Is Australia ready for another female leader?

It’s been more than a decade now since the Australian Labor Party dumped Julia Gillard as prime minister and turned back to Kevin Rudd to save the furniture. After a torrid term in office, Gillard said of her gender as she departed: “It doesn’t explain everything; it doesn’t explain nothing. It explains something.”

Ley’s elevation to the Liberal leadership is a significant moment in Australian political history, and it sets twin tests. The first is for the Liberal Party: after years of decline in female support because of perceptions it is too male-dominated, too blokey, is it ready to be led by a woman? And will the party give her time to grow into the role?

The second test is for those Australians who struggled, during Gillard’s prime ministership, with the mere fact that a woman was leading the country – many of whom shared sexist and denigrating memes.

We don’t know yet whether Australians are ready for a woman to lead a major political party once again, let alone whether a majority would be prepared to vote a woman into the prime ministership. (And that’s before you factor in the 33 seats the Coalition has to win back to form government.)

The federal political landscape is supposed to have changed for the better in the past decade, with shocking revelations raised by Brittany Higgins and Rachelle Miller leading to the Respect@Work report into sexual harassment, the Set the Standard report into parliament’s workplace culture and more.

Steps have been taken to improve the culture in Canberra with the creation of a Parliamentary Workplace Support Service and an Independent Parliamentary Standards Commission – though both lack the teeth they need.

In theory, the arrival of another federal leader who happens to be a woman should be no big deal. It has become commonplace for state premiers and chief ministers to be women. Women have held almost every senior portfolio federally, though not as treasurer.

Opposition Leader Sussan Ley: a test for her party, and the country. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Countering that, the Liberal Party has, to be blunt, failed in the past decade with its treatment of and appeal to women, with its policy offering becoming less and less appealing to women under Scott Morrison and then Peter Dutton.

But there is something unique about leading a federal political party, as national leaders are a projection of how we see ourselves as a nation – so now that the Liberal Party has chosen Sussan Ley to be its leader, we are about to find out what has actually changed for women in politics.

Ley has not spoken to Gillard since she took over the leadership, though she has discussed the challenges that lie ahead with former Liberal deputy leader Julie Bishop, a stand-out cabinet minister who may well have led her party but who so many Liberal men simply couldn’t bring themselves to vote for when Malcolm Turnbull was defenestrated.

Like Gillard, Ley has publicly played down the fact that she is the first female leader of her party. But in her first speech at the National Press Club on Wednesday, she spoke about things that few, if any, men could talk about: her own personal experience of coercive control; being knocked back when she initially set out to get her pilot’s licence; juggling the demands of being a farmer’s wife, raising three young kids and going to university at the age of 30.

As she told Jacqueline Maley and me on the Inside Politics podcast this week, time and again, year after year, she was refused commercial pilot jobs because an (unnamed) airline told her that passengers were not ready to accept a woman flying a plane.

But perhaps the most extraordinary comment she made was to open the door to Liberal Party state divisions adopting quotas, so as to forcibly fix the party’s declining number of female MPs and declining support among women.

This is a big deal. Ley is the first federal Liberal leader to offer support for quotas, if state divisions choose to go down that path. To underscore how uncomfortable this makes some Liberals, her leadership rival, Angus Taylor, spoke out against quotas on Thursday, as did NSW Opposition Leader Mark Speakman.

But as Ley said on the podcast, the percentage of women voting for the Liberals has been in decline since 2001, the year she was elected, and she is open to anything that would increase female representation – a seismic shift for a party that has long rejected quotas out of hand.

However, asked by Maley why, as party leader, she didn’t just pull the trigger and implement quotas, Ley hedged: “One of the things I value in the Liberal Party is the autonomy of state divisions … the only view I have is that we must get more women in our parliamentary party. I’m not going to tell divisions or individuals how to get there.”

She added: “You’re talking about a process; I’m talking about an outcome, and that outcome has to be more women [in the party].”

Ley argues she is focused on the result, rather than prescribing how that result is achieved, because the federated structure of the party and its state divisions’ autonomy make it much harder to impose a top-down approach. That’s true.

But quotas work. Labor has achieved gender parity in the past three decades, while the Liberals have been going backwards for years. Review after review has recommended anything but quotas. Each so-called solution ends in failure.

The new opposition leader’s determination to fix her party’s woman problem is real. It won’t be fast, it won’t be easy, and she will face resistance every step of the way. But if she fails to fix it, the Liberal Party faces being out of power for not just two terms, but for a generation.

After everything that has happened since Gillard left the top job, including the hard conversations about the treatment of women, parliament’s increased focus on tackling domestic violence, the return of a women’s economic statement in the budget papers, it is to be hoped that the Liberal Party, and ordinary Australians, judge Ley on her policies, rather than on her gender.

Gillard’s remark about gender – it’s not everything; it’s not nothing – has been remembered long after she left office. What is sometimes forgotten is what the former prime minister said in her next breath: “What I am absolutely confident of is it will be easier for the next woman and the woman after that and the woman after that.”

James Massola is chief political commentator.

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