Piers Akerman: Woman problem? No, NSW’s sooky Liberals need to rediscover their sense of humour
The NSW Liberals are not just good at losing elections, they’ve also lost their sense of humour for excoriating a former Liberal Party president for a harmless joke, writes Piers Akerman.
Opinion
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The NSW Liberals are not just good at losing elections, they’ve also lost their sense of humour.
Members of the NSW division’s women’s council excoriated Alan Stockdale, a former Victorian treasurer and former Liberal Party president, for a harmless joke he made during a Zoom conference with its members last week.
Faced with a screenful of women, Stockdale quipped that the women in the party were now so assertive that quotas may be needed for men. Not a great line, but not deserving of the confected outrage that followed.
Maybe the last amusing feminist left Australia when Germaine Greer exited to London.
This was meant to be a private discussion between the trio of external administrators brought in to run the dysfunctional, faction-riddled NSW division in the wake of its signal failure in the last state election, but some of the would-be Boadiceas rushed to their Left-leaning media friends to dump on Stockdale and fellow Victorian Richard Alston, a former senator and cabinet minister.
Handily, a video of the Zoom session and a transcript had been made and leaked, although participants were not asked for permission for the recording.
As Nine Media state political reporter Alexandra Smith snidely noted in a shockingly ageist comment: “Stockdale and former Victorian senator Richard Alston, combined age 164, positioned themselves under a portrait of Robert Menzies as they fronted the NSW Liberal Women’s Council on Tuesday to argue why they should continue to run the troubled division.”
The third member of the federally appointed troika, Peta Seaton, who served 10 years in the NSW Legislative Assembly and held more than a dozen shadow portfolios, was largely ignored.
Those who piled-on included Opposition Leader Sussan Ley, Nationals Senator Bridget McKenzie and NSW Senator Maria Kovacic, who was appointed (not elected) to succeed the late and revered Senator Jim Molan by the NSW Liberal Party.
But the federal administrators aren’t in the dock, the division is.
The roles of former state MP Michael Photios and those in his employ and on the state council need examination.
Photios, hugely influential in the so-called Moderate faction, reportedly organised a meeting after the federal election at which it was agreed with Alex Hawke (the Centre Right faction boss recently elevated by Ley) they would fight reform of the NSW division, reject the Coalition’s nuclear policy and fully support Labor’s renewable energy policy.
Rather than consider possible conflicts of interest, members of the women’s council slammed Stockdale as if he had been an enthusiastic visitor to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s island.
Let me remind them that Stockdale was a key member of the last successful reforming Liberal state government in the nation.
When he took on the Victorian Treasury portfolio in October 1992, Victoria’s state debt was about $32 billion. With the fall of the Kennett government in September 1999, after major economic reforms and privatisations, the state’s debt had been significantly reduced to $5.5bn. Today it stands at $167.6bn.
Ley, the first woman to head up the Liberals, weighed in, saying “there is nothing wrong with being an assertive woman”.
Of course there isn’t. She should ask Dominique Fisher, Stockdale’s wife, who has run (among other things) her own successful organisation for the past 30 years.
Alan Stockdale misread the room.
He thought he was engaging with an audience of adult women and not a claque of coddled girls in need of hourly counselling.
That was his sole mistake.
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