Victorian Liberal Party urged by Ripon MP Louise Staley to introduce 'requirements' to boost female MPs

Updated

A female Liberal MP who has retained her marginal seat by just 15 votes in the Victorian election is urging her party to embrace a "constitutional requirement" to deliver more women into parliament.

Key points: Louise Staley's narrow victory in Ripon has made it the most marginal seat in the state

She says a mechanism that "effectively behaves as a quota" for Liberal women is needed

Labor says it is considering taking court action to challenge the result

The Victorian Electoral Commission this morning declared Louise Staley had officially retained her seat of Ripon, in western Victoria, edging out Labor's Sarah De Santis in the tightest-fought contest this election.

The Labor Party said it was actively considering whether to take court action to challenge the result.

The Liberals won 21 Lower House seats, four of which are held by Liberal women, including Ms Staley, Cindy McLeish (Eildon), Bridget Vallence (Evelyn) and Roma Britnell (South-West Coast).

At both a state and federal level, the Liberal Party has been under recent pressure from within its own ranks to boost the number of female candidates in safe seats.

"We certainly need to deliver more women," Ms Staley told ABC Central Victoria.

"It is clear that that is one of the areas — it is not the only area, I don't even think it is the major area, but it is one of the areas — we have to make some progress on.

"We have a job to do to regain their [the electorate's] trust. A lot of people clearly think we don't have enough women.

"I am one of them. I have fought for women's preselection in the Liberal Party … for at least 20 years."

Ms Staley rejected the use of Labor-style quotas, but said the party needed "some sort of constitutional mechanism" which does the same thing.

"The trouble with the 'quotas' word … is the way it is implemented in the Labor Party is not possible for [the Liberals to use for] a whole raft of technical reasons," she said.

"But the idea of some sort of constitutional requirement, that effectively behaves as a quota, if I can put it that way, is something that we have to look at.

"We have tried targets, we have tried jawboning, we have tried saying we want more women, and we have not achieved that."

She said she was not sure how exactly such a requirement would work, but suggested her party could consider allocating certain seats to female candidates.

Labor considering its legal options

Labor made a request for a recount in Ripon following Ms Staley's victory, but the VEC has rejected that request.

The commission says Labor must go to the Court of Disputed Returns if it wants to appeal the result.

Labor's assistant state secretary Kosmos Samaras said the party was considering its options.

"A full recount is, you literally count the ballot from start to finish, all over again. That didn't happen," she said.

"What they granted was a re-check of the minor parties' primary votes and preference distribution.

"The same process of what I would consider vigorous scrutiny was not applied to the primary votes of either Staley or De Santis.

"So we're considering whether we take it to the court of disputed returns, and in Victoria that's the Supreme Court."

A VEC spokeswoman said it had conducted a full recount in which the electoral commissioner had ruled on the admission or rejection of any ballot paper questioned by the election manager or a scrutineer.

The spokeswoman said the VEC re-examined first preference ballot papers for the two leading candidates on December 5, in what was the third count of those ballot papers.

All Lower House seats will be officially declared by the end of today and the full results for the Upper House count will be declared tomorrow evening.

The Ripon result was not only the narrowest result in this Victorian election, but also one of the closest in recent electoral history.

In 1999 Labor won Geelong by 16 votes, while Ferntree Gully was won by the Liberals in 2006 by 27 votes.

But the closest in living memory, in the Upper House seat of Nunawading Province, is hard to beat.

Both the Liberal and Labor candidates in the 1985 election polled 54,821 votes each and the winner was literally drawn out of a hat.

The Labor candidate took his seat in Parliament, but the seat later went to a by-election after the Liberals appealed the outcome in the Court of Disputed Returns.

'We need to be more empathetic'

In 2018, the Liberals suffered heavy swings against them, particularly in Melbourne's east, and Ms Staley said the party failed to speak with voters about issues that mattered to them.

"[New Opposition Leader] Michael O'Brien has noted that we need to stop talking about climate change, and instead start talking about how we ameliorate its effects, and how we deal with climate change," she said.

She also said her party's strident opposition to a safe injecting room in Richmond was "not something that resonated" with voters.

"We need to be more empathetic to the fact that so many Victorians have someone in their family or someone that they know that takes drugs, and come up with practical, pragmatic solutions to help those people," she said.

She also criticised her federal colleagues, telling them to focus on policy, not in-fighting.

With its reduced minority in the new Victorian Parliament, Ms Staley said her party faced a tough time over the next four years.

"There are a raft of challenges that my party faces and one of them is that we are a depleted partyroom.

"Parliament itself will feel markedly different when the numbers on the floor are strongly towards Labor."

Topics: government-and-politics, elections, state-elections, ballarat-3350, bendigo-3550, vic, maryborough-3465

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