Good policy, not female quotas, key to Liberal’s recovery
Despite its devastating defeat in May, some 45 per cent of Australians preferred the Coalition to 55 per cent who preferred a Labor government. It’s a big margin but not insurmountable.
I remember former Liberal Party deputy leader Peter Costello saying, when he was in opposition, that just because some commentators were advising you what to do does not mean that they would vote for you.
I was reminded of this when watching ABC TV’s Insiders last Sunday. Mark Kenny – a former Labor Party staffer, ABC producer and Sydney Morning Herald/Age journalist who now has a professorship at the Australian National University – provided lots of advice about how to resolve “the women problem that the Liberal Party has”.
Kenny wants the Liberals to impose quotas for females contesting preselections. So does ABC left-of-centre journalist Patricia Karvelas. Writing in ABC News Online on June 30, she offered “some free advice to the Liberal Party” that opposing quotas “provides Labor with a free kick of monumental proportions”.
Without question, the Liberal Party needs more female MPs in the commonwealth parliament, as leader Sussan Ley has acknowledged. There is a photo taken in March 1996 of prime minister John Howard at Parliament House with 25 Liberal women. Howard was to say after the 1998 election, when there was a swing against the Coalition, that his government was saved by the strong performance of some female Liberal MPs in marginal seats.
Certainly, the Liberal Party has a problem with the female vote – which, on the evidence of the polls, dropped dramatically in the immediate run-up to the May 3 election. However, this is likely to have turned more on the policies offered by the Peter Dutton-led opposition than candidate selection.
It is not at all clear that women necessarily favour female candidates. As with male voters, the cost of living is the main driver in party political choice. It is conceded that the poorly presented policy to end working from home within the commonwealth public service was a turn-off for many women voters. But this would have affected Coalition candidates of either gender.
Moreover, the policy of ending work from home for public servants was presented by Jane Hume (one of the best Coalition performers during the first Albanese Labor government). And, in so far as can be ascertained, it was supported by the Liberal leadership – Dutton and his deputy, Ley. Ley was also the shadow minister for women’s affairs at the time.
As Liberal Party frontbencher Anne Ruston said on Insiders on May 18, many “fantastic women put their hand up to run for us at the last election and didn’t get up”.
The list includes Amelia Hamer (Kooyong, Melbourne) and Gisele Kapterian (Bradfield, Sydney). Both were defeated by well-financed Climate 200-endorsed teal candidates, Monique Ryan and Nicolette Boele. Both Hamer and Kapterian won preselection without quotas for women. Meanwhile, Tim Wilson in Goldstein was the only Liberal to win a seat from an opponent – in this case teal Zoe Daniel.
Quite a few Liberal women oppose quotas because they do not want to win on account of their gender but on their ability alone.
It’s true that Liberal women face certain problems when compared with their Labor counterparts. Many Labor MPs have a background as political staffers, in the public sector and the trade union movement.
On the other hand, many potential Liberal female candidates come out of small businesses or are self-employed. They have less experience in machine politics and less time to spend working the branches. But many achieve success. As Ruston noted, the prime reason there are few women in federal parliament turns on the fact the Liberal Party suffered a massive defeat in May. Any recovery in the next election will almost certainly see the number of Liberal female MPs rise.
These days former Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull is the go-to person for ABC journalists looking for a criticism of the Liberal Party. And so it came to pass that Karvelas interviewed the former prime minister for her piece.
Turnbull criticised Liberal frontbencher Angus Taylor and former PM Tony Abbott for (allegedly) giving the impression they are happy with the male-dominated party that it is. Turnbull added “the Liberal Party has said it needs to recruit more women into its parliamentary ranks for years, and for just as long resisted quotas”.
He has criticised ex-Liberal PM Scott Morrison for some years. But, as I recall, Morrison had more women in his cabinet compared with Turnbull. Moreover, there is no record that comes to mind of Turnbull calling for quotas when he was PM from 2015 to 2018.
The Liberal Party is a federated party consisting of six state divisions, a division in the ACT and in the Northern Territory (where the Country Liberal Party exists). It is difficult for the federal entity to prevail over the various divisions. This makes the imposition of quotas difficult. In the meantime, the best way for the Liberals to increase their female MPs is to do well in the next election.
When the party lost the 1972 election, journalist Peter Samuel wrote in The Bulletin on March 17, 1973 that the small-L liberals had prevailed over the conservatives such as Malcolm Fraser (as he then was) and that the conservatives were in decline. But Fraser defeated Labor’s Gough Whitlam in a landslide in December 1975.
On July 17, 1993, academic Judith Brett wrote in The Age “the Liberal Party in the 1990s seems doomed”, following Labor’s win in 1993 under Paul Keating. By March 1996, Howard was prime minister on his way to becoming the second-longest-serving PM in our history (after Robert Menzies).
Despite the Coalition’s devastating defeat in May, some 55 per cent of Australians preferred a Labor government to some 45 per cent who preferred the Coalition – indicating a move to the centre-left. It’s a big margin but not insurmountable. The path to electoral success for the Coalition, however long, depends on good policy strongly proclaimed, irrespective of gender.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.
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