Kelly O’Dwyer has said she wants to establish a “fighting fund” for Coalition women who want to enter federal politics so they have the financial firepower needed to run effective campaigns at election time.

The minister for women said she would happily travel the country to fundraise for the purpose because more Liberal and Nationals women were needed in Canberra.



Speaking at the National Press Club on Tuesday, O’Dwyer also drew attention to the Liberal party’s pre-selection process, saying more needed to be done inside the party to help women become candidates.

We need to be pretty frank with the party organisation when we say the buck stops with you. Kelly O’Dwyer, minister for women

She said the party had had many firsts when it came to women – the first woman elected to parliament, the first female president of the Senate, and the first female foreign and defence ministers – but the proportion of female Liberal candidates had to increase.

“I think we need to be pretty frank with the party organisation when we say, you know, the buck stops with you,” she said. “You need to highlight the fact that we need to get more women in parliament, we need to look at what barriers there are and we need to eliminate them.”

She was speaking ahead of International Women’s Day, which is on Thursday. The opposition spokeswoman for women, Tanya Plibersek, will speak at the press club on Wednesday.

O’Dwyer touched on Barnaby Joyce’s affair with his staffer, Vikki Campion, and welcomed Malcolm Turnbull’s decision to update the ministerial code of conduct – in the aftermath of the affair – to prohibit sexual relations between ministers and their staff.

She said it would require ministers to adopt a higher standard of behaviour, and she dismissed the idea it would overturn “the press gallery journalists’ convention” of generally not reporting on the private lives of politicians.

“It should be noted that the reporting on Barnaby Joyce predated the code of conduct so the idea that the code has created a new licence for intrusion into politicians’ lives is nonsense,” she said.

O’Dwyer said she was proud to call herself a feminist.

She said the #MeToo movement had successfully used social media to send a message about the need to end harassment, and that sexual harassment and violence against women “must never be tolerated”.

But she said everyone needed to think about the implications, “both good and bad”, that come with the airing of allegations in public. “Social media is not a courtroom, and complainants, and those who are the subject of complaints, can be subject to trial by keyboard warriors,” she said.

“Natural justice is a fundamental tenet of our legal system – it is something that we value in the land of the ‘fair-go’ – and it is often absent in the wild web.



“We need to be careful that this public push doesn’t silence the very women it wants to help. We don’t want women to be afraid that their reputation will forever be tarnished when someone types their name into Google.”

O’Dwyer also said the gender pay gap had fallen under the Turnbull government by 1.9 percentage points – to 15.3% – a 12-year low, but more needed to be done.

She said workplaces needed to become more flexible so more men could work part-time to help care for children. She said of men who were employed, 81% were working full-time and 19% are working part-time, whereas for employed women, 53% were full-time and 47% part-time. “This is what I call the ‘flexibility gap’,” she said.

O’Dwyer also said planned to work with internet providers, and communications minister Mitch Fifield, to make cyber space safer for girls.

The Labor party and Greens have consistently criticised the Coalition for their lack of female representation. At the 2016 election, the number of female candidates elected for the Coalition comprised just 19.8%, while Labor (44%) and the Greens (50%) were much higher.