Off the back of party focus group research showing that the Liberal Party has a problem with female voters, this week party strategists asked women in the parliamentary ranks to refute claims the government doesn’t do enough for women.
The problem with having so few women in your parliamentary ranks is that there really aren’t that many women who you can call on to defend the status quo. Or as I prefer to put it, defend the indefensible.
On Wednesday, two Liberal parliamentarians — one senator and one marginal seat MP — were quoted in this paper defending the parliamentary party against accusations of bullying and denouncing the need for gender quotas to lift female representation.
Senator Linda Reynolds wrote an opinion piece on the issue, Sarah Henderson was splashed across the front page with quotes.
On Thursday, two more joined the fray — Nola Marino and Nicolle Flint. Again, quotas were denounced in the name of philosophical purity: arguably the one issue on which this team of Liberals seems to want to stick to its philosophical guns on.
In fact, somehow in their musings the gender problems within the government became Bill Shorten’s fault. I’m still trying to get my head around that one.
That’s four voices in total. Not quite an on-court basketball team, but not bad given there are so few women in Liberal ranks.
Julie Bishop was also approached for comment, but the former deputy party leader has seen too much in her time to fall for that trick — just doing what the blokes want and defending the indefensible.
She knows the Liberal Party has a problem with women. And having been asked to publicly defend Tony Abbott back when Julia Gillard was targeting him, Bishop wasn’t going to be used in that way again.
Bishop’s offering was to point out to readers that she’s disappointed with Australia falling from 15th to 50th in the world when it comes to female parliamentary representation since the Howard years. Not quite the defence the party strategists were hoping for, I suspect.
Given that during those 20 years Labor’s quota system has seen the number of its female MPs rise to nearly 50 per cent, and the Coalition now has just 16 per cent women in the House of Representatives (12 of 74), it’s not hard to work out which party Bishop was being critical of.
By Friday, the Liberals had run out of women prepared to defend the status quo. Today, frontbencher Sussan Ley was quoted in the paper, urging her colleagues in NSW to embrace quotas to solve the gender problem. And throughout the week we didn’t hear from the minister for women Kelly O’Dwyer defending her party’s track record on this issue. Doing so would have been a little awkward given she’s previously said Liberals are perceived as “homophobic, anti-women, climate-change deniers”.
What about other women in the Liberal Party who might come out and defend the status quo? Can we expect to hear from more of them? Unlikely. The odd senator might say something in the days ahead, but that’s it. Adding to Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells’s intellectual offering today that Liberals don’t have “quota girls”: that’s true, neither does Labor. It has women in its ranks to the magnitude of nearly 50 per cent of the team. The Coalition has no girls and very few women.
There’s no one left in the House to defend the indefensible. Those remaining are either retiring in disgust or fighting for their lives in marginal seats. Which is what the likes of Henderson and Flint should be focused on. Both hold marginal seats and both may well lose at the next election precisely because Liberals have a problem with women. Victims of a party failure they spent the week defending.
Peter van Onselen is a professor of politics at the University of Western Australia and Griffith University
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