But the call to recruit more women from a prime minister who has retained his revered status among Liberal members,unlike other recent party leaders,may jolt his conservative admirers,some of whom have dismissed the lack of Liberal women as a left-wing talking point.
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Opposition LeaderPeter Dutton last month used his authority to protect new frontbencher,Melissa McIntosh,from losing her seat to a man.
While many recent preselection contests have been won by men,the party has selected Mary Aldred for the Victorian seat of Monash,held by the now-independent MP Russell Broadbent,but expected to return to the Liberals.
Katie Allen has been chosen to recontest Higgins,which she lost to Labor in 2022,while Gisele Kapterian and Amelia Hamer will contest the now-teal seats of North Sydney and Melbourne’s Kooyong. Susie Bower and Katie Mullins will try to wrest seats back from Labor in Tasmania’s Lyons and Sydney’s Parramatta at the next election,which is expected sometime between the end of this year and May 2025.
Last month,right-wing senator Alex Antic dislodged former minister Anne Ruston from the top of the South Australian Senate ticket,as Antic dismissed “the gender card” as “nothing but a grievance narrative,constructed by the activist media”.
Liberal MPs Linda Reynolds,Karen Andrews and Bridget Archer expressed alarm about female involvement in the party ina column by author Niki Savva published this week. Reynolds argued Dutton couldn’t win an election “until the party understands and harnesses the electoral power of women”.
The Liberal’s Hume-Loughnanepost-mortem following its 2022 election loss found women aged between 35 and 54 were the most likely to shift their vote from the Morrison-led Coalition.
Ethnic diversity is another challenge. An estimated one in four Australians has non-European,non-Indigenous ancestry,but only three of the Coalition’s 86 federal MPs can make that claim – Terry Young (South Sea Island),Ian Goodenough (Singaporean) and Dave Sharma (Indian).
Labor has five Indigenous MPs while the Coalition has two.
Labor also falls short on ethnic diversity:about 10 per cent of its MPs are non-European and non-Indigenous,though more than 50 per cent of its federal politicians are women in part due to its quota system.
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The Hume-Loughnane review recommended the creation of a Margaret Guilfoyle Network – which was quietly launched last month by Hume – for current and former female MPs,staff,and local branch members to promote female representation.
In a recent interview with this masthead,Hume shied away from the Liberal Party adopting a UK-style list system. “He[Conservative Party leader David Cameron] had a talent pool that was specifically for preselection,whereas the Guilfoyle network,of course,would provide that but more than that,” she said.
Hume added that before the 2022 election the Liberal Party held half of the 50 seats in the country with the highest proportion of white-collar women but now held just 10.
“And in the top 30,we held half and now we hold three,” she said.
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