The NSW Liberals received a donation from an anti-abortion activist who was accused of “brazen bullying” and attempting the “Americanisation of NSW politics” by former party leader Mark Speakman.

The $2000 donation from strident anti-abortion activist and campaigner Joanna Howe was made at one of a series of political fundraisers the NSW Liberal Party has held with firebrand federal Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price since September.

A Rhodes scholar and a legal academic, Howe has drawn criticism from across the political spectrum for what South Australian Deputy Premier Kyam Maher has described as her “Trumpian” tactics.

She has been accused of attempting to import a MAGA-style debate about abortion into Australia, and in 2024 was banned from parts of South Australia’s parliament after MPs in that state claimed she used “threatening and intimidating” tactics during an abortion debate. Howe has previously denied this, and described the ban as an “appalling” abuse of power.

More recently, Howe has organised a series of large anti-abortion protests outside NSW parliament, including one attended by former deputy prime minister turned One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce last month.

Her attendance at the fundraiser and the donation is likely to anger some senior Coalition figures given Howe, who has a large social media following, has been targeting NSW Nationals MPs in the lead-up to next year’s election, and had previously campaigned for Speakman to be sacked.

As recently as this weekend, Howe held community forums targeting the seats of Bathurst and Cootamundra MPs Paul Toole and Steph Cooke because of their previous support for an abortion decriminalisation bill in 2019.

Her campaigning activities in NSW drew the ire of Speakman during a debate over a Greens bill which gave greater access to the right to prescribe medical abortions for terminations up to nine weeks.

The bill, which was ultimately passed, was modelled on recommendations of a NSW Health review of abortion law which found so-called “abortion deserts” were undermining the functionality of the 2019 legislation.

During debate over the bill in 2025, Speakman accused Howe of having “threatened” his leadership, accusing her of “brazen bullying” and declaring he would not “cave in” in the face of political threats.

He read out an email from Howe in which she said that she would “suspend my planned campaign against Labor, in order to lead a public campaign aimed at encouraging a grassroots opposition to you as Liberal leader” if he supported the bill.

At the time, Howe ran Facebook ads urging people to “join the Liberal Party to axe Speakman”.

She rejected the idea she had bullied Speakman, saying she had been critical of all sides of politics “without fear or favour”.

“[A]ll I did was write to him to ask him to vote against [the] bill and to notify him, which, I thought, was quite a polite thing to do, that I intended to run a political campaign against him if he sided with the Greens on their radical abortion bill,” she said.

Howe frequently posts on social media in support of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. She insists she is not aligned to any party and supports MPs such as Liberal upper house MP Rachel Merton, who opposes abortion. At the Farrer by-election, she issued a how-to-vote card which encouraged her supporters to back Family First candidate Rebecca Scriven above successful One Nation candidate David Farley.

Though her campaigning focuses on issues such as the sex-selective abortion ban currently before the NSW parliament, she said her ultimate goal is to “bring the number of abortions to zero”.

“But I recognise that we have to bring people on a journey, and that’s going to happen through incremental law reform,” she said.

Howe, who refers to Labor as “the party for abortion”, said that changes to introduce more restrictive abortion law would happen only “through parties on the right”.

“My interest is for the Liberal Party to be a pro-life party, to be against late-term abortion,” she said. “And so, where I can support good politicians in that party who stand for the human rights of children, I will support those politicians.”

Electoral disclosures show Howe made the donation at one of three political fundraisers the Liberals have held with Price after she made the inflammatory claim last year that the Albanese government was encouraging Indian migration to bolster its vote. She later walked back the comments, but was dumped from former leader Sussan Ley’s frontbench before being reappointed by Angus Taylor in February.

One of the fundraisers, in September, came just days after she made the remarks and prompted an apology at the time from Speakman.

The three fundraisers included one with Merton, which Howe attended, another with the Willoughby branch of the Liberals, and a third “in conversation” with Sky News host Rowan Dean organised by the party’s Roseville branch.

NSW Liberals are concerned the party’s parlous financial state could undermine its already outside chances of reclaiming government and has forced hard decisions about seats to target at the 2027 state election.

Other donors at the events have included the Pharmacy Guild of Australia, Insurance Australia Group and industry lobby group Coal Australia.