Quotas for women are long overdue in Liberal Party

Our parliaments need to represent the Australian people. Women have faced discrimination for generations and the best way to change that is for the people who have lived through that discrimination to serve in our parliaments. But it’s more than that. We need to have our best people in parliament and we aren’t doing that while more than half the population is chronically under-represented.

The Liberal Party has tried to improve female representation without quotas and it hasn’t worked. It’s time we changed. Quotas are a fast and effective way to get the Liberal Party to better reflect the community we seek to serve. It was great to hear the Prime Minister’s statement in support of quotas for women. It was important and overdue.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison, in an emotional press conference last week, said he was open to the idea of quotas. Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

The great Kathryn Greiner made the point on The Drum that you don’t recruit women to fix the culture. She’s dead right. The onus is on every MP in every parliament – male and female – to create and sustain a professional and respectful party culture. We should recruit more women because having a balance between men and women candidates will bring us closer to voters and the issues they care about and that will help us win elections. Quotas are just a fast way to get us there.

Ever since the ALP introduced electoral quotas for women in 1994, Liberals have used the idea of merit to argue that the problem will fix itself. All else aside, blind faith in merit has failed. You only have to look at the numbers of women Liberals in the state and federal parliaments to see that we are a long, long way from parity and worse, a long way behind Labor. The first step to fixing the problem is to recognise it exists.

Merit is in the eye of the beholder. Preselection is not some Solomonic process that objectively weighs the individual qualities of the candidates. Qualities and qualifications matter, but preselections are multi-faceted contests. Geographical, numerical and yes, factional considerations come into play in determining who puts their names forward and who gets preselected. There’s no shame in admitting that.

The Liberal Party is a broad church and there is a natural tension between its wings. Contesting preselections is a process that helps keep the competing philosophies within the party balanced. It also helps make sure our overall approach is centred on the mainstream. But we have to acknowledge that it’s also a process that has failed at getting capable women into parliament. The definition of stupidity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome.

If the Liberals cannot win back women voters, they cannot win elections.Credit: Janie Barrett

John Howard once said that politics “is remorselessly governed by the laws of arithmetic”. Howard was referring to the existing quotas which determine how many Nationals serve in the federal Coalition cabinet but it is just as relevant to a consideration of women’s voting patterns. The Australian National University’s election study has pinpointed the steady drift over the past two decades in women’s votes from the parties of the right to the parties of the left. At the 2019 federal election, while 45 per cent of men gave their first preferences to the Liberal Party, just 35 per cent of women did so. The arithmetic is undeniable: if we can’t reverse this trend, we can’t simply win elections.

Women candidates and women MPs aren’t the whole answer. We’ve still got to pull together the right policies. But we’ve got a much better chance of creating policies with broad appeal if we’ve got candidates with broad appeal. You cannot be chronically under-representing half the population and still have the best candidates and the best policies.

Liberal values offer far more to the women of Australia than the limiting, controlling ideas of the left. We are the party of opportunity; of equal access to education and employment. We encourage women to open their own businesses and to keep more of what they earn. We believe in the dignity of the individual and that all women should have the freedom to live their lives according to their own values. We are the party of law and order and we should be doing more to make sure that the world women live in is safe and that men who assault women are brought to justice. And we will be better representatives of the ideals of equality if we have more equal representation of men and women on the Liberal benches.

Matt Kean is NSW Energy and Environment Minister.