Liberals' lack of female representation is costing them votes, so senior women are speaking out

Updated

In the Australian Parliament, the walls have ears. Intrigue is everywhere. Words are spoken in hushed tones, furtive glances cast at passers-by.

A deeply agitated source — a Liberal MP — finally dares to confide:

"[We] aren't making ourselves any more popular by speaking to you about this."

The sensitivity is hard to fathom; we aren't talking about divulging state secrets, nor about espionage, corruption or misconduct. It's far more delicate than that.

We're talking about the Liberal Party's "women problem", and to those within the party, it seems every bit as serious and intractable as any other threat to the Australian democracy.

The "problem" is easy to measure and easy to define.

Women make up just 22 per cent of Liberals in Federal Parliament. For Labor, it's 45 per cent.

And it's dragging down our international image. Australia ranks 50th in the world for female representation, sandwiched between the Philippines and South Sudan.

The solution must be difficult, because the Liberal Party hasn't found one yet.

But within their meagre ranks of 18 MPs and senators, there are few souls prepared to step out of the shadows and suggest a way to expand their number for the millions of female Australians relying on them.

So who is ready to talk? Meet senators Jane Hume and Linda Reynolds.

"If we told you that there wasn't a bit of a collective eye roll when we start talking about this, we'd be lying," Senator Hume says.

Senator Hume — who spent 20 years in the financial services sector before entering politics — says evening up the gender representation is not about appearance or "ethical window-dressing", it's a business strategy for winning.

"One of the tough things we have to do is convince our members and our colleagues that there is a business case for increasing the number of women in parliament," she says.

The party has already crunched the numbers and identified a worrying trend.

It's not just that it's struggling to get women into parliament — the party is also struggling to get women to vote for them.

Since 2001, the number of female Liberal MPs has been falling, which has coincided with a decline in the number of women voting for the party.

There are a few reasons, including social progress, but a big one is the lack of role models.

When Julia Gillard became prime minister, Labor's female vote increased by 7 per cent.

Women make up half the population, but when they look at the Liberal Party, they see men.

Senator Reynolds — who gave up a 30-year military career to run for politics — says she and her female colleagues have a "personal responsibility" to drive cultural change through the party and get more women into parliament.

"Women make amazing MPs and local representatives but sometimes they just need to see other women and hear from other women and see that it is possible," she says.

How bad is the 'woman' problem?

Just 18 of the 84 Liberal MPs and senators in Parliament are women — the party's lowest level since 1993.

This is also reflected in the Young Liberal movement and broader party membership, where men significantly out-number women (and the average age is over 60).

The problem is obvious.

Men are much more likely to win pre-selection for safe Liberal seats.

Since 2015, for example, 13 Liberal MPs have retired from safe seats, and male candidates have been chosen to replace all but two of them.

By comparison, women are overwhelmingly more likely to be selected to contest marginal seats for the Liberal Party.

Quota/target timeline: 1994 — ALP sets quota to preselect women in 35 per cent of winnable seats by 2002

— ALP sets to preselect women in 35 per cent of winnable seats by 2002 2012 — ALP updates quota to preselect women in 40 per cent of winnable seats

— ALP updates to preselect women in 40 per cent of winnable seats 2015 — ALP updates quota to preselect women in 50 per cent of winnable seats by 2025

— ALP updates to preselect women in 50 per cent of winnable seats by 2025 2016 — Coalition sets target to preselect women in 50 per cent of winnable seats by 2025

Take the 2016 federal election.

The Liberal Party put forward more female candidates than ever before, but only three of the 38 were pre-selected to contest safe seats.

The Senate was even worse. The Liberal Party ran an all-male ticket in Tasmania, and in Queensland the one female candidate was placed in an unwinnable position.

Female Liberal MPs deny their party has a "woman problem", but they all agree there are degrees of "unconscious bias" at work, where pre-selectors automatically choose a male candidate because, well, most politicians are male.

So, how do you solve it? Don't mention the 'Q' word

The Labor Party has used quotas since 1994 to narrow the gap between its male and female numbers

At the same time, the ALP-aligned Emily's List was set up to identify potential female candidates and encourage them to run for politics.

While Liberals are toying with the idea of establishing a similar group, they are deeply resistant to the idea of quotas, dismissing Labor women as "Quota Queens" who were not chosen on merit.

Instead, the party has set a target of reaching equal representation by 2025.

But on current trends, it will be almost impossible to achieve.

Describing herself as an eternal optimist, Senator Reynolds points to the UK's Conservative Party, which has overhauled its pre-selection process, changed the mindset of its members and increased the number of women in its ranks from 17 to 67 in a decade, all without quotas.

"Their business case is once their [female] vote falls below 40 per cent, the Conservative Party will not win," she says.

"They won't win in coalition or in their own right.

"So they've realised to win, they need more women."

But this philosophical opposition to quotas is not shared by all Liberals.

Victorian Liberal MP Julia Banks says the "meritocracy argument" is flawed and that quotas, or "hard targets", are needed to force change quickly.

Having worked in the legal and corporate worlds for 25 years, she says targets only work in business "because you can tie them to incentives".

"Targets aren't going to work so well in politics for obvious reasons," she says.

And there is some contradiction in this anti-quota argument too.

There are quotas for female representation at the federal executive level, and in the Victorian branch, and, as Ms Banks points out, there's an informal quota to decide the number of Liberals and Nationals on the frontbench.

It's just not on the agenda

At the highest levels of the Liberal Party, there is undoubtedly a will to boost the number of women in parliament.

New party president Nick Greiner has publicly acknowledged the party has a "woman problem" and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has appointed Australia's first female ministers for foreign affairs, defence and financial services.

The problem lies further down, at the grassroots level, or state branches, where candidates are preselected.

According to West Australian Liberal MP Melissa Price, the issue of gender representation "is not on the agenda", no-one is held accountable and progress is not measured.

"I think [the membership] now needs to have a look at these targets and actually commit to them," she says.

"And let's assess them at the end of a six-month period or 12-month period."

At the recent federal council meeting, members debated motions on everything from Liberal Party values and national symbols to Defence drones and four-year parliamentary terms. But there was not a single mention of the gender target.

Some members the ABC spoke to did not know the party even had a target.

'Champions of change' need to champion change

But if they are serious about change, the MPs realise they also need to take up the cause and start actively finding and mentoring future female politicians.

And that goes for both the men and women in the party.

Senator Reynolds says without a male mentor, she would not be in Parliament and probably would not have been a brigadier in the Army either.

"I realised that if I actually wanted to make change and wanted to be a role model, it was time for me to put my hand up and that's why I sought pre-selection in WA," she said.

Senator Hume and Ms Price have similar stories — they were sponsored and championed by men.

The WA MP beat 12 male candidates for pre-selection, something she puts down to her experience and lengthy career as a lawyer in "blokey industries".

Ms Price reckons a formal mentoring or sponsorship program involving senior MPs would get more women into the party and into the pre-selection pipeline.

Senator Reynolds concedes pre-selections are "utterly gruelling" and says female candidates need to be given the courage to put their hand up and then supported through the process.

"Women like us — and the men who do champion change — need to stand up and say, it's time," she says.

"Because we don't have quotas, we've got to find ways of getting cultural change in the organisation to sustain reforms."

The future of the party is relying on it.

Topics: women, government-and-politics, parliament, political-parties, alp, liberals, work, leadership, feminism, community-and-society, australia

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