Liberal says she’s proof the party doesn’t need diversity quotas

Young, female, new to party politics and the child of migrants, Nicole Werner is not your average Liberal candidate.

Three years after she Googled “how to join the Victorian Liberal Party”, the daughter of Chinese-Malaysian migrants is on the cusp of becoming a member of Victoria’s parliament.

With Labor yet to decide whether to contest, Nicole Werner is the frontrunner to win the Warrandyte byelection.Credit: Penny Stephens

The 32-year-old charity worker and mature-aged student wasn’t involved in university politics and only joined the Liberal Party in 2020, triggered by frustration over COVID-19 lockdowns.

With Labor yet to decide whether to field a candidate in next month’s byelection, Werner is the frontrunner to win the seat and become the first female MP from an Asian background to represent the Liberal Party in state parliament.

But Werner, who was unable to speak English when she started kindergarten in the mid-1990s, told The Sunday Age she rejects identity politics and doesn’t believe in gender quotas to improve female representation or engineering diversity. She said her two preselection wins were proof the Liberal Party was capable of change on its own.

“I have stood for two preselections, both times in a competitive field, and in both instances they chose a woman and the runner-up was a woman,” she said.

“But it has to be on merit and the best person for the job and the party can make that choice.”

That first preselection win was for the seat of Box Hill which she contested for the Liberal Party at last year’s state election. The Coalition had identified Box Hill as a “must win” seat for the Liberals alongside other electorates in Melbourne’s east including Ringwood and Ashwood which it had lost to the government.

But on election night, the Liberal Party’s primary vote dropped 8.9 per cent in the seat, a result which left Werner “astonished”. After the loss, she penned a piece for News Corp attributing the party’s poor showing in Melbourne’s east to a “lack of long-term engagement and work within multicultural communities” and claimed she had been “hung out to dry”.

Nicole Werner with her husband Fraser and her grandmother.

She has since tempered this criticism somewhat, but maintains Labor has been “more proactive and getting into migrant community groups”.

“Politics is meant to represent the makeup of what Victoria or Australia looks like, and we have work to do to get it there,” she told The Sunday Age.

“We need more women representing the Liberal Party and coming from an ethnically diverse background and being young, gives me a different perspective.

“Having new members with different backgrounds, that contributes to having a broader perspective, being more representative and being engaged in the community in different ways. It all makes for better policy.”

Werner still draws inspiration from her family’s migrant background. As a child, her Popo, Chinese for grandma, had hidden in the jungles of Malaysia during the Japanese invasion.

Werner’s parents Peter and Belinda moved to Melbourne from Malaysia in 1987.

Her parents, Belinda and Peter, migrated to Melbourne in 1987, settling in Box Hill before saving up to buy a house in the nearby suburb of Blackburn North. Her father worked three jobs and the couple took out bank loans to send Werner and her brother to elite private schools in Melbourne’s east.

“I think my success in becoming a candidate was a symbol for them of their hard work,” Werner said.

Going into next month’s election, the Liberal Party holds Warrandyte with a 4.2 per cent margin. But factional fighting and the decline in the party’s support in the seat mean Werner’s win is far from guaranteed.

Most of Warrandyte sits within the federal seat of Menzies, where Labor received a 6 per cent swing at the 2022 federal election, in part driven by a backlash from Chinese-Australian voters.

Liberal MPs are already framing a loss in the seat as the end of John Pesutto’s leadership following months of division triggered by his decision to try and expel upper house MP Moira Deeming for her involvement with the Let Women Speak rally that was gatecrashed by neo-Nazis.

On that saga, she concedes both sides – Pesutto and Deeming – could have handled the issue better, but said she remains supportive of Pesutto as leader.

Werner says she isn’t aligned to either faction, but time spent as a youth pastor with Christian Pentecostal megachurch Planetshakers has seen her linked to the party’s religious right whose members overwhelmingly backed Deeming to remain in the party.

Labor has until August 9 to decide whether to contest the seat. In Labor’s absence, Greens candidate Tomas Lightbody, the deputy mayor of Manningham Council, is predicted to be Werner’s strongest competition in the August 26 byelection.

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