If old school white-anting Sussan Ley on gender quotas works, the Liberals may pay a heavy political price

The Guardian

a day ago

A day after the Labor party first voted to implement gender quotas to promote the representation of women in federal politics, five female Liberal MPs condemned the decision in a statement.
Labor's national conference in Hobart in September 1994 featured heated debate about rules requiring that women be preselected for 35% of winnable seats by 2002. At the time, blokes made up more than 85% of Labor's parliamentary ranks.
The five women in then opposition leader Alexander Downer's shadow cabinet – Bronwyn Bishop, Jocelyn Newman, Amanda Vanstone, Judi Moylan and Chris Gallus – signed a statement saying quotas demeaned women and would further institutionalise their minority status in frontline politics.
'It is effectively a vote of no confidence in women's own abilities and it is a reverse form of discrimination,' it read.
'It only treats the symptoms, not the cause of the problem.'
The statement came just a few weeks after Downer had apologised for making light of domestic violence, joking that the opposition's policy on women's safety would be titled 'the things that batter'.
Fast forward 30 years and the Liberals, emphatically rejected by voters at the 3 May federal election, are asking why just six of their 28 lower house MPs in the new parliament will be women. In contrast, Labor will have 50.
An assessment by the outgoing Liberal senator Linda Reynolds found the Liberals will have their lowest number of women in parliament since 1993, a year before Labor adopted its first quotas.
Charged with picking up the election defeat pieces, the party's first female leader, Sussan Ley, this week promised to be a 'zealot' on actions to get more diversity in Liberal ranks, but said she was agnostic about the right approach to do so. Ley reminded journalists that her party works as a federated organisation, and power over preselection rules rests with state and territory branches.
Ley's appearance at the National Press Club in Canberra was impressive.
Ending Peter Dutton's three-year boycott of the club, Ley outlined two formal reviews into the dire political state of the Coalition, and said she wanted new processes for policy design. She has a compelling personal backstory and resisted any risky captain's calls on policy or symbolism – recognition of deep divisions within her party.
Previous reviews, including after the 2022 loss to Labor, recommended the Liberal federal executive adopt a target of 50% female representation within 10 years or three parliamentary terms. The recommendations were all but ignored by state branches.
Challenged over just how many seats the Coalition would need to win at the next election to prevent Anthony Albanese securing a third term for Labor, Ley said she was prepared to work hard and remained optimistic about the Liberal party's future. She showed a successful rebuilding effort could be part of her legacy, even if victory itself would prove too difficult in 2028.
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But Ley's unwillingness to take a position on the best mechanism to boost female representation meant the question quickly fell to other Liberals speaking in the media this week.
The former prime minister Tony Abbott was quick out of the blocks.
Despite finding just one woman with sufficient talent or aptitude to be appointed to his cabinet line-up in 2013, Abbott rejected quota systems because such a move would contravene 'the merit principle that should be at the heart of our party'. He described quotas as 'fundamentally illiberal'.
On Friday, the senior conservative Angus Taylor spoke out against quotas, arguing they 'subvert democratic processes'. After promising to 'crusade' to get more Liberal women elected, Taylor's prescription was mentoring, recruitment and support of potential candidates and staff. He correctly said the Liberals also needed to do better at other measures of diversity, including recruiting more multicultural candidates.
Taylor pointed to branch level plebiscites in the New South Wales Liberal party, but neglected to mention the feral factionalism and branch stacking which often helps push men to the top of candidate selection lists, especially in winnable seats.
Not all Liberals are opposed, however.
The former finance minister Simon Birmingham called for 'hard, fast and ambitious' quotas after the election drubbing and Maria Kovacic, the NSW senator, has acknowledged current settings aren't working. She has called for quotas as a short-term circuit breaker.
Reynolds used an opinion piece in the Australian on Friday to warn the Liberals were becoming increasingly irrelevant due to declining voter support, suggesting the prospects of the party surviving to its 90th anniversary in 2034 were slim without action on gender.
One Liberal MP rubbished Taylor and Abbott's contributions, accusing them of 'white anting' Ley.
'Ultimately their attempts to destabilise Sussan have come very early,' they told Guardian Australia. 'They want to rule over the rubble. It's sad.'
A frontbencher warned against quotas becoming an 'all consuming' fight for the party, like the civil war under way in the Victorian state opposition.
'We don't want it to be the defining issue of this term,' they said.
Perhaps the post-election review being led by party elders Nick Minchin and Pru Goward, or a separate structural assessment by the Queensland senator and experienced strategist James McGrath, will recommend quotas, but the usual rearguard action against them is already under way.
The problem for those opposing a new system is that quotas are the only method shown to have worked.
Labor stuck to its original rules until 2012, when it moved to a '40:40:20' quota system, designed to ensure at least 40% of Labor's seats were filled by women, and not fewer than 40% were filled by men. The remaining 20% were open to any candidate. New goals adopted in 2015 required the party to hit gender equity by 2025, a milestone it achieved early, hitting 53% after the 2022 election.
The former party strategist turned pollster Tony Barry said it best this week, when he observed drastic changes in approach usually come when opposition MPs reach a point 'where they just cannot stand losing any more'. There is apparently some way to go in Canberra.
Bronwyn Bishop, Amanda Vanstone and their colleagues were wrong in 1994 when they belittled action to give more women a seat at the decision-making table.
How much longer ideological opposition to smart strategies persists might just determine how long Labor stays in power.