‘Not good enough’: Peter Dutton to be left with one Liberal woman in Queensland
Peter Dutton will be left with one Liberal woman in his fortress state at the next federal election as the teal movement quietly mobilises for a full-scale assault on key Queensland seats.
Peter Dutton will be left with one Liberal woman in his fortress state at the next federal election as the teal movement quietly mobilises for a full-scale assault on key Queensland seats.
Queensland Liberals have yet again failed to put up a female candidate to contest a winnable seat, with a looming preselection to replace Morrison government frontbencher Karen Andrews in her Gold Coast seat of McPherson, a male-only affair.
It is set to be the seventh consecutive preselection in Queensland since 2020 that will choose a male candidate to replace an outgoing federal MP or senator.
Angie Bell, who holds the ultra-safe Gold Coast seat of Moncrieff, is the only female Liberal in Queensland contesting one of the party’s 18 held seats in both the lower and upper houses. The Nationals fair slightly better, with two female federal representatives out of eight, senator Susan McDonald and Capricornia MP Michelle Landry.
In the past five handovers of LNP lower house seats in Queensland – Fadden, Bowman, Dawson, Flynn and Groom – all departing male MPs have been replaced by men and, last year, Stuart Fraser was selected to take the winnable third spot on the party’s Senate ticket for the next federal election.
The LNP will close preselection nominations in the blue-ribbon seat of McPherson on January 15. So far no female candidates are expected to contest.
Jann Stuckey, a former Newman government minister who held the state seat of Currumbin for 16 years, warned the party had not “learned its lesson” from the last federal election.
“In McPherson, it would be wise to replace a female with a female, given the Liberal Party have often been criticised for their lack of female representation,” said Ms Stuckey, who quit the LNP in 2020.
“If I was in Liberal Party headquarters I would be very concerned about the prospect of a teal, or similar branded candidate, particularly, if it’s a woman.
“What they’ve been doing to attract women has not been good enough. Karen Andrews is on the record saying she wants more women, well where is she on this?”
In a statement Ms Andrews said she hoped “there are a large number of applicants including women” in the McPherson preselection contest, but did not directly respond to questions about what the party needed to do more to boost female representation or if she believed she could have done more to mentor a female successor.
McPherson, which takes in the southern end of the Gold Coast, has been held by conservatives since it was designated in 1949 but is at risk of falling to a teal independent at the next federal election, due in 2025. A “McPherson Matters” group – modelled on former Victorian independent Cathy McGowan’s Voices for Indi – has been set up, complete with an ABN, which aims to hold 300 “kitchen-table” conversations in the electorate by March.
At the 2022 federal election, female teal independents captured five prized seats from male Liberals in NSW and Victoria. The Liberal election review noted: “The party must also ensure there is a much larger number of high-quality female candidates contesting key, winnable seats at the next election.”
Ms Bell said the party had to be more “proactive” in encouraging more women to stand for preselection.
“It is an ongoing challenge for our party to have more women in the parliament,” she said.
“There are women out there, we have women in our party who are very capable but you can’t force them to put their hand up.”
Ms Landry, who has held the central Queensland seat of Capricornia for four terms, was surprised there were no female candidates vying to succeed Ms Andrews in McPherson, but said that was out of the party’s control. “You can’t drag people kicking and screaming, people have got to want to do it,” she said.
“I’d love to see more women in there (federal parliament), it is definitely a very male-orientated industry let’s say, and you know, that does have its difficulties. If you look at the upcoming state election, I know that David Crisafulli certainly has a really good team of women on the ground and, and obviously, with a federal election, next year, we need to get more women in there.”
After becoming LNP leader in 2020, Mr Crisafulli set a target to preselect women in seven of the 14 seats he wants to wrest from Labor at the October state election. Eight women and three men have been chosen as candidates in those seats so far, with three preselections still to go. Party insiders have praised Mr Crisafulli’s success at working “behind the scenes” to identify and promote female candidates without being seen to install captain’s picks or overrule local preselections.
In Brisbane City Council, the largest local government in Australia, 13 of 20 LNP councillors are women.
Mr Dutton did not respond to questions about what he had done as leader to attract female candidates in key winnable seats or if the federal LNP had a problem attracting women candidates in Queensland.
A spokesman for the Liberal leader said: “These are matters for party members, preselectors and the party organisation.”
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