After years of circular conversation it is time to call it what it is. The Liberal party does not have a “women problem”. They have a men problem. Or more specifically, a problem with men who do not want to cede space to give women a chance.
Scott Morrison belled the cat in 2019 when he told an International Women’s Day event that “we want to see women rise. But we don’t want to see women rise only on the basis of others doing worse.”
Liberal party branches took that literally, and Simon Kennedy’s preselection in Scott Morrison’s former seat of Cook is just the latest example in a long line of missed opportunities. Women being preselected in winnable Coalition seats is the exception, not the norm.
In Queensland, men were preselected for the safe seats of Fadden and Bowman and James McGrath won the Senate ticket battle over Amanda Stoker. Karen Andrews’ McPherson branch, an electorate considered so safe that at one point, Peter Dutton challenged her for it, will be deciding between four men for its next candidate. That will leave Angie Bell as the sole woman in the Liberals’ strongest state. Bell is also facing a fierce preselection challenge from men, which if successful would mean out of the 23 seats the LNP hold, Michelle Landry would be the only woman – and she sits in the Nationals party room.
And it is not just Queensland. Former Western Australian senator Ben Small will replace retiring MP Nola Marino as the Forrest candidate. Bridget Archer, one of the only Liberal MPs to consistently vote with her conscience, is facing a preselection battle orchestrated by men furious she has exercised said conscience. Archer was notably absent once again from Dutton’s ministry reshuffle, which left more MPs with a frontbench position than without. As one Liberal woman said of the reshuffle which advanced just two women among the six men, “it seems we care more about western Sydney than women”.
The retiring Marise Payne was replaced in the Senate by Dave Sharma. The Liberal candidate for the Dunkley byelection was male. Men replaced Victorian MP and speaker Tony Smith and former defence minister Christopher Pyne in South Australia. Men will replace Gerard Rennick and David Van on Liberal senate tickets.
A “local and administrative committee” decided to preselect Manny Cicchiello for the Victorian seat of Aston, replacing the former preselected candidate from the byelection, Roshena Campbell. And despite once claiming he’d like to see a woman replace him, Scott Morrison refused to support the sole woman’s bid, while the men fell in behind failed Bennelong candidate, Simon Kennedy.
The Liberals now have fewer women in parliament than they did when they set their gender parity target by 2025, nine years ago. An analysis by the Australia Institute found that of the 228 MPs who sit in Liberal party rooms across the country, just 71 are women. And despite the tactic of crowding women behind the dispatch box where they will be seen for question time, there is no hiding that there are just nine women sitting with the Liberal party in the lower house. To help recent car-obsessed Coalition MPs understand, you could fit them all in two Ford Rangers, or one VW Caravelle.
And yet, none of the men seem to think this is an issue. Six years on from when former finance minister Kelly O’Dwyer (who was forced to fend off a concerted attempt to unseat her from parliament 10 days after giving birth to her second child) warned colleagues the Liberals were in danger of being seen as “homophobic, anti-women, climate change deniers” the men in charge of the Liberal party continue to stay the course.
As my grandmother used to say, if he’s not helping solve the problem, he is the problem.
The shadow ministry changes signal where Dutton believes the battleground for the next election is, but unless the women contorting themselves to be seen as worthy by preselectors can transform into a small modular nuclear reactor, it’s hard to see what role women play in the Coalition’s future.
Blaming Scott Morrison’s unpopularity with women for the 2022 election loss has been a handy deflection, but Morrison was a symptom of the party’s overall attitude, not the cause. Teal independent campaigns are already mobilising in Liberal electorates like McPherson, where communities are no longer willing to wait for the Liberals’ come-to-Dolly moment.
The lack of women in the party room and more broadly across the Liberal tent has seen the party all but vacate the arena on women’s policy issues. Dutton has left most of the heavy lifting of policy direction to the deputy, Sussan Ley, who seems to spend more time waging culture wars and posting inflammatory tweets than building a policy platform to woo back female voters. Ley has convened women’s roundtables while speaking on the party’s need to reconnect with women and has made a point of highlighting domestic and gendered violence issues.
At the same time, Ley barely managed to admonish her Coalition colleague Matt Canavan for claiming companies reporting their gender pay gaps was turning men towards misogynist himfluencer Andrew Tate.
The vacuum gave Labor an easy win on paying super for paid parental leave, a policy cynically announced for International Women’s Day, and one with widespread support from voters. Labor dragged its feet on implementing the policy while independents picked up the fight in the absence of the Coalition. Even after Labor made the announcement, the Liberals fumbled it out of the blocks with James Paterson referring to PPL as “welfare”, a tone deaf comment reminiscent of the Coalition’s earlier war on “double dipping”.
Instead of pushing the government to act sooner than its set 2025 implementation date and put some fingers on an easy policy win, Ley’s official response was the party will look at the sums.
Meanwhile, Liberal women continue to wring their hands and speak of their despair in their support group chats, apoplectic with rage off the record, while soothing on it.
Which is part of the problem. Women who still believe in the Liberal party are too busy trying to make nice with the boys’ club and not rock the boat, in the hope that if they just prove themselves a little more, the men will see the error of their ways.
They never seem to realise the boys club don’t think of them at all.
The answers have been there for decades.
Women have spent untold lifetimes trying to save men from themselves. At some point, you just have to let them own it.
