Unlike Julia Gillard, who was the factional pick to take down a first-term prime minister, the first woman to lead the federal Liberal Party was elected, not selected.
That alone speaks to the party’s foundational belief that opportunity and merit should determine advancement. Indeed, as Robert Menzies said: “I am not half so interested in the sex … of my representatives as I am in the quality of their minds, the soundness of their characters, the humanity of their experience, the sanity of their policy and the strengths of their wills.”
Those words of Menzies should ring loudly in the ears of anyone who says gender-based quotas will fix the Liberal Party’s electoral fortunes. The Liberal Party does indeed need to get more women into its parliamentary ranks and to attract more female voters. But chasing votes on the left could lose as many votes to minor parties on the right. And the fundamental problem is not failing to win enough female votes but failing to win enough votes across the board. This has far more to do with its failure to create a contest with Labor and to develop strong policy than to any current lack of female leaders, or policies pitched specifically to women, or quotas designed to force the party to install women in particular seats.
I warned last week in this column that convulsions about turning left or right are counter-productive; the Liberal Party’s values are its North Star and that’s where the rebuild should start. If you get the policy right, the politics will follow. Thinking that a big-spending policy on childcare, for example, will win female voters is naive if the policy doesn’t reflect Liberal values by providing women (and men) with choice about how they raise their children, as opposed to Labor’s funding of unionised childcare only.
Simply matching Labor’s $18bn in subsidies for families earning up to $500k a year is hardly the Liberal way; certainly it’s hardly in the spirit of John Howard and Peter Costello, where policy was underpinned by sound economics.
But a party that’s spooked by its own shadow has lost the ability to contest policy and this must change under the new leader.
Sussan Ley is a Liberal who won a Nationals seat. As a pilot, a farmer and a former tax official, she has an attractive backstory but has never been regarded as a Canberra heavy-hitter, nor has she developed much of a political persona despite 24 years in public life. Possibly that’s because of past scandals over entitlements and somewhat eccentric positions, at least for Liberals, such as strong support for Palestine (which she has now put behind her) and fierce opposition to the live sheep trade.
Leading the opposition after a heavy defeat is the hardest job in politics. There’s little goodwill or benefit of the doubt from voters and certainly none from the Canberra press gallery. Ley has acquitted herself well in her opening encounters with her natural predators, firing back when she felt journalists weren’t giving her a fair go.
An early test will be how Ley handles the federal intervention into the NSW division of the party sparked by its faction-driven failure to lodge local government nominations on time. To revitalise itself and to entice people who normally vote Liberal to join, the NSW party desperately needs a new constitution encouraging members to debate policy and empowering them to preselect candidates.
But the factional bosses want a swift return to business as usual in a closed shop that in the past few years has lost 5000 members and refused to accept 600 new applicants lest factional controls slip.
Ley will face pressure from the moderate wing of the party, largely run by renewable energy lobbyist Michael Photios and including the likes of Malcolm Turnbull and Matt Kean with big commercial interests at stake, to back the Albanese government’s energy policy guaranteeing ongoing multibillion-dollar subsidies for wind and solar power. So far Ley has hedged her bets, putting off taking a position until a policy review.
While the Libs don’t need detailed policies until a year out from the next election, they can’t avoid having a broad position on key issues or dealing with legislation designed to wedge. Without being clear in what they stand for, they will never be able to develop a coherent critique of Labor.
This means if Ley is to avoid the trap of being Labor-lite she’ll have to thank her factional backers for their support while insisting on being her own person. To be more than a stopgap leader, she’ll have to emulate the likes of Menzies and Howard, leaders who saw politics as a contest of ideas and were willing to have robust internal debates.
By prizing unity above all else, Peter Dutton missed the opportunity to test the party’s policy settings, yet that’s an important part of opposition; not junking your values but shaping policy that reflects the needs of the community in line with party principles.
It may surprise those demanding quotas that the last time the Liberal Party’s share of the female vote was above 40 per cent was under Tony Abbott (45 per cent in 2013, 41 per cent in 2010 even against the first female prime minister). Paradoxically, while the left likes to claim women loved Turnbull, his time in office saw the Libs’ female vote slump to 35 per cent in 2016 and it has since fallen further.
That’s because women respond to a well-crafted, values-based policy agenda as much as men. It’s because that has been missing that women have walked away. And the style of our leaders in communicating with women, which is hardly less important than the policy offering, has been appalling.
On this, Ley is already different. But that’s not all down to gender. After all, Labor’s landslide win and increased share of the female vote have happened under a male leader and deputy.
Back in 1943, Menzies declared: “There is no reason why a qualified woman should not sit in parliament, or on the bench or in a professorial chair or preach from the pulpit or, if you like, command an army in the field.” And most of the female firsts were under Liberal governments. If the Coalition lacks strong female representation in parliament right now, it’s less the absence of quotas and more the disproportionate male membership at every level of the party.
A 2020 Menzies Research Centre paper revealed that scarcely 30 per cent of the Young Liberals membership was female and scarcely 40 per cent of the general membership was female.
The challenge is to increase female membership in the branches because it’s only if there’s a more numerous pipeline that women are going to enter parliament and go on to become frontbenchers in greater numbers.
To think that quotas, the most illiberal move the Liberal Party could make, are the silver bullet to solving its electoral crisis misunderstands the nature of the problem. Dividing us by identity, be it gender or race, is precisely what so many Australians rejected with the voice. As a woman, I can’t think of anything more demeaning than to be advanced by anything except hard work and ability.
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