Turnbull and Kovacic are the latest to weigh in over quotas for women in the Liberals

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2 days ago

As the Liberal Party grapples with its spectacular election loss and works out how to rebuild, Opposition Leader Sussan Ley is approaching it as if there's a giant sign above her head that screams, "I'm not Peter Dutton".
Her speech at the National Press Club this week was loaded with hints that fit this thesis. Even the decision to address the National Press Club itself — a forum Dutton viewed as a space of the Canberra journalistic elite and snubbed consistently — was a signal. She has also flooded the youth and women's podcast space to send the same point.
And from the moment she was on her feet at the press club she acknowledged the traditional owners of the land — a sentence that had not only become absent from the Liberal leadership lexicon — it was by the end of the election campaign a full-blown culture war that put even more nails in the Liberal Party's already bolted-in coffin.
If you swim in right wing algorithms — especially on X — you'll see that all of these choices by Ley are being mocked as symbols of "Labor Party-light". In the subterranean online world Ley's leadership is being painted as too "woke".
Ley's job over the next year is fraught with danger. She might be given a period of brief peace but most Liberals you speak to privately concede that it will be difficult to keep that peace for the entire term.
One of those big debates that's just starting to get heated is the issue of women's representation.
On this issue you will hear a lot of over the top language. Ley says she will be a zealot for women's representation in the party. Shadow Defence Minister Angus Taylor says he will crusade to have more women elected. Fancy words. But after the two previous elections, leaders said similar things.
The issue of gender quotas is the one philosophical and cultural mountain that the Liberal Party has never been prepared to climb. And even by the party's own reckoning, it is failing.
Beyond the hard arithmetic of imposing quotas, every other strategy is little more than vibes and positive thinking. Vibes don't get women elected, and if women are not at the table in large numbers Australian voters will continue to turn their backs on the Liberal Party.
If everyone agrees with such a passion that the party needs a stampede of women — what's the hold-up?
Opposition Defence spokesperson Angus Taylor this week rebuked gender quotas for political parties, a move that was widely regarded as undermining Ley's openness to the idea.
Timing is everything in politics and just six weeks earlier Ley and Taylor fought for the Liberal Party leadership. One pitched her credentials as the modern Liberal centrist leader — the other as the centre right cultural figure that could re-engage the existing base. The problem is the existing base is old, white and male.
Ley's National Press Club speech featured her claims she would consider quotas if the party's state divisions saw them as the solution to gender equity.
Days later Taylor said mentoring and recruitment was a better way to do it, adding that the Labor Party "subverted democracy" with its quota strategy.
"I believe in democratic processes, and I don't believe in subverting them, but I also know from my past experiences that mentoring, recruitment support is the way to make sure you have the people you need," Taylor said.
"The Labor Party will do things their own way. And they do subvert democracy, and that's a matter for them. At the end of the day, if you're going to have quotas, it means you are going to subvert democratic processes."
Subverting democracy? Labor women were lining up to respond.
The numbers speak for themselves. Only one-third of Liberal MPs are women. That compares to 56 per cent of Labor MPs who are women.
Cabinet Minister Tanya Plibersek told Insiders the Liberals used quotas for Nationals MPs on their frontbench pointing out the contradiction in the tools they use for promotion and representation.
"They've got a quota of National Party MPs that have to be on the frontbench," she said. "So they're happy to have quotas for National Party MPs. It's just quotas for women that they're not prepared to use.
"Does Angus Taylor really want people to believe that the 28 most talented Liberals in the whole country are the people who've made it into the federal parliament?"
Plibersek pointed out that the Liberals had ignored a non-binding 50 per cent target for female representation put in place after the 2022 election.
Here is some free advice to the Liberal Party. Every time they talk about women and quotas and anyone implies that the Labor quotas have led to the promotion of women without merit the ALP has a literal party. They won this debate so long ago it provides Labor with a free kick of monumental proportions.
I was a high school girl when Labor had this debate and settled it. Now, here we are 30 years later and the Liberals are still having a debate the community resolved in the 1990s.
Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull told this column senior Liberal men, including former prime minister Tony Abbott and Angus Taylor, left the impression that they were happy with the male dominated party as it is.
"The Liberal Party has said it needs to recruit more women into its parliamentary ranks for years and for just as long resisted quotas on the basis it undermines the right of party members freely to choose their own candidates. But nothing has changed and the party room has fewer women than ever," Turnbull told me. "Those who oppose quotas need to explain what their alternative is, otherwise people will reasonably conclude they are quite happy with the male dominated status quo."
Opposition frontbencher Julian Leeser has called for preselection primary contests, instead of quotas, and other Liberals including former minister Simon Birmingham and NSW senator Maria Kovacic have called for mandated quota systems.
Kovacic tells this column that quotas are no longer a philosophical discussion, but have become a source of urgency.
"We must address the persistent and systemic under-representation of women in our party, the temporary implementation of quotas is now both necessary and urgent," she tells me. "Quotas will serve as an effective interim measure to correct these structural imbalances."
Kovacic believes the scale of the gender imbalance in the Liberal Party demands "immediate and decisive action".
"Delaying the adoption of quotas in favour of softer incremental approaches alone, such as mentoring and leadership programs is no longer viable. That opportunity has passed. We must change, and change now."
The NSW Liberal Women's Council will debate gender quotas at a meeting in Sydney this week. Those pushing for change won't go down without a massive fight.
Patricia Karvelas is host of ABC News Afternoon Briefing at 4pm weekdays on ABC News Channel, co-host of the weekly Party Room podcast with Fran Kelly and host of politics and news podcast Politics Now.