Marise Payne’s retirement from the Senate, announced at the beginning of September and which took effect at its end, marked the end of a remarkable list of achievements. She had the longest stint of any woman in the history of the Senate, and in that time was both the first female Defence minister and provided spectacular and prolific silence as minister for women.
Now the issue becomes who’s to replace her? We look at the candidates floating around as options and how they’ve been auditioning for this role in recent years.
Dave Sharma
Alexander Downer will be pleased, having pre-emptively (and correctly as it turned out) mourned the loss of potentially “truly great men” such as Sharma to independents who, apparently, “will be totally forgotten in 10 years”. (By the by, Sharma had earned this level of admiration from the sad clown of Auspol during his stint as a legal adviser to the then-Foreign Affairs minister between 2004 and 2006, during which time the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), at Downer’s request, bugged the Timor-Leste cabinet to help Australia in negotiations with the tiny state, recovering from civil war, in relation to resources under the Timor Sea.)
Anyway, since being swept from the seat of Wentworth by the teal wave and replaced by Allegra Spender, Sharma has done some classic post-politics work, joining newly formed tech investment advisers SWG Capital — incidentally, The Australian Financial Review‘s coverage of the move brutally referred to him as a “Former Liberal rising star“. But this didn’t carry the same sense of finality of former treasurer and fellow “truly great man” Josh Frydenberg heading to Goldman Sachs, and Sharma has kept his hand in with Liberal politics, providing regular commentary for The Australian on the potential future of the party.
Responding to the post-election review he argued that to win back seats such as his old hunting ground: “We need to be as focused on the threat from our left as we are to that on the right.” One wonders, in that context, what he makes of a Peter Dutton-lead party. He’s also engaged in that other extremely popular post-2022 past time: blaming Scott Morrison.
Andrew Constance
Constance, former NSW Transport minister, can at least claim he’s been clashing with Morrison since before it was cool for a Liberal politician to do so. When as prime minister Morrison first showed his natural talent for making everyone furious at him during the fires that ravaged NSW across the cusp on 2019-20, Constance, his own house very nearly wiped out by those fires, made it clear whose side he was on:
I didn’t even know he was coming, I haven’t had a call from him. To be honest the locals probably gave him the welcome he probably deserved.
Should Constance run, it would be his second attempt to to enter the federal arena — in 2022 he quit state politics to run in the lower house seat of Gilmore. Thanks partly to the fact the Nationals didn’t run a candidate, he did a lot better than 2019’s candidate, Warren Mundine, by achieving a 12% swing and coming within 400 or so votes of giving the Coalition a rare pick-up in that election.
He reflected at the time on the need for serious action on climate change, and that his party was risking irrelevance:
The party can’t exist for itself, it’s got to exist for the community. It’s got to reflect community values and community thinking. Politics can’t continue as a dog-eat-dog world because it isn’t resulting in good outcomes for our community.
Hmmm. This all seems a bit touchy-feely for the current Libs.
Zed Seselja
Ah, now we’re talking. The former Morrison government minister is reportedly considering a late run for the spot, back by the hard right of the party. Seselja was, shall we say, a tangential teal scalp, taken out by independent and former rugby player David Pocock in 2022. During his time as a senator for the most progressive electorate in the country he managed the impressive feat of voting consistently against everything they said they wanted — supporting penalty rate cuts, opposing assisted suicide and marriage equality. The last of these in particular would please Dutton, who famously bemoaned the failure of the NRL to find all those existing and popular anti-marriage equality songs that exist.
Hey, separately, is it weird that a party that had less than 30% female representation at federal level even before Payne’s retirement so far doesn’t appear to have identified a single woman to replace her?
Do the Libs STILL have a problem with women? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
