Don’t mention the “Q” word around Liberal Party meetings: that is, quotas.
It’s not the Liberal way, despite their previous and current ways seeing women abandoning the party in droves.
Back in 2018, a freshly minted prime minister Scott Morrison said that women need “support”, not quotas. “I believe in any political organisation it should be a matter of one’s own credibility, exertion, work and merit,” he told Leigh Sales during a 730 interview.
That prime minister, who believes he got to where he is on merit and credibility (and possibly also via some divine intervention), is facing a censure motion in parliament today, following a report by Virginia Bell into the many secret ministries Morrison swore himself into.
He made the comments around the same time that John Howard’s former Chief of Staff Grahame Morris declared he’s not the kind of person to say, “hey it’s time for women” because then, as he put it, you get women in parliament to make up the numbers. “Look at some of the dregs behind Bill Shorten who are just there to make up the numbers,” he said on the then Shorten-led Labor opposition. (Morris later apologised for the comments on Sky News.)
More than four years later, after a reckoning in the Liberal party that saw its spectacular defeat in the May 2022 and following years of headlines highlighting its lack of support for women, a review has been conducted into what went wrong at the election, and what more can be done to bring women in.
But the early signs are that the recommendations ahead do not include quotas — or anything really, that will see it deviate from what it’s already been doing.
Quotas for women, like what the Labor Party has had since the 1990s, won’t be pursued to help bring more women in, according to reports on the early review findings, delivered to the party executive on Tuesday, with sources present during the meeting sharing what was presented across the Nine papers today.
Rather, the party looks set to develop a “pipeline” of talent, pursue targets, and run a recruitment drive based on one pursued by David Cameron in the UK back in 2005, where he created a list of diverse people to be pursued as candidates.
That’s sounding a lot like Morrison’s idea to “support” women. Just with the added twist of having a list of women to support.
The post-election review came after the party lost a large portion of the women’s vote at the election in May, and continues to record a tiny representation of women across the House, where just nine of its 48 Liberal MPs are female. The Liberal Party does better in the senate, where women make up 40 per cent of its senators.
The review was led by Liberal Party spokesperson, Jane Hume, and former party director, Brian Loughnane. Hume has previously put on record her personal opposition to quotas for attracting women. She also came under fire during a Q&A appearance on the ABC a year ago, following a question about quotas in the Liberal party. Her response was that women should “work that little bit harder”, and “don’t get bitter, work harder”. She also declared that women being defined as a minority group is “patronising”.
Meanwhile, the party is also examining new seats that it can target outside of metropolitan areas, with suggestions that Opposition leader Peter Dutton is not yet ready to abandon inner city seats won by independents (mostly women), but does believe such seats are the party’s past, rather than its future.
While this review into the Liberal Party and what it can do next to try and attract more women is not yet finalised — and there are a number of meetings set to look into the report before the end of the year — it’s telling that so far, the best ideas appear to be on based on 2005 British tactics, and doing more of the same thing that we know very much hasn’t worked in the past.
Quotas look set to be a shift too far for the Liberal party, with its staunch opposition to such measures likely to see its further demise.