The Liberal party does not have “a woman problem”, it has “a man problem, and a merit problem and a misogyny problem” according to author, journalist, former political adviser, and feminist bureaucrat, Anne Summers.

In a provocative address anticipating International Women’s Day, Summers told the National Press Club on Wednesday the Liberal party was not only failing to use proactive strategies to recruit women during preselection processes, it was actively replacing female parliamentarians with male candidates.

Summers said if preselections were being determined on merit, which is the prevailing Liberal party cultural rationale, then there would be a larger cohort of women in public life. “It would happen automatically because merit is evenly distributed between the sexes,” she said.

She contended there wasn’t evidence of a merit principle being applied with Liberal preselections, but there was evidence of a “mirror principle”, where men selected other men, and not only other men, but men from similar backgrounds.

Summers referenced a spate of recent cases where Liberal women had failed to win preselection only to be replaced by male candidates, and also pointed to the departures of Julie Bishop and Kelly O’Dwyer, and the defection of Julia Banks to the crossbench as significant. Frustrated women were now raising public objections to prevailing party culture for the “first time in decades”, she noted.

Of the 75 woman in parliament today, “just 19 are Liberals and two represent the National party”, which was a lower proportion of female representatives than any other political party. “Every other party in the parliament has a significantly greater representation of women than the parties that currently form the federal government,” she said.

She said she believed the Liberal party had gone backwards over the past two decades, and that regression was depressing its vote among women, which was problematic for a government seeking re-election. It was also prompting Liberal women to articulate their frustrations about their lack of advancement.

Summers, who was a high-profile journalist before working for Labor during the Hawke and Keating years first as a bureaucrat and then as a political adviser, said on current trends, the Liberal party’s level of female representation after the coming federal election “is likely to be as low as it was in the late 1970s”.

She predicted it would take an election loss to force a reset in attitudes, and said party moderates needed to fight to make the Liberals a party of the centre again, because the government was now “so far to the right of the electorate that they are just talking to themselves”.

“It needs to become a party of the centre if it’s ever going to appeal to the electorate,” she said.