The Queensland Liberal National party women’s group will hold its international women’s day event at a “men only” members club with the vice president questioning why it can’t be respected when men want something for themselves.

LNP Women has sent out invitations to its lunch in Brisbane on Friday at Tattersall’s, a 150-year-old club that invites $1,000 a year memberships from among the business and political elite – unless they are women.

LNP Women vice president Peta Simpson said the decision to celebrate international women’s day at a men’s only club came down to two factors: Tattersall’s represented the best value, and was the ideal forum to protest an establishment stacked against women’s political participation.

“I’ll speak only for myself here because I’m the person who made the final decision,” Simpson told Guardian Australia.

“At the end of the day, point blank, we made a decision on price. We booked it through one of our women members. And what better place to, I guess, rage against the establishment than in the establishment.”

The choice of venue for a women’s day celebration was even raised in federal parliament, with Tony Abbott – in jest – heralding the event as evidence of the LNP “smashing the glass ceiling yet again”.

“Obviously they’ve now broken down the last barrier and they’ve made the men only club admit women,” he said.



“I say congratulations and thank God that bastion of old fashioned chauvinism has finally collapsed like the walls of Jericho at the trumpet cry of the Liberal and National party.”

Speakers at the lunch are state LNP MP Fiona Simpson, who called for a change in the party’s aggressive political style after the Newman government’s election defeat, federal Nationals president Christine Ferguson, and Lyn Truss, a community advocate and wife of deputy prime minister Warren Truss.

Peta Simpson said the LNP Women were about “supporting and promoting women’s interest in the political process” and its choice of speakers reflected the group’s view that “there’s more than one way to influence politics”.

Simpson hastened to say the event itself would not involve any criticism of the venue itself.

“At the end of the day men are men and women are women and I know increasingly in society the lines are getting blurred,” she said.

“But how can we celebrate international women’s day knowing that there’s not an international men’s day – and then when the men do want to have something that’s for themselves, we can’t respect it?”

Asked if she would personally change Tattersall’s men only members policy, Simpson said she would abide by what members in a members’ club wanted but would certainly seek to “influence what the members thought”.

“One of the constraints on women’s engagement in the political process is obviously the pre-existing structure, as well as unconscious bias,” Simpson said.

The phrase “unconscious bias” was used by Queensland appeal court president Margaret McMurdo when questioning the Newman government’s apparent favouring of male judicial appointments in a speech last year.

Those observations led to McMurdo coming under political attack in what supreme court judge Roslyn Atkinson last month said were “scandalous personal comments made about the president by politicians”.

Queensland Greens senator Larissa Waters said Abbott’s comments were “yet another scary insight into the Liberal Party’s 1950s views on gender equality”.

Waters said this month was the 50-year anniversary of a famous protest in Brisbane by two women – one of them Merle Thornton, the mother of of the actor Sigrid Thornton – against a ban on women drinking in public bars.

“It’s telling that Tattersall’s is making a special exemption for the event so that women do not have to show a ‘partner card’ to gain access,” she said.



“This month marks 50 years since women protested in Brisbane against a ban on drinking in public by chaining themselves to the Regatta’s public bar.

“Sadly, it seems like the Liberal Party hasn’t moved on since then.

“That Tony Abbott thinks celebrating international women’s day at a men’s-only club is ‘smashing the glass ceiling’, once again shows he is unfit to be minister for women.”

