To find women, Liberals have tried nothing and now out of ideas

Asked about the ongoing sausage party that is the parliamentary Liberal Party, Peter Dutton made a valuable point: it’s no-one’s fault that the women trying to become Liberal candidates keep objectively being not as good as men:

In our party, we have a democratically based process where our members make decisions about who the candidates will be. In the Labor Party, the faceless union bosses decide who will be the candidates.

Ours is a much more democratic process. Of course, we want to see more women running in seats, and we have got some incredible candidates.

Women make up about 30% of the party’s federal MPs and senators (compared to 52% of Labor seats held by women). In the case of the seven retiring Libs at the coming election, only one is being replaced by a woman to run in 2025.

This has been a perennial issue for the men who run the Liberal Party. They wish — oh how they wish! — they could get more women elected as MPs. But they are quite literally powerless to do anything about it!

Scott Morrison

As the premise of this piece probably indicates, to be a Liberal leader distinguished as particularly bad on women’s issues (particularly after the reign of Tony Abbott) takes quite some doing. But Morrison was special.

It started with a standard line. Soon after Morrison replaced Malcolm Turnbull, when several women came forward claiming they had been bullied in the lead-up to Turnbull’s axing, Morrison lamented on 6PR radio that it was “incumbent on every party president, every branch president, every person in the party around the country that we look to see how we can get more women into strong roles within our party.” Naturally, he ruled out a quota system as a possible solution.

By 2021 things had, of course, gotten much worse. Morrison’s government was under relentless pressure following the truly catastrophic handling (both private and eventually public) of allegations of rape in Parliament, which emerged in February. By March, Morrison was “emotionally” telling Parliament, “There has never been a more important time for women to stand in this place. I want to see more women in this place. I have done many things to get more women in this place and I intend to do more.”

Apart from rejecting quotas, the many things Morrison had done to that point did not include implementing the recommendations of the handily titled Respect@Work report that sex discrimination commissioner Kate Jenkins had submitted more than a year earlier. Within a month of the Brittany Higgins allegations, the Morrison government said it would accept all of the report’s 55 recommendations, at least in part and principle. Within six months, it had started to walk back from that commitment.

Malcolm Turnbull

Our most loquacious prime minister, Turnbull loved to say that “women hold up half the sky” (it always struck me as a missed opportunity that none of Turnbull’s enemies in the Murdoch press ever pointed out how often their bête noire quoted Chairman Mao). Under his leadership the party signed up to a “gender diversity plan” to increase female representation to 50% by 2025.

Asked about the proliferation of male candidates in 2017 (his colleague Luke Howarth could be heard mumbling “This fucking…” at the questioner, before stopping himself), Turnbull said, “We always look forward to having, to seeing more women represented in our parliaments.”

This, naturally, did not extend to a quota. “I don’t think a quota system can work in a grassroots political system,” he said in 2018 after Jane Prentice, member for Ryan, was dumped. As with many of his stated views while prime minister, his contention that the Liberal Party was not a sexist organisation has shifted a little since.

Tony Abbott

Tony Abbott’s legendary history of awful rhetoric on women is too extensive to detail here. Let’s just remember the time he put together his first cabinet, which included 19 men and one woman. “I’m obviously disappointed that there aren’t more women in cabinet,” he said when announcing the appointments he had made. I suppose, physiologically speaking…

Former deputy Liberal leader Julie Bishop has since said that Abbott’s real disappointment was that he didn’t want any women in his 2013 cabinet, and that she was only there because her rank required it.

John Howard

Howard’s consistent line has been very similar to Dutton’s: there will be more women in Liberal politics if they can just find some competent ones.

In 2018 he said, “I would like to see more women in the House of Representatives on our side of politics … But I’m sure the women amongst us would agree with me overwhelmingly that, in the end, it’s all about merit.” That he had the nerve to bring this up while standing in a men’s-only Brisbane club adds the perfect seasoning.

Quite a few Liberals leap immediately to mind whose merits severely test Howard’s theory.

“Look, I don’t believe in quotas, as you know, and I mean, you can talk about targets and aspirations and goals,” he made clear in 2016. “I would like to see a natural process whereby there are more women.”

But Howard did not think a 50/50 balance would ever be achieved: “It is a fact of society that women play a significantly greater part of fulfilling the caring role in our communities, which inevitably places some limits on their capacity”.