The Liberals must make peace with the ‘F’ word

There is no greater confirmation of the Liberal Party’s inability to learn from its mistakes than a re-read of its 2022 election review.

Such reviews are a convention on both sides of politics, and they (should) serve a sound purpose: the prosaic and simple purpose of learning history so as not to repeat it.

The 2022 review, undertaken by former party director Brian Loughnane and Senator Jane Hume, contains many paragraphs that could be cut and pasted into the next review, covering the devastating loss the Liberals have just suffered.

Liberal senator Jane Hume and former party director Brian Loughnane reviewed the Liberal Party’s 2022 loss.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen/Louise Kennerley

“The party has lost nearly all of its inner metropolitan seats,” reads one 2022 observation.

“Of particular concern in the results is that in seats with high numbers of female professional voters, the Liberal Party only holds three of the top 30 seats where previously it held 15.”

Then there is the conclusion that “the only demographic class where the Liberal Party and the National Party have a stronghold is in rural electorates”.

And its blunt follow-up: “No party that is seeking to form government has a pathway to a majority solely through rural and regional electorates.”

Further: “Liberal Party performed particularly poorly with female voters, continuing a trend that has been present since the election of 1996.”

This is a kind way of saying that its share of the female vote has been falling for nearly two decades, with no serious attempts to arrest the decline. No acknowledgment, outside this review, that the lady-vote is not a boutique item, not an interest group or a minority to be pandered to, but instead, that it represents the numerical majority of voters.

Also from the 2022 review: “A significant number of submissions to the review cited the Liberal Party’s declining vote among women as a decisive factor in the 2022 election loss. It is clear from the party’s research and post-election analysis that the party’s standing with women was an important factor in the party’s defeat.”

Scott Morrison’s defeat in 2022 prompted an internal review that found the Liberal Party “performed particularly poorly with female voters”.Credit: James Brickwood

Add the statement: “Liberal defectors in ‘Teal seats’ were highly likely to agree with the statement that ‘the treatment or attitude toward women within the Liberal Party had a strong influence on my vote’.” Or: “Immediately following the election, a clear majority of Australians (across different electorates) agreed with the statement that ‘the Liberal Party has fallen behind the views of middle Australia’.”

There are sections on the swing against the Liberals among Chinese-Australian voters, and a warning that the Liberals’ policy agenda “appeared to be limited and unclear to the electorate”. There is a call for the proper vetting of candidates, and the preselection of candidates in good time to prepare for the election campaign.

And then the most damning conclusion of all.

“Many of the matters raised in this review were also discussed in the reviews of the 2016 and 2019 federal elections,” the authors write. “Many of the problems identified have been constants for a decade or more.”

What now? At the time of writing, Deputy Liberal Leader Sussan Ley had declared her candidacy for the leadership. On Friday, she told the Sunrise program, “We did let the women of Australia down”.

She continued: “I’m determined and convinced that I am the right person to lead the party forward at this time and I think my appointment would send a strong signal to the women of Australia, but it’s about much more than that.”

Even in this brief statement, you can read the internal conflict of the Liberals: We know we have done a bad job with women, and we know we need to promote them to positions of leadership. But we can’t allow the impression to settle that they are promoted to positions of leadership because they are women.

The conservative side of politics, in Australia and abroad, has always had difficulty embracing the values of feminism. In its furthermost right quarters, women are valued chiefly for their roles as homemakers and mothers, with a reluctant concession that some women have something to offer the public sphere.

Julie Bishop listens as then prime minister Tony Abbott speaks during question time at Parliament House in 2015. Credit: Andrew Meares

Former prime minister Tony Abbott eventually put out a replacement-wage maternity leave policy with the explanation that women should not be educated to a high level, only to be denied a career.

“If we want women of that calibre to have families, and we should, well we have to give them a fair dinkum chance to do so. That is what this scheme of paid parental leave is all about,” he said in 2013.

In 2014, then-minister for foreign affairs Julie Bishop rejected the label “feminist” for herself.

“I don’t find the need to self-describe in that way,” she told the National Press Club.

Feminist, she said, “is not a term that I find particularly useful these days”.

She said she would never “blame the fact that I’m a woman” if something didn’t work out in her career.

And yet, it is difficult to conjure any reason other than her gender to explain why Bishop was never treated seriously as a leadership contender by her own (majority male) colleagues.

The Labor Party has achieved gender parity in parliament (if not in high leadership positions) through the effective implementation of quotas.

The right side of politics has an anathema for the Q word, even though Liberals have, for years now, tentatively used the more gentle word “targets” to assert they are onto the problem of the gross under-representation of women in their ranks.

The Liberals should be the party of aspiration, and the party of peak economic productivity. Quotas are productive – in the sense that they work, and they work quickly.

Feminism is a byword for female aspiration – the aspiration for what countless politicians like to call the Australian principle of the “fair go”. Why is that F-word so ubiquitous, while the other one is so difficult for Liberals to utter?

Jacqueline Maley is a columnist and senior writer.