The Liberal party does not have a ‘women problem’. Men are the problem
I wrote this more than a year ago, but you could run it at anytime over the last decade and anytime into the coming years.
I’m just re-upping this piece I wrote for the Guardian in March 2024. The same conversation – what can the Liberal party do to attract more women – was playing out then (as it does almost every year) and all the same hand-wringing we are seeing now, was also playing out then.
But the fact is, the Liberal party’s issues are so entrenched, it is unlikely to ever change. It took Labor 30 years to reach gender parity and that was after a decision was made to enact quotas. It is not perfect when it comes to representation and there needs to be a lot more done not just in multi-culturalism, but also class if the Labor party wants to better reflect Australian society.
The Liberals have not only rejected quotas, or any attempt to increase diversity, they have actively fought against it. For one simple reason - they don’t want to change.
No amount of hand wringing will change that. It is not for the women to fix – they can’t. Even if they elect Sussan Ley as leader, nothing will change. Party insiders are already discussing the next leader as a placeholder, not as a serious leader. The men who do want the job - Angus Taylor, Andrew Hastie - don’t want responsibility for cleaning up the mess they helped create.
There is more talk that the Liberals and Nationals will split their formal Coalition and try to start from scratch. Again, that is probably unlikely to happen because those who won their seats in the last election are more likely than not the ones who not only supported the rot, they encourgaed it.
If ‘moderate’ Liberals still exist, there is unlikely to be a home for them moving forward. There hasn’t really been a place for them since Howard. He declared it a conservative party. He nursed Tony Abbott who led to Scott Morrison and then Peter Dutton. Women being handed the shit sandwich is nothing new in politics. But it doesn’t change anything.
When it comes to the Liberal party, it is unlikely, at this point, anything will.
You can read the piece, below
The Liberal party does not have a woman problem. Men are the problem.
The problem for the Liberals is that they have equated conservatism with butch, hairy chested, macho man, maleness. If you look at Abbott, Morrison, and Dutton, that was very much the image that they projected. From my viewpoint (as a male) it comes across as bullying, lacking in empathy and social awareness, and distinctly crass. Hence comes the “war on wokeness” which is frequently merely a victimisation of minorities dressed up as something else.
It needs to be repeated often, that Howard rebadged the Liberal Party as “The Conservative Party”. Howard saw himself as a populist tea party Republican. in his own words “I'm an economic radical and a social conservative” and when he finally gained power he introduced his broad based tax system, embraced Keating's microeconomics reforms to shake off the last vestiges of Keynesian macro economics. Free trade agreements saw a boom in raw materials and comodities at bargain prices, the mining boom followed, providing a fraction in royalties to our sovereign wealth fund that we should have received. A generation later, we are now seeing the consequences of this, where Corporations are now blatantly stripping our public resources paying no royalties, nor paying tax on profits.