What must the Libs do to fix their gender problem? Allow me to woman-splain

When former Victorian treasurer Alan Stockdale, acting as the interim head of the NSW Liberal party, suggested that women in the party were “sufficiently assertive” and that in fact the Liberals may need to “protect men’s involvement”, he said it was a joke.

The gag – made to a virtual meeting of the NSW Liberal Women’s Council, during a discussion about female representation – didn’t land with the crowd.

Alan Stockdale raised eyebrows at the NSW Liberal Women’s Council.Credit: AAPIMAGE

But surely I was not the only one tickled when reading reports of the comments a few days after they were made. It was the use of the adverb “sufficiently” which most amused me – the idea that female assertiveness has an allocation, and that the allocation had been filled, as decreed by Stockdale.

It helped that the news report was illustrated with a photograph of Stockdale (80) and his co-chair, former Howard government minister Richard Alston (84), seated in front of a portrait of Liberal Party founder Robert Menzies – an earnest trio of white-haired gerontocrats. Stockdale’s right hand was poised in the air, as though caught mid-mansplain.

Last year former Liberal leader Peter Dutton appointed Stockdale, Alston and former NSW MP Peta Seaton as administrators to run the NSW division.

The NSW branch was deemed incapable of managing itself after its failure to nominate 144 candidates for local government elections in September (they had one job, etc). But after Stockdale’s comments were widely leaked, the male party veterans had to go.

“Gerontocrats” Richard Alston (left) and Alan Stockdale in the online meeting.

Ironically, their ouster (official reason given: they were too Victorian to help in NSW) only helped to prove the truth of Stockdale’s remarks. It seemed very much like they were forced to quit their posts because, well, they came across a lot like out-of-touch old white guys.

In lamenting his own victimhood, Stockdale ended up proving his own point.

As reported this week, the NSW Liberal party is now being led back from the brink by former NSW premier Nick Greiner. He will head a new committee overseeing the party’s NSW branch, for the next nine months, after which point, they might get the keys to the car back.

Greiner’s reluctant elevation (he told the ABC he didn’t want to do it) coincided with the appointment of two party elders to undertake a review of the federal Liberals’ disastrous election campaign. They are former NSW Liberal minister and former sex discrimination commissioner Pru Goward, and former South Australian Liberal senator Nick Minchin.

Campaign reviews are conducted after every election, and the 2022 review – undertaken by Brian Loughnane and Senator Jane Hume – was replete with sound advice that was thoroughly ignored.

What’s different this time, is that before the election was called for May, the Coalition was in a strong position to take Labor into minority government. But as soon as the campaign began, the Dutton-led Coalition managed to squander its lead so spectacularly it was difficult to watch.

It was a very bad campaign, but it wasn’t entirely the campaign’s fault it was bad, so to speak. The campaign was simply the period when voters worked out that the Coalition was all tip and no iceberg. They came to realise the Coalition had developed barely any policy during its time in opposition. The scant policy that had been developed was released too late, with too little detail.

Dutton was praised for keeping his party unified, with no mention of the heavy price he paid to do so – notably, capitulating to the Nationals on energy policy. This left the party with a nuclear policy so non-feasible it was basically fictional. Polling showed that women voters in particular disliked it.

It had never been explained how Dutton expected to win back government without the inner-metropolitan seats it had bled to the teal independents. Turns out, it wasn’t possible. It still isn’t.

The Liberals failed to convey their values to Australian voters and seemed unsure themselves what those values were. But they did manage to project a cultural hostility to women which resulted in a strong continuation of the trend of the last decade or so – that fewer and fewer women are inclined to vote for the Coalition.

The announcement of a policy, early in the campaign, to curtail working-at-home privileges for public servants, was astounding in its ineptitude. The policy’s most startling feature was not that it seemed like it had been conceived by someone who had never met a working mother, and who had apparently never even met anyone who had met a working mother.

It was the total lack of any economic reasoning behind the get-back-to-the-office edict, beyond “we think public servants are lazy” and “if you’re putting a load of washing on in your lunch hour, it isn’t work”.

Nick Minchin this week gave an interview in which he seemed open to quotas for female candidates.

“If you believe in picking on merit then quotas are an anathema,” he told The Nightly. “However, I think it is proper after an election like this to re-examine that question. We’ve clearly got a problem with the female vote.”

The fact that even a traditional conservative like Minchin seems open to quotas is encouraging. Not just because quotas work, and not just because voters do not care how you achieve gender equality in your party, they just expect it to be there.

But because it shows the Liberals are finally showing some pragmatism. Our democracy needs a strong, pragmatic Liberal party to test and challenge the Labor government.

But the Liberals’ woman problem is not just about its personnel. There is little point having good female candidates if they are forced to sell bad policies which ignore the economic and social contribution of women.

A former police officer, Dutton often cast himself as a “protector” of women and children. Sussan Ley, then deputy-leader, echoed this when she introduced him at the Liberal campaign launch on April 13.

“He has been the thin blue line protecting women and children from harm,” she said.

But women don’t need protection. They need promotion. They need power. Recognising that is the best way for the Liberals to return to power themselves.

Jacqueline Maley is a senior writer and columnist.

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