Liberal Party needs more women MPs: Tony Abbott

Former prime minister Tony Abbott says the Liberal Party should recruit more women and ethnically diverse MPs to improve the fortunes of a party grappling with the task of reflecting modern Australia.

The 28th prime minister urged his party to look to the UK Conservative Party, which created an “A-list” of female and diverse candidates without quotas, and now boasts Hindu Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and cabinet ministers Suella Braverman and Kemi Badenoch – described by Abbott as “robust conservatives” in “the most diverse cabinet in history”.

Tony Abbott said the Liberal Party would better reflect Australia with more female and ethnically diverse MPs.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

As the number of Liberal women in federal parliament languishes at a three-decade low, Liberal women are speaking out about the failure to reverse a problem identified by election reviewers Jane Hume and Brian Loughnane as a major factor in the 2022 defeat.

The party’s candidate selection season is in full swing but there are scant examples of new women being endorsed to run in safe seats, leading to radical calls for open primaries in which non-party members pick aspiring MPs.

“I want the parliamentary party to be more reflective of the general Australian community, namely to have more women and to be more diverse,” Abbott told this masthead.

“I don’t want to import identity politics into the party but to defuse identity politics by showing that the Liberal Party and Australia more generally really does judge people on merit and is prepared to give anyone and everyone a fair go if they’re ready to have a go for us and for our country more generally.”

“[I] would rather not speculate on the electoral benefit as, again, we should pick candidates on their inherent quality, other than to say that eventually, better candidates should produce better outcomes.”

Abbott has a chequered history on gender relations. Julie Bishop criticised him for appointing himself minister for women when Bishop, the deputy leader, was the only woman in his first cabinet. When she was prime minister, Julia Gillard accused Abbott of being a misogynist in a famous speech.

But the call to recruit more women from a prime minister who has retained his revered status among Liberal members, unlike other recent party leaders, may jolt his conservative admirers, some of whom have dismissed the lack of Liberal women as a left-wing talking point.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton last month used his authority to protect new frontbencher, Melissa McIntosh, from losing her seat to a man.

While many recent preselection contests have been won by men, the party has selected Mary Aldred for the Victorian seat of Monash, held by the now-independent MP Russell Broadbent, but expected to return to the Liberals.

Katie Allen has been chosen to recontest Higgins, which she lost to Labor in 2022, while Gisele Kapterian and Amelia Hamer will contest the now-teal seats of North Sydney and Melbourne’s Kooyong. Susie Bower and Katie Mullins will try to wrest seats back from Labor in Tasmania’s Lyons and Sydney’s Parramatta at the next election, which is expected sometime between the end of this year and May 2025.

Last month, right-wing senator Alex Antic dislodged former minister Anne Ruston from the top of the South Australian Senate ticket, as Antic dismissed “the gender card” as “nothing but a grievance narrative, constructed by the activist media”.

Liberal MPs Linda Reynolds, Karen Andrews and Bridget Archer expressed alarm about female involvement in the party in a column by author Niki Savva published this week. Reynolds argued Dutton couldn’t win an election “until the party understands and harnesses the electoral power of women”.

Jane Hume and former party director Brian Loughnane.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen/Louise Kennerley

The Liberal’s Hume-Loughnane post-mortem following its 2022 election loss found women aged between 35 and 54 were the most likely to shift their vote from the Morrison-led Coalition.

Ethnic diversity is another challenge. An estimated one in four Australians has non-European, non-Indigenous ancestry, but only three of the Coalition’s 86 federal MPs can make that claim – Terry Young (South Sea Island), Ian Goodenough (Singaporean) and Dave Sharma (Indian).

Labor has five Indigenous MPs while the Coalition has two.

Labor also falls short on ethnic diversity: about 10 per cent of its MPs are non-European and non-Indigenous, though more than 50 per cent of its federal politicians are women in part due to its quota system.

The Hume-Loughnane review recommended the creation of a Margaret Guilfoyle Network – which was quietly launched last month by Hume – for current and former female MPs, staff, and local branch members to promote female representation.

In a recent interview with this masthead, Hume shied away from the Liberal Party adopting a UK-style list system. “He [Conservative Party leader David Cameron] had a talent pool that was specifically for preselection, whereas the Guilfoyle network, of course, would provide that but more than that,” she said.

Hume added that before the 2022 election the Liberal Party held half of the 50 seats in the country with the highest proportion of white-collar women but now held just 10.

“And in the top 30, we held half and now we hold three,” she said.

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