Libs would never have looked to star-struck Bishop

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

The same sections of the media that mourned Malcolm Turnbull’s departure from politics are grieving after Julie Bishop’s announcement she is leaving too.

Huh. There might be a clue here. A matter for Sherlock Holmes, maybe? On second thoughts, even the hapless Inspector Clouseau could solve the predictable case of left-wing lament over Bishop’s political demise.

Daft claims about Bishop as a saviour for the Liberal Party keep piling up. The Sydney Morning Herald, The Guardian and the ABC have been so busy bleating that Bishop was “snubbed” by men in her own party, a fate that befalls every failed leadership candidate, they fail to understand why.

Bishop was popular, well known to Australians, frequently positioning herself in the media, splashed across women’s magazines, and feeding us with a constant stream of selfies with celebrities. But her escalating ambition to become the party’s political celebrity damaged her reputation, not just within the party but among those who admired her before she became star-struck by her own celebrity.

Turning on the charm is not the same as convincing a disillusioned electorate to vote Liberal. After Turnbull’s messy downfall and ugly dummy spit against the party that made him leader, the notion that the leadership should go to another political celebrity was absurd. As the Liberal Party’s Simon Birmingham told a flummoxed Patricia Karvelas on ABC radio last week, politics is not a popularity contest.

There is another clue in the fact that political lightweight Julia Banks thinks Bishop is “one of the finest leaders this country has ever seen” and “should have been the first female Liberal prime minister”. The former foreign minister and deputy leader was undoubtedly polished and articulate, a hard worker, a terrific fundraiser and campaign worker.

But few regarded Bishop as a serious political warrior on issues that go to the heart of the Liberal Party’s existence as a political party.

No one expects Banks to understand that; she was a Liberal MP for a moment in time. But Bishop, in politics for 20 years, should have understood.

She lost the leadership because not enough Liberal MPs thought she could win in a ballot up against Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton.

And that tells a story too. In an existential fight against Labor, with an election looming, Bishop didn’t have the political heft to carry that fight. That was the reasonable calculation most Liberal MPs, both men and women, made. Poof! There goes that gender conspiracy.

Bishop was a competent foreign minister. But let’s not pretend hers was a difficult period for a foreign minister to navigate. By contrast, former Liberal foreign minister Alexander Downer contended with the East Timor crisis, the rise of Islamic terrorism, and the decision to send Australian troops to Afghanistan and Iraq. Downer was at the forefront of ­securing Australia’s borders too.

Successful leaders and ministers convince voters about a party’s reason for being. Think Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating. Or Robert Menzies and John Howard. The Howard government had heavyweight ministers such as Peter Costello, Peter Reith and Downer, who were at the front line battling big policy debates. Bishop wasn’t at their level of conviction.

In fact, with a few exceptions, the current raft of senior Liberal ministers, including the present Prime Minister and former ones too, don’t come close either. That’s why the Liberal Party is in state of ideological disrepair, not because it has a “women problem”.

This is whipped-up hysteria from sections of the media that would rather talk about gender and unconscious bias and repeat unfounded claims of bullying than discuss the policy and values vacuum that has afflicted the Liberal Party over the past decade.

While Labor has a sharp message about what it stands for, albeit with splits over borders and coal, the Liberal Party is a bigger jumble of ad hoc policies, with no central story behind it.

This yammering about gender ignores the critical problem.

Putting more women into parliament won’t lift the Liberal Party from its electoral funk. Just look at the political miscalculation of preselecting Banks in the Victorian seat of Chisholm.

She won the seat as a Liberal, only to desert the party at the first whiff of political grapeshot. A better candidate would have stuck around for a fight.

It is no surprise that the same clueless media that embraces Banks because she fits its sexism schtick still has not understood Bishop’s political end. She imagined that a glossy profile, a few firsts as a woman, and a string of quick phone calls to MPs would easily secure her the leadership, rather than a history of serious policy advocacy.

Obsession with gender has reached such farcical levels that when a woman won preselection in Higgins on Saturday, replacing the outgoing Kelly O’Dwyer, Karvelas continued on her gender bender, tweeting that it was close and had a man won, it would have been a “massive issue”. That ABC bubble seems to suffocate the brain. Mainstream Australians outside Southbank might regard electricity prices, immigration, stagnating wages growth, superannuation changes and holding on to franking credits as massive issues when they enter the ballot box.

The fixation with Bishop’s clothes and shoes by those in the media who are usually quick to condemn any mention of what a professional woman wears is part and parcel of their threadbare thesis about Bishop’s political fall.

Alas, some people will never rise from the bog of their gender trenches or stop lobbing ridiculous claims at imaginary enemies.

On that note, a book arrived in the mail last week, called On Merit. Author Paula Matthewson excitedly proclaims that a “red” rebellion is under way. Red because Bishop wore red shoes when she resigned as foreign minister and then other Liberal women wore “crimson jackets, dresses and heels” to signal their fury at the 11 votes she attracted.

The essay reads like angry fashion blogger turns gender activist, demanding quotas and asserting, over and over again, that merit is a sham.

Matthewson shows no understanding of why, after 20 years in politics, Bishop attracted meagre support from her colleagues. Or that a red rebellion is the low road to mediocrity for Australian politics. Indeed, former Liberal minister Amanda Vanstone features on the front cover, declaring that “real equality is when a female mediocre fool gets the same job as a male mediocre fool has now”.

God help us if the Liberal Party falls for this dismal outcome. A quota system formally cements ­female mediocrity as an entry ticket into parliament. Some will say Julia Gillard entered parliament once Labor had quotas and look how she fared. That’s how quotas insult women.

Perhaps the red rebels need reminding again that Margaret Thatcher was British prime minister for almost 12 years and Helen Clark led New Zealand for nine, and neither needed a red rebellion or quotas to succeed. Was their merit a sham?

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