The Morrison government frontbencher Sussan Ley says the Liberal party needs to consider adopting quotas to boost female representation in parliament because “if you look at our party, the picture tells its own story”.

Ley told the ABC on Thursday night the Liberal party needed to do more to recruit women and ensure they were able to be preselected for safe seats.

She said she had not, historically, been a fan of quotas, “but I must say recently I’ve wondered whether we should consider them”.

Ley, the assistant minister for regional development, said she was not attracted to Labor’s affirmative action system because it didn’t seem to channel enough women in the direction of winnable seats. But given the Liberal party was not currently getting enough women prepared to put up their hands for public life, something had to give.

She said the recruitment exercise had to start well before the preselection process, with attempts to build networks of female leaders so able candidates could be identified earlier.

Ley’s intervention follows comments this week from the party’s former deputy leader Julie Bishop, who said the Liberal party had difficulty achieving diverse representation, a situation she characterised as unacceptable.

“Our party, in fact all parties, recognise they have a problem in attracting and maintaining women, diversity in general,” Bishop said.

The government’s leadership crisis has emboldened a number of Liberal women to speak their minds about toxic elements of political culture, from backroom bullying to the lack of support for the advancement of women.

Earlier this week, the minister for women, Kelly O’Dwyer, said she’d had a number of conversations with male and female MPs and it was clear that people were subject to “threats, intimidation and bullying” during the leadership crisis.

Asked on the Ten Network on Thursday night whether bullying occurred during the last parliamentary fortnight, the prime minister, Scott Morrison, said: “I believe there was a lot of pressure applied over over an intense period.”

Morrison said politics was “a tough and ferocious business, and we have to support each other and we have to give each other the care that is needed when you go through those times”.

But while some in the government are pushing for active investigation and intervention, the prime minister said the “curtain has come down” on recent events because “Australians don’t want to be talking about how we feel about our jobs because our job is to focus on what they feel”.

Ley said she was not bullied during the backroom arm-twisting associated with the leadership change but she validated the experiences of colleagues.

She said the government needed to explore more effective dispute resolution procedures to give MPs a level of comfort that their complaints would be addressed. Ley said there needed to be “clear avenues of protest”.

She said the whip’s office was the right place to start, because not all disputes could be aired in the Coalition party room, because there were sensitivities.

Earlier this week the South Australian Liberal senator Lucy Gichuhi said the deterioration in political culture had reached crisis point, so what was required was “a formal professional way of dealing with disputes”, whether in parliament, or with staff, or with the party leader.