Josh Frydenberg backs Julie Bishop after she slammed the culture at Parliament House, as Turnbull’s daughter calls for change
MALCOLM Turnbull’s daughter has unleashed on the Liberal Party over its treatment of women, saying quotas to boost the number of female MPs may be the party’s “only hope” to win back female supporters.
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MALCOLM Turnbull’s daughter has unleashed on the Liberal Party over its treatment of women, saying quotas to boost the number of female MPs may be the party’s “only hope” to win back female supporters.
Daisy Turnbull-Brown has also blasted bullying in the party and said it would be “very hard to raise daughters and tell them to look to the Liberal Party for strong female role models” as she backed Julie Bishop, who yesterday called out the “appalling” behaviour she had experienced as a woman in politics.
“I have never been a fan of quotas but they may be the Lib’s only hope to win back female supporters,” Ms Turnbull-Brown said in a series of tweets this morning.
She added a pointed comment about the recent debate over bullying and intimidation in the Liberal Party following the leadership spill that rolled her father last month.
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There is also something fundamentally kid/family unfriendly about Canberra, and that is also a factor in why some women may not want to be MPs, sure. But that is not enough of a reason. It is not the reason for the past 3 weeks. #auspol
— Daisy Turnbull Brown (@MrsDzTB) September 5, 2018
Mr Turnbull’s son Alex has also hit out at the party in recent days, calling for people to donate to Labor’s campaign for his father’s former seat of Wentworth.
Federal Labor has had gender quotas since 1994 and women now make up a record 48 per cent of the party’s current MPs.
The Liberal Party has rejected gender quotas on the grounds political candidates should be selected on merit alone. They have just 20 female members in Parliament out of 85 MPs and senators.
FRYDENBERG BACKS BISHOP OVER ‘BULLIES’
Scott Morrison’s deputy says the Liberal Party needs to do more to attract female candidates after Julie Bishop blasted the “appalling” behaviour she has endured in politics.
Treasurer and Deputy Liberal leader Josh Frydenberg this morning said it wasn’t good enough for politicians to pay lip service to complaints about bullying and intimidation and then do nothing to fix the culture at Parliament House.
It comes after Ms Bishop, in her first speech after stepping down as Foreign Affairs Minister in the wake of last month’s damaging leadership coup, called out the dire lack of women in Australian politics and the “appalling” behaviour she had experienced as a female MP.
“Politics is robust, the very nature of it, it’s not for the faint hearted,” Ms Bishop said at a Women’s Weekly awards event in Sydney yesterday when asked about reports of bullying and intimidation in the Liberal Party that have come out of the leadership spill and Victorian MP Julia Bank’s announcement she intends to quit politics at the next election.
“I have seen and witnessed and experienced some appalling behaviour in Parliament, the kind of behaviour that 20 years ago when I was managing partner of a law firm of 200 employees I would never have accepted,” Ms Bishop said.
“Yet in Parliament it’s the norm.”
She also said it wasn’t acceptable that less than a quarter of Liberal MPs were women.
“It’s not acceptable for our party to contribute to the fall in Australia’s ratings from 15th in the world in terms of female parliamentary representation in 1999 to 50th today,” she said. “There’s a lot to be done.
“Our party, in fact all parties, recognise they have a problem in attracting and maintaining women, diversity in general.
“When a feisty, amazing woman like Julia Banks says this environment is not for me, don’t say ‘toughen up princess’, say ‘enough is enough’.”
Ms Bishop didn’t comment on missing out on the top job in the leadership ballot beyond saying the events of the spill would be “debated and dissected for years to come”.
This morning, Mr Frydenberg, who replaced Ms Bishop as Deputy Liberal leader, said he agreed with her remarks.
“My first comments to the party room after I was elected as the Deputy Leader was to say to colleagues we need to get more women into not just marginal seats but into safe seats and more women into the top table,” he told ABC radio.
“Julie was also making a broader comment about the atmosphere and culture in Parliament House — the adversarial nature, the sometimes confrontational nature, and that is something we all need to be very conscious of and mitigate against.”
He also said it was “not good enough” for MPs to simply speak about the issues, they needed to act on them.
“Certainly when it comes to getting more women into Parliament, that is an objective that we are promoting and pursuing and already Scott Morrison has acted on it by putting more women into Cabinet,” he said.
Mr Morrison now has six women in Cabinet. Ms Bishop was the only woman in Cabinet in the Abbott Government in 2013.
DUTTON BACKERS DENY BULLYING CLAIMS
Energy Minister Angus Taylor and Assistant Minister for Treasury Zed Seselja have publicly denied any knowledge of bullying or intimidation of their fellow Liberal MPs from Peter Dutton’s camp during the leadership spill in the wake of Ms Bishop’s remarks.
Senator Seselja said Ms Bishop seemed to be reflecting on the broader issues in Parliament rather than any specific issues in the Liberal Party
“There’s no doubt about it, she talked about things like Question Time and the atmospherics around that and these are very legitimate issues to be raised,” he told Sky News.
“In terms of some of those specific criticisms (about bullying), no I’m not aware of those.”
The senator added however that Ms Bishop should be taken seriously as an MP who had contributed a lot to the Liberal Party.
Angus Taylor added that he would be getting fully behind the new Prime Minister, who he was “absolutely sure” would “drive the sort of priorities I believe in”.
Despite a series of damaging leaks from within the party this week, Mr Taylor told Sky News there was “no question” Mr Morrison could unite the party.
He said he was not aware of bullying from the Dutton camp during the spill but said: “When these bruising things happen, there are always these things that follow.”
Dutton supporters during the leadership spill have denied they even spoke to Ms Banks during the spill week, which will fuel conservative MPs and commentators questioning the debate about bullying in the Liberal Party.
Liberal MPs Michael Sukkar, Andrew Hastie, James Paterson, Jonathan Duniam, Tony Pasin, Zed Seselja and Eric Abetz have told Fairfax Media that they never spoke to Ms Banks to seek her support for Mr Dutton.