Liberal Party dusts off same script on quotas to debate lack of women MPs

Is there a more ghoulish spectacle in Australian politics than the triennial round of hand-wringing and puzzlement that consumes the federal Liberal Party after yet another election bestows yet another round of shrinkflation on its ranks of female MPs?

It's 10 years now since a covert report to the Liberal Party's federal executive warned that the party did not afford equal opportunity to female candidates, and strongly advised that a target of 50 per cent be set and met by 2025.

At the time the report was written, there were just 17 Liberal women in the House of Representatives, a number sufficiently grim that the Turnbull government, in 2016, duly committed to the 50 per cent target.

A worse situation now

When parliament resumes later this month, the situation will be visibly, morbidly worse. Just six Liberal women will take their places on the green leather.

Assuming Liberal leader Sussan Ley takes a Comcar to Parliament House, the rest of the Liberal women can get there in a Corolla.

The truly transfixing part, however, is this: no matter how low the number goes, the script remains the same.

Dismay is expressed. A review is called. A handful of party figures (mostly women) gently suggest that perhaps, after 30 years of arguing about this while things get worse and worse, it might be worth looking at some kind of mechanism to improve the situation.

At which point they are briskly reminded by various grandees (mostly male) that the Liberal Party is the party of merit, and quotas are to the party of merit as dancing is to the town of Bomont, Utah in the movie Footloose (a breakout hit in 1984, the last-but-one election year in which the Liberal Party's proportion of female candidates was competitive with Labor's).

Quotas are illiberal, goes the party line. They are anti-democratic. They are anathema to the spirit of the Liberal Party.

Which is weird because the Liberal Party invented quotas for women. After the sickeningly dispiriting election of 1943, in which John Curtin's Labor Party trounced all comers with 58.2 per cent of the two-party preferred vote — still its highest ever — Robert Menzies built a grand coalition between the non-Labor forces the very next year, in 1944, and called it the Liberal Party.

Lending funds and campaign expertise to the enterprise were women's groups like the Australian Women's National League, whose leader, Elizabeth Couchman, shrewdly negotiated a provision in Victoria that half the party's executive positions be reserved for women.

Were those appointments made on merit? Quota purists would say no, of course. But Couchman and her colleagues must have been doing something right: the Victorian branch of the Liberal Party, in its first 25 years, did better than any other party branch in Australia at electing women to the federal parliament, producing Ivy Wedgwood, Marie Breen and the magnificent Margaret Guilfoyle, Australia's first female finance minister.

Hardly a quota-free operation

Quotas brought women to the table, sent women to the parliament and played a strong role in ensuring that the Coalition enjoyed a consistent advantage among female voters all the way until the year 2001.

The Liberal Party is perfectly entitled to reject quotas for women. It's a free party, practising free association in a free country.

But to pretend that it runs a quota-free operation — even today — is risible at best.

The Coalition agreement with the Nationals — renegotiated after every election — is principally concerned with how many Nats are proportionally entitled to demand front bench positions.

Is it a miracle of merit that there always turn out to be exactly as many matchlessly qualified National Party MPs available to serve as ministers as would decently reflect their share of the joint party room?

No, it is not.

Is the deputy prime minister in a Coalition government always a Nat because the regional junior partner has a freakish knack of always just happening to have the most meritorious chap for that particular office?

Pull the other one. There's a formal quota in place for Nationals on the front bench, just like there's an informal one for wets and dries, and people from Queensland, and all the rest of it.

Merit is a wobbly concept at best

Are preselections in the Liberal Party a matter of merit? Let's be realistic. Even if there were standard KPIs available for what makes a good MP — which there absolutely are not — it would be an uphill climb to convince any disinterested observer that they alone determine who gets to be a candidate, especially in safe seats. Much depends on the factional makeup of the preselection college. The appetite of the candidate for arm-twisting and white-anting. The presence or absence of powerful sponsors. "Merit" — a wobbly concept at best, and endlessly susceptible to human subjectivity — is a particularly gelatinous affair when it comes to politics.

The candidate preselection system in the Liberal Party yields — just as it does in the Labor Party — a wildly inconsistent crop of candidates, by and large. Both parties — threaded as they are with factional operatives, seats that "belong" to one gang or other, and grassroots memberships that skew left or right or old or crackers — are capable of sending profoundly ungifted representatives to the nation's capital. Sometimes, they send brilliant people. Sometimes, average ones. There are unofficial quotas for unions, for people with influential mates, for good blokes judged to have missed out unfairly last time round.

Let's not even talk about the Senate, which is the largest and most obvious quota system our parliament operates. Does Tasmania get a grossly disproportionate number of senators to its tiny population because Tasmanians are more meritorious?

Nope, they get the same number of senators as NSW because when our federation was being designed, the drafters knew it was important to hear from everybody.

And more to the point, they would never have got federation over the line without cutting a deal for the smaller colonies.

Less adventurous than Scott Morrison

Politics is always about getting the numbers. If merit's involved, which it absolutely is, at least some of the time: brilliant. But let's never pretend that the long march of gaining preselection in a major party, making it to parliament, getting picked for the front bench or even becoming the leader of a party is reliably fuelled by merit alone.

The Liberal Party's new leader, Sussan Ley, provoked all sorts of huffing and puffing last week by declaring at the National Press Club that urgent action was required to increase the number of Liberal women in parliament. She did not specifically endorse quotas. This makes her not even as venturesome on the subject as Scott Morrison, who declared in 2021 — to absolutely no perceptible effect — that he was prepared to give gender quotas a go.

The hard truth is that preselections are a matter for state branches in the Liberal Party, and any federal leader wanting to revolutionise the system will require nerves of steel and a determined party room with an appetite for trouble.

One compromise model — proposed in 2021 by the now-former Liberal MPs Nicolle Flint and Jason Falinski — is the "priority list" approach adopted in 2005 by British Conservative leader David Cameron.

Determined to modernise the party, Cameron had the party's national leadership compose a list of diverse candidates from which branches were obliged to consider at least two in each preselection round. Rather than enforcing quotas, the reform forcibly expanded the field of candidates under consideration.

Still, it was a long-tail, feather-ruffling business.

For years, the women on the Tories' priority list were known derisively as "Cameron's Cuties".

One of them was Kemi Badenoch, who 20 years later, now serves as the party's leader.

Power never gives itself away. And if you want to grab it, you have to be prepared to hold on, because it's never pretty.