Quotas an option for Liberal Party women

Liberal female MPs acknowledge that the party must fix its image problem.

Victorian senator Jane Hume. Picture: Russell Shakespeare

Senior Liberal women are pushing the party to urgently ­embrace reforms to increase its female representation in federal parliament, with Foreign Minister Marise Payne leaving open the possibility of adopting a quota system.

After a week in which the party attempted to shift the gender narrative and defend its treatment of women, Victorian senator Jane Hume yesterday demanded action and a “Liberal alternative” to quotas.

Liberal female MPs have been promoting the party’s policies they say are helping Australian women, but also acknowledge it must fix its image problem, with only 19 of 83 of its members and senators being ­female.

“I still think quotas are not the answer. It’s a Labor solution to a Liberal problem,” Senator Hume told The Weekend Australian. “But if quotas are not the answer, we need to announce and implement the Liberal alternative now. We need the parliamentary and organisational leadership, state and federal, to come ­together and start working on this. It cannot wait. It does not have to be a binary between ­quotas and nothing.”

Senator Payne, the highest-ranking Liberal woman in cabinet after she replaced Julie Bishop as foreign minister in ­August, yesterday said she was neither for nor against quotas.

Her openness to the contentious measure comes after her NSW colleague Sussan Ley pushed for the state division to introduce quotas and as former Liberal frontbencher Teresa Gambaro called for a 40 per cent target of female candidates by 2020.

The Liberal Party set a target of 50 per cent women MPs by 2025 in 2016, but its numbers have gone backwards.

“I don’t support or oppose quotas but I do know that as an organisation there is more that we can do,” Senator Payne said. “In 1996, the Liberal Party was elected with a record number of women on the floor of the House of Representatives and the Senate. And we know we can do it.

“I look forward to reproducing those record numbers into the ­future. We will have a woman in a winnable position on every Senate ticket in Australia.”

Ms Gambaro, elected under John Howard in 1996, first called for a 30 per cent target by 2020 in 2015, but yesterday said it should be ramped up to 40 per cent to “aim higher”. “Merit clearly is not working in the party; we need to have a target system. We need to have each of the party divisions responsible for setting and keeping that target and being held to account,” she said.

“We need to recruit more women externally within the party system, but we need to ­actively go out and seek women. It worked (in the 1990s) because John Howard and shadow minister for women at the time Judi Moylan made a concerted effort. We have done this before, we just need to be focused.”

The Liberal Party’s federal secretariat conceded yesterday it still had more work to do but insisted “progress was being made”, pointing to the fact that three of its state Senate tickets were being led by women. “In recent pre­selections for marginal electorates, the Liberal Party, LNP and CLP have selected a number of impressive women to take the fight up to Labor,” it said.

Assistant Home Affairs Minister Linda Reynolds, who with fellow frontbencher Sarah Hender­son triggered the debate about the Liberal Party and women in The Australian earlier this week, said the issue for her party was now how to “speed up” progress.

There have been 65 men and 22 women so far preselected for the Liberal Party ahead of the federal election, with 48 seats still to be decided.

The Weekend Australian understands the Liberal Party expects it will surpass the number of female candidates who ran when Mr Howard led the party.

“A factor that often gets lost in the public debate is that the Liberal Party does not have the trade union movement to draw members, candidates and funds from. Therefore, as a volunteer organisation the only way to recruit more women is to engage externally to encourage women to join and stay — we cannot ‘quota’ members into our party,” Senator Reynolds writes for The Weekend Australian online.

“This is why the Liberal Party has deliberately taken a different approach, to adopt targets that underpin programs to engage with women and encourage them to join and participate. This is not a short-term fix, but one that has demonstrated success in many other organisations.”