Libs must be vigilant as they replace yesterday’s men

Malcolm Turnbull must be rubbing his hands with glee. The former prime minister’s allies are inflicting untold damage on the government months out from an election. Several MPs who voted for Turnbull in the 2015 leadership spill have announced their resignations. Another quitter, Julia Banks, is running as an independent against Liberal MP Greg Hunt. Political bastardry doesn’t come less thinly veiled than this.

However, the Liberals could convert chaos into political capital by ­selecting high-calibre women to run for seats vacated by yesterday’s men.

Departing MP Julie Bishop didn’t recover from her failed bid to become Liberal Party leader last year. Yesterday, she accused the notorious fixer Christopher Pyne for cruelling her chances. But Pyne wasn’t the only Liberal moderate who thwarted Bishop’s ambitions. In a leaked message thread from the “Friends of Stability” group, about 20 of her factional allies ­decided to vote for Morrison: ­“Despite our hearts tugging us to Julie, we need to vote with our heads for Scott in round one.”

Bishop retaliated in spectacular fashion. She resigned as foreign minister and has announced she will not contest her seat of Curtin. However, she is making her presence felt in the battle for preselection, where her favoured nominee is reputed to be bureaucrat Erin Watson-Lynn.

Like many Coalition MPs, Bishop believes there are too few women in the party. In particular, there is a paucity of women in safe seats. In a paper on female representation in parliament, Menzies Research Centre director Nick Cater and Liberal MP Nicolle Flint recommend better reporting on gender balance at preselections for lower and upper house positions at the state and federal level. They specify the need to monitor the number of men and women nominating for preselection, the gender profile of candidates preselected and how many women are preselected for and elected in safe seats.

Succession planning is considered a crucial method for increasing the representation of women in parliament. Bishop, Kelly O’Dwyer and Steven Ciobo are considering women to replace them. Despite campaigning strongly for gender equity during the same-sex marriage debate, Pyne reportedly favours a man to replace him.

The perception that gender — and identity politics more broadly — is used to parachute cultural Left candidates into government has some merit. But in the battle for Bishop’s seat, the Liberals have a genuine contest of ideas between former vice-chancellor Celia Hammond and policy wonk Watson-Lynn. To date, the press has focused largely on Hammond, who is widely viewed as the frontrunner in the preselection battle. She has come under scrutiny not for her business acumen, leadership of a university or community service in Western Australia but simply because she holds conservative views.

In comparison with Hammond, Watson-Lynn’s track record is quite unremarkable. She moved back to Perth in January, just meeting the requirement that nominees for preselection must be Liberal Party members for at least 30 days. However, despite Watson-Lynn’s history of speaking against flagship Coalition policy, she has been spared the criticism meted out to Hammond.

In 2016, Lynn-Watson drew ­applause from the ABC’s Q&A audience for criticising the third pillar of the nation’s border security policy, the offshore processing of asylum-seekers and refugees. She used her parental status in an emotional appeal against the ­Coalition’s cornerstone policy: “As a parent … I think the idea that we’ve got children in detention is awful.” Nor did she agree with the government policy of resettling refugees in another country. The problem is not Watson-Lynn’s criticism per se but her apparent lack of understanding about cause and effect in government policy. Porous border policies fuel international trafficking in children. During its previous term, Labor’s weak border controls left 8000 children in detention. The Morrison government relocated the last remaining children from immigration detention last month.

While lacking the understanding one might regard as requisite for an aspiring Coalition MP, Watson-Lynn shares history with key Liberal figures Malcolm Turnbull and Simon Birmingham. In 2016 she was a finalist for the Women’s Agenda Leadership Awards. In her bio, she listed two people as supporters: Lucy and Malcolm Turnbull. In the same year, she won a high-level university position. The Australian’s former higher education editor Julie Hare wrote: “The national equity centre had a new chairwoman appointed yesterday. Erin Watson-Lynn is young, female, a working academic who hasn’t yet handed in her PhD with a start-up and a not-for-profit under her belt. Hardly your standard appointment to such things. Seems she met Education Minister Simon Birmingham some time ago and must have made an impression. He recommended her for the position.”

On the National Centre for Student Equity website, Watson-Lynn’s bio makes mention of the Turnbulls again: “(Watson-Lynn) is the co-founder of DICE Kids, whose Patron is Lucy Turnbull AO.” There is nothing wrong with securing patrons and Watson-Lynn deserves credit for organising DICE for Kids. However, it is reasonable to question whether she is the best qualified candidate for Curtin, especially considering the calibre of contenders.

Despite Hammond’s extraordinary career achievements, much has been made of her supposed ­anti-feminism. The controversy arises from a 2013 speech where she spoke about the type of feminism that encourages a default position against men and mother­hood. Two years later, she clarified her position in an interview with Honi Soit. Hammond is a strong believer in equal opportunity for women but thinks that during the 1980s feminism shifted from a pro-equity movement to one based on anti-male, anti-family politics that excluded women with dissenting views on issues such as abortion.

A political party genuinely committed to the advancement of women permits women freedom of speech and political diversity. Labor has women in numbers but they must toe the party line in an organisation led by men and male-­dominated unions.

From the chaos of revolving-door leadership, the Liberals can create a new order where women are more than mere pawns in the zero sum game of identity politics. They must come to represent the broad church of the liberal ­tradition.