Of 47 Liberal Democrat candidates just three are women and the party is putting no women among 14 men in Senate contests where its only realistic chances of success lie. Liberal Democrat senator for NSW David Leyonhjelm Credit:Jessica Hromas All three female candidates were added to the party's website overnight on Wednesday after Fairfax Media and other organisations queried the party's all-male line up of 31. In a statement, the Liberal Democrats said the party was "colour-blind and gender-blind" but would, nonetheless, "like more chicks to join us". Former Liberal Democrat senior adviser Helen Dale, who quit Senator Leyonhjelm's office last week to return to Britain, said a lack of female representation was a "problem" in terms of the party's electoral appeal but said the libertarian movement had struggled to attract women for a long time due to a historical split with the feminist movement.

Ms Dale - who was previously known under her pen name Helen Demidenko, the controversial but award-winning author of The Hand that Signed the Paper - has written a number of articles about the "rupture between feminism and classical liberalism", which she says is "borne of feminism's tendency to call on the coercive power of the state to achieve its aims". By contrast, the Liberal Democratic Party aims to reduce the size and influence of the state in everything it does. Ms Dale said the Liberal Democrats had "quite a few" female members. "But women are less-interested in all parties. They are just less politically active," she said.

"On the Liberal Democrats matter, you are also dealing with that historical situation where classical liberalism has diverged from feminism. "For me, I think it's a quite serious problem for a political movement to find itself wedged as broadly unrepresentative of the people. You can't make a party exactly exactly representative otherwise you would need exactly 51 per cent female candidates and three per cent Aboriginals, for example, but it is a bigger problem for the Liberal Democrats." Eva Cox the feminist and writer, who was once part of the Sydney libertarian push with Germaine Greer, said the Liberal Democrats probably didn't realise they had a gender imbalance until asked by the media. "Where you have men sitting around talking to men about things that are important to men, the likelihood of them even thinking about how to represent women is pretty low," she said. "It's a party that's aimed at getting rid of institutional structures but leaving power in the hands of men. I don't think they would have noticed [they had no female candidates] until asked."

Ms Cox said there was truth in Ms Dale's comments about the fissure between liberalism and feminism but said the latter needed to use the levers of government power to fight gender inequity because men dominate all other power structures in society. Among the Liberal Democrats Senate line up is Sam Kennard, the self-storage mogul and Adelaide businessman Roostam Sadri. Fairfax Media revealed last week a written agreement in which Mr Sadri offered the party $500,000 if he was guaranteed a place at the top of the Senate ticket in South Australia. The matter is now being investigated by the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Electoral Commission over possible breaches of the Commonwealth Electoral Act. Duncan Spender, the Liberal Democrat founder who dealt with Mr Sadri on the agreement, which the party insists was never signed, is standing for the Senate in Victoria.

In a statement on Thursday, a Liberal Democrat spokesman said suggestions of an all-male candidate list with no female candidates will "come as a shock" to lower house candidates Bronwyn Ablett (Griffith), Cath Buckley (Petrie) and Olya Shornikov (Macquarie). "The Liberal Democrats now have more than 5000 members of whom fewer than one in five are women – however, this may reflect a lack of engagement in the political process by women across the parties," he said. "For the record, Senator Leyonhjelm says the Liberal Democrats will never support quotas, because our policies are both colour blind and gender blind. But he would like more chicks to join us and become actively involved in the party." Follow us on Twitter