Frustration over preselection as Liberals wrestle with gender balance

Senior women in the Liberal Party are growing increasingly concerned about female representation as men dominate preselection battles ahead of the next election.

A review of the Liberal Party’s 2022 election loss, released one year ago, recommended a target of 50 per cent female representation within parliamentary ranks in 10 years.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and male colleagues during question time at Parliament House.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

But with preselections under way in Victoria and NSW, only one new woman, Mary Aldred, has been preselected in a Liberal-held seat, and top female members fear the federal party’s record-low level of women MPs will not improve.

In Victoria, just three women have been endorsed as candidates for the 13 lower house seats where preselections have been held.

Melissa McIntosh will face a challenge in her western Sydney seat of Lindsay.Credit: Nick Moir

In order to reach gender parity for Victorian candidates at the next election – due between August and May – female candidates would need to be endorsed in two out of every three remaining seats.

In NSW, sitting MP Melissa McIntosh is under serious threat of losing her seat, and senior Liberal figures, speaking anonymously to discuss internal party matters, expect Opposition Leader Peter Dutton will intervene to protect her. Deputy opposition leader Sussan Ley also staved off a preselection threat last year.

Jo van der Plaat will run in Labor-held Eden Monaro, Gisele Kapterian will run in independent-held North Sydney, and Katie Mullens will run in Labor-held Parramatta.

A group of NSW seats – including Wentworth, Reid and Gilmore – do not yet have candidates, meaning more women may be picked.

Frustrated that the party will fail to improve the gender gap at the next election, female party members including Charlotte Mortlock, who runs Coalition women’s advocacy group Hilma’s Network, and Karyn Sobels, who was the first female president of the Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, are calling on the party to come up with ways to attract more female candidates to run.

Mortlock said if the party was truly committed to the target, then more would need to be done in 2024 because 2023 was a year of stagnation.

Charlotte Mortlock’s Hilma’s Network tracks the number of Liberal women in parliaments and advocates for greater representation.Credit: Peter Rae

“To meet this target we cannot lose focus … we are making things harder for ourselves,” she said, adding that she was encouraged by the number of women putting their hand up for nomination. “The only way we fix this is through incremental change, seat by seat, vacancy by vacancy.”

Sobels, who unsuccessfully contested a Liberal Senate preselection in Victoria last year, said the party needed to attract more younger women because it took years for them to embed themselves within party networks and win preselection contests.

Sobels said women also faced barriers – such as child-rearing – that men did not.

“But it feels to me like there is a shift in the culture happening,” she said.

Former Liberal MP Tim Wilson wants his Melbourne seat of Goldstein back.Credit: Penny Stephens

The Liberal Party was contacted for comment. Jane Hume, who co-authored the post-election review, declined to comment.

In Victoria in the past eight weeks, the party has endorsed Matt Evans to stand in Bendigo, Anthony Richardson in Isaacs, Manny Cicchiello in Aston, Usman Ghani in Calwell and Theo Zographos in Chisholm.

During that same time, just two new women were endorsed for seats – Katie Allen in Higgins and Mary Aldred in Monash.

Gisele Kapterian will run in the independently-held North Sydney seat.

The party has had several chances to increase the number of women in the party room since the last election. Stuart Robert (Fadden) was replaced by Cameron Caldwell, Roshena Campbell was selected by the party to replace Alan Tudge in Aston but lost the byelection, and two senators (Marise Payne and Jim Molan) were replaced by one man, Dave Sharma, and one woman, Maria Kovacic. Queensland senator Gerrard Rennick also lost his spot to a man.

In Dunkley, where a by-election will be held early this year, councillor Nathan Conroy is the front runner to be the Liberal candidate, while in Goldstein former MP Tim Wilson is the preselection favourite against lawyer Stephanie Hunt.

As the Coalition starts to plot its path back to government, four senior female Liberal figures – speaking to on the condition of anonymity to discuss preselections – said they feared the party was not doing enough to fix the problem.

The Liberal’s post-mortem following its 2022 election loss found that the party’s vote was weakest among women aged 18 to 34, and that women between 35 and 54 were the most likely demographic to shift their vote. It stopped short of recommending quotas to get more women elected, but instead recommended a target of 50 per cent female representation within parliamentary ranks in 10 years.

One former female Liberal MP said that goal was unachievable if it failed to boost the number of women elected at the next election.

"We have identified the problem, we know what we need to do but no one seems willing to do anything about it," the former MP said.

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