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.

On Thursday, it tried again. But this time, it failed.

Labor announced that, if re-elected, it would spend $30m over four years to eliminate out-of-pocket costs for abortion care. Within hours, Victorian Liberal leader Jess Wilson largely matched it.

Under Labor’s plan, participating private providers would be paid to deliver medical and surgical abortions up to 16 weeks’ gestation. Women would no longer have to pay for GP and specialist consultations, scans, tests or medication. Those in regional Victoria who must travel long distances for care would also be eligible for a subsidy.

The government would extend access to medical abortion from nine to 10 weeks’ gestation, while commissioning a clinical review into whether it could safely be offered at up to 12 weeks’ gestation. Currently in Victoria, women are able to obtain a termination during the first 24 weeks of pregnancy, and later if they obtain the agreement of two doctors.

The reform builds on years of work to improve access to reproductive healthcare under former premier Jacinta Allan and her then health minister Mary-Anne Thomas. The duo established 20 sexual and reproductive health hubs across Victoria, a mobile clinic that delivers medical abortion services to women in remote and regional parts of the state and a virtual women’s health clinic. In its first year, almost 60% of appointments at the virtual clinic supported medical abortion.

At a government symposium on abortion care last year, affordability was identified as one of the biggest barriers to access. At the event, Danielle Mazza, head of Monash University’s department of general practice and the SPHERE Centre of Research Excellence in Women’s Sexual and Reproductive Health, argued the state should look to the UK, where abortion care is publicly funded through the NHS, and Ireland, where GPs are subsidised to provide the service.

On Thursday, Mazza said Labor’s announcement brings Victoria into line with those jurisdictions and would make it the first Australian state to provide abortion care without out-of-pocket costs. Only the ACT currently offers free abortion services.

“I applaud this policy announcement, and if it’s implemented, it will make Victoria the leading state in abortion access and reproductive rights,” she says. “It would address a lot of issues that key stakeholders have been advocating for many years.”

But the timing – after 12 years in government and with all polls pointing to a Labor defeat – drew the ire of many.

The health minister Ingrid Stitt said “only Labor will protect a woman’s right to choose”, with her media release claiming polling showed the Liberals could only form government with the support of One Nation, a party who would make abortion “a criminal offence”.

One Nation’s federal leader, Pauline Hanson, has said she was not against abortion in the first trimester – a position that has not been reflected in the party’s national platform, which pledges to “seek every opportunity to roll back brutal and extreme abortion law”.

In 2024, state leader Warren Pickering joined anti-abortion activists at a “March for Babies” in Melbourne and posted on Facebook that Victoria’s abortion laws were “some of the most draconian on the planet”. At a 2022 candidate’s forum, he said One Nation would “seek to bring the abortion gestation period back to what it previously was – 12 weeks [off] the top of my head”.

Trades Hall has also adopted similar language to Labor, recently launching a campaign urging people to “vote like your right to a safe abortion depends on it”. Its posters claim the Liberals “won’t have the guts” to stop One Nation’s plans to “roll back safe abortion laws”. They even feature a coat hanger – a stark symbol of the dangers of unsafe abortion.

They say the campaign resonates with voters. This is backed up by a March 2026 Redbridge poll commissioned by The Australia Institute ahead of the South Australian election, which found that 62% of Australians support access to abortion, with an additional 25% supporting access in limited circumstances. Notably, even 50% of One Nation voters supported abortion access.

And Labor has used similar tactics to effect before. At Queensland’s 2024 state election, then premier Steven Miles warned that the Liberal National party could allow changes to abortion laws. Labor lost office, but party figures believed the issue helped save some of its seats. It clearly cut through, because immediately after winning office, David Crisafulli moved to prevent parliamentary debate or changes on abortion for the term.

In Victoria, however, Wilson has moved to neutralise the attack before it can gain traction.

While there may be a small group of Liberal MPs who are privately uncomfortable with the commitment, they aren’t expected to publicly speak out as they have in the past. As one Liberal source put it, “there is absolutely no appetite to take the bait” so close to an election they look likely to win.

Even Labor MPs have said it was a “politically clever” move, with one saying Victorian women were “the real winners”. Another said it would help Wilson appeal to female voters, a demographic that had previously abandoned Liberal party but were appearing to return to it under Wilson’s leadership.

“It’s backfired spectacularly,” the MP said.

The premier, Ben Carroll, comes out of it the most bruised, having failed to show up at Stitt’s press conference on Thursday morning, then clumsily tried to frame the issue in economic terms in the afternoon.

“I’m a financially conservative premier that’s also socially progressive. Decades of research shows that a woman carrying around an unwanted pregnancy has a detrimental impact on her education, on her earnings,” he said.

Animal Justice party MP Georgie Purcell, who alongside Legalise Cannabis MP Rachel Payne has pushed for abortion care to be made free, including in a report released last year.

Purcell said Labor had 12 years in government to improve abortion access but chose to use the annoucement as an “opportunity to wedge a female opposition leader during an election campaign.”

“I can only presume there was some bloke thought he was a genius behind that one,” she said.

• Benita Kolovos is Guardian Australia’s Victorian state correspondent