Senior Liberal women are quietly campaigning to preselect more female candidates ahead of the next federal election as representation plummets to decade lows.
The preselection of Simon Kennedy in the safe Liberal seat of Cook has reignited a battle within the Liberals to take its gender targets seriously and deal with its “women problem”.
Male candidates have also been chosen for preselection in Chisholm, Dunkley, Aston, Curtin – all previously held or contested by a Liberal woman – leading some politicians to contemplate whether it is time for gender quotas.
Just nine women sit on the Liberal benches in the lower house while the party has 10 women in the Senate. It means the party’s “women problem” has worsened in the nine years since it introduced a 50-50 gender target by 2026.
Those fighting for gender parity grumble the campaign to elevate women in preselection battles has been consistently stymied by the party’s conservative old guard.
Former prime minister Tony Abbott and his factional colleague Angus Taylor were named by two NSW Liberals, who spoke to Guardian Australia under the condition of anonymity, as undermining efforts to promote the sole female candidate, Gwen Cherne, over Kennedy in the recent Cook battle.
Abbott declined to comment while Taylor did not address the questions on the record.
Taylor said he supported the local party members’ decision to choose Kennedy, adding he was a “fierce advocate for plebiscite-based preselections”.
Factional in-fighting and the “boys’ club” have continued to hamper efforts to reach the gender targets, Liberal sources say.
“It just takes a couple of high-profile people, like those two, to set us back [on meeting gender targets],” one NSW Liberal, who would not speak on the record for fear of retribution, said.
“It’s not that it’s not happening, but the way they operate and the things that they do make it a hell of a lot harder.
“I actually think people want to vote for us. I think what we’re actually doing is giving them reasons not to.”
Communities want ‘candidates that reflect them’
The party’s post-election autopsy recommended more professional women be chosen at preselection in an effort to lure back centrist voters. Women should represent half the party in federal parliament by 2032, it recommended.
But the party’s current decade-low representation could dwindle even further unless more women are elected after the retirements of former ministers Marise Payne, Linda Reynolds and Karen Andrews.
Senior women within the party have taken note, calling for the gender targets to be front of mind as time winds down to the next federal election.
The NSW Liberal senator and former state president Maria Kovacic said Australians were frustrated with politics and wanted to see strong leadership within the party to elevate women candidates.
“It was really pleasing to see former prime minister John Howard actually step forward and endorse Gwen Cherne [in Cook] because that’s the kind of leadership we need,” Kovacic said.
“We need to ensure that we give our communities candidates that reflect them, and that means more professional women and people with broad lived experience, including people of a multicultural background, in winnable seats.”
Reynolds, who told Guardian Australia she hoped a woman would replace her in the Senate at the election, said improvements to representation required “long-term structural and cultural change”, which she said was occurring.
“The Liberal party has nothing to lose by embracing gender reform,” Reynolds wrote in a post on gender reform shortly after the 2022 federal election.
“If we fail to implement meaningful change, the party will become permanent occupants of the opposition benches. The quiet approach has not worked. We have a small window to act. And we must.”
Kate Chaney, who was elected as a “teal” independent for the Western Australian seat of Curtin in 2022, said she ran because the Liberal party had “very little appeal”.
Despite coming from a family of state and federal Liberal MPs – her grandfather, Fred Chaney, was a Menzies government minister – Chaney said the party still looked like “a big boys’ club” from the outside.
“My experience as a parliamentarian – I don’t feel like there’s any additional challenges with being a woman running as an independent but it sounds like that’s quite different if you’re inside the Liberal party,” she said.
“I know that in Western Australia, they’ve been talking a big game in terms of recruiting women, but it doesn’t really seem to be delivering. And I think it’d be a pretty hard road to choose if you’re a sensible woman who wants to be taken seriously.”
Chaney’s Liberal opponent in Curtin at the next election will be Tom White , who was preselected for the wealthy Perth seat earlier this year.
‘There’s no point saying we don’t have a women’s issue’
The Liberal party’s preselection season is fast approaching. A number of seats are up for grabs but they aren’t necessarily going toward women.
It’s an all-male affair in the Gold Coast seat of McPherson, where Karen Andrews is retiring, with four men nominating to replace her.
Angie Bell has been battling to stave off preselection challenges from men in her Gold Coast electorate of Moncrieff. Of the 21 federal seats the LNP holds in Queensland, only three (including Andrews) are women. Of the five LNP senators, Susan McDonald, a National, remains the only woman.
Queensland’s south-east has been identified as a strong opportunity for teal candidates, with community groups beginning to mobilise in McPherson and other male-held LNP seats.
Former Western Australia senator Ben Small is the likely replacement for outgoing Forrest MP Nola Marino, while in Tasmania the popular moderate Bridget Archer is also staring down a preselection battle.
The Hilma’s Network was created to address the Liberal party’s “woman problem”. One of its co-founders, Charlotte Mortlock, said the solution was simple.
“We won’t be able to get more women to join the party as members until we have more women in parliament,” Mortlock said.
“There’s no point saying we don’t have a women’s issue, we have to prove it. And we prove it by electing more women.”
