Retiring Liberal senator Linda Reynolds has labelled her party’s election loss a “comprehensive failure”, while saying the Liberal Party must preselect more women and diverse candidates into safe seats.
“Whether it’s through quotas, whether it’s through targets, we do have to look at ways of how we do our preselections…and to make sure that we’ve got candidates who do actually represent, look like, sound like and think like the broader Australian community, and we simply don’t have that,” Reynolds told ABC Perth radio.
“Ten years ago, I was part of a review into gender…and we recommended targets and a plan on how to get there without quotas, and that’s been the Liberal Party policy for 10 years, but it’s just sat on a shelf.”
“We do have to have the hard conversations now about how we become more gender balanced but also a broader diversity.”
Reynolds also threw her support behind Sussan Ley for the party leadership, saying she would like to see a woman in the role.
“I am very favourably disposed towards Sussan Ley, who I think would be a great and a very healing and receptive leader for our party,” Reynolds told ABC Perth radio.
“I would certainly like to see a woman up.”
In the interview, Reynolds said the Liberal Party had drifted too far away from its core values and needed to honestly reflect on what went wrong. She said the party had drifted a long way from being one that once attracted women voters.
“In fact, until 2001 the majority of Australian women voted for the Liberal Party, and that seems almost inconceivable now,” she said.
“So we have to understand why women have turned away from our party and change.”
Reynolds said the Liberal Party needed to preselect women in winnable seats.
“When I have a look around at what we’ve done over successive elections, we have sat at about 20 per cent of women elected,” she said.
“Quite frequently women get preselected into seats that are very difficult to win, so when they do win they’re the first to lose when there’s an electoral swing. As a party, we’ve been slow to understand that women bring great benefits to the party, women are fabulous local members.”
In her assessment of the loss, Reynolds also said that factions had become too powerful and the influence of the religious right needed to be better balanced with mainstream, moderate values.
“Factions have become more important than the party itself,” she said.
“[The religious right is] still very strong here in the Liberal Party, it hasn’t gone away.
“There is still a very strong conservative movement in the party that needs to be addressed and needs to be balanced, because it does not represent mainstream Australian and West Australian values.”
Also today, Liberal senator Hollie Hughes, who is due to leave parliament, spoke about the Liberal Party defeat and said the party had failed to bring credible economic policies to the campaign.
“I have concerns about [Angus Taylor’s] capability. I feel that we have zero economic policy to sell,” Hollie Hughes said on Radio National on Monday. “I don’t know what he’s been doing for three years. There was no tax policy, no economic narrative.”
“I have concerns about his capabilities, but that is shared by a huge number of my colleagues, and frustration that they didn’t have economic narratives that they could push and sell during the election.”
Feature image: Linda Reynolds delivering her valedictory speech in the Senate.