The Liberal Party struggled with votes from women at the last election and it’s on track to have the same problem at the next one, due within months.
This is not a “women problem” for the party. It’s failure to learn from past mistakes, despite putting money and effort into internal reviews regarding just what went wrong in 2022 when they lost seat after seat to women running as independents.
A lack of women represented in Parliament is (at least part) of the problem for the party, and one that can only be solved by pre-selecting more women to winnable seats.
But that’s not happening.
Rather, five men so far have been preselected for seats where current sitting Liberal MPs are retiring at the next election, and just one woman: Mary Aldred, a former CEO and current head of corporate affairs for Fujutsu Australia and New Zealand.
The final pre-selected for a seat where a Liberal is retiring is happening this Saturday, and there is a fierce race ahead for the seat of Bradfield. Liberal MP Paul Fletcher is retiring, and anti-Voice campaigner Nyunggai Warren Mundine and tech executive Gisele Kapterian are both pushing to be pre-selected.
This seat of Bradfield was once considered safe for the Liberals, but is under threat from Teal independent candidate Nicolette Boele, who came close to winning in 2022.
Fletcher has publicly called for a woman to replace him, while Opposition spokesperson for women Sussan Ley has also backed Kapterian. Former prime minister Tony Abbott as well as Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and other conservatives are calling for Mundine to be picked.
Women have a much better chance of being pre-selected to seats the Liberal party is unlikely to win, according to an analysis published in the Australian Financial Review this week. But women are still in the minority here in the 31 seats determined so far, being pre-selected for just 11.
This won’t improve the current rate of the party’s female representation. At 30 per cent of its Federal MPs and senators compared with 52 per cent for Labor.
Of the six seats where Labor MPs are retiring meanwhile, five women have been preselected and one man.
Opposition leader Peter Dutton is saying much of what we’ve heard before from Liberal leaders regarding a desire to see women running in seats but no real action for making it happen.
“Of course, we want to see more women running im seats, and we have got some incredible candidates,” Dutton told media on the lack of women so far preselected.
But he was also quick to blame the “process” rather than any lack of desire from his end to use his leadership to change the numbers.
“Ours is a much more democratic process,” he said.
“Members make decisions about who the candidates will be. In the Labor Party, the faceless union bosses decide who will be the candidates.”
The Liberal party’s review following the previous election by Brian Loughnane and Senator Jane Hume found the Liberal Party’s appeal to women was weak across all age groups. It called for a target of 50 per cent female representation in parliament within a decade.