding Health Minister Ryan Park rescind the directive and bring his department back under the authority of the Parliament.
Mr Shelton says NSW Health Policy Directive PD2026_032, Termination of Pregnancy in New South Wales, published on 24 July 2026, declares that the conscientious objection provisions "do not extend to" "administrative, managerial or other tasks ancillary to the performance of a termination" or to "hospitals, institutions or services", and goes further still by placing clinical assessment, referral and non-directive counselling outside the protection of conscience altogether.
Mr Shelton says the timing tells the story. In May 2025 the Legislative Council considered precisely these questions when it debated Greens MLC Amanda Cohn's Abortion Law Reform Amendment (Health Care Access) Bill 2025 - and struck out the clauses that would have given the Health Minister power to direct public hospitals to provide abortions, imposed a "reasonable distance" access duty, and forced an individual conscientious objector to hand a patient directly to an abortion provider rather than simply provide information. The Act assented to on 11 June 2025 contains none of those things.
"Parliament looked at this, debated it, divided on it, and said no," said Mr Shelton. "Little more than a year later, unelected officials in the Ministry of Health have written the rejected policy into a departmental directive and enforced it as a condition of hospital funding. That is not administration, that is legislating by memo, and it is contempt for the Parliament of New South Wales."
Mr Shelton says the directive's own legal foundation collapses on inspection. It claims authority under section 14 of the Abortion Law Reform Act 2019, but section 14(3) of that Act binds only "a registered health practitioner performing a termination, or assisting in the performance of a termination", and the directive's own opening section concedes that it "applies to all registered health practitioners in NSW who perform, or assist in the performance of, a termination of pregnancy."
Its conscientious objection provisions nonetheless purport to bind hospitals, institutions and services - bodies Parliament never gave the Secretary power to bind. The only lever the directive holds over them is the line declaring compliance "mandatory for NSW Health" and "a condition of subsidy for public health organisations."
"When the law will not carry the load, they reach for the chequebook," Mr Shelton said. "Hospitals are being told the price of keeping their funding is surrendering a conscience protection that Parliament put in the statute and refused to take out. That is coercion dressed up as compliance."
Mr Shelton says the gravest overreach is buried in section 4.3. Section 9(1) of the Abortion Law Reform Act 2019 expressly protects a practitioner who conscientiously objects to being asked to "advise the first person about the performance of a termination." The directive strips that protection away, ruling that "clinical assessment, referral or non-directive counselling", together with all pre- and post-termination care, sit outside the clinical performance of a termination and therefore outside conscientious objection entirely.
"Parliament wrote conscience protection for advising a woman about an abortion into the black-letter law. A department cannot delete it with a bullet point," Mr Shelton said. "A nurse or midwife who wants no part in steering a woman toward an abortion is now told by her own employer that her conscience stops at the theatre door. Parliament said otherwise, and Parliament outranks the Ministry."
Family First is calling on Premier Chris Minns and Health Minister Ryan Park to rescind PD2026_032 in full; to direct the Secretary of NSW Health to reissue a directive that goes no further than the Abortion Law Reform Act 2019 as Parliament actually passed it; to withdraw the "condition of subsidy" threat held over public hospitals; and to explain to the Parliament who authorised officials to implement by directive the very provisions the Legislative Council had struck out of a bill.
Mr Shelton says Family First will campaign at the 2027 New South Wales election for legislation that entrenches conscientious objection in statute - for individual practitioners and for institutions alike - and places it beyond the reach of any future policy directive, so that no health bureaucrat can again undo by memorandum what the people's representatives have decided on the floor of the House.
Mr Shelton says the question for the Minns Government is a simple one, and it is not really about abortion at all: does the Health Minister run his department, or does his department run the state? Mr Shelton says every member of the New South Wales Parliament who voted to remove these provisions in May 2025 now has an obligation to say publicly whether they accept being overruled by their own officials, and the case for a genuinely independent voice in Parliament - one prepared to ask that question when the major parties will not - has never been clearer.
