Quashing quotas

 
Enid Lyons women group shot.jpg

Introducing gender quotas would contravene the Liberal Party’s far nobler aim of equal opportunity. By Nick Cater.

Long before the invention of the glass ceiling, the removal of barriers to the advancement of women’s progress had been enshrined in the Liberal Party’s platform.

The statement of principles known as “We Believe” incorporated in 1954 promised all Australians “the opportunity to reach their full potential in a tolerant national community”.

Eleven years earlier, Robert Menzies had declared it “outmoded and absurd to treat a woman’s sex as a political disqualification”. It is doubtful, however, the party’s founding intellect would have been comfortable with today’s suggestion of quotas. For as Menzies went on to say of womanhood, “it seems to me equally absurd to claim it as a qualification in itself”.

Quotas are an ineffective tool. In an attempt to end discrimination against women, quotas seek to discriminate in their favour, and arguably to discriminate against men. Their proponents denounce the fallacy that women are the weaker sex while treating them as victims and offering them a protective hand.

While quotas may satisfy Labor’s quest for equal outcomes, at least on paper, they are hardly the solution for a party committed to the far nobler aim of equal opportunity like the Liberal Party. Nor, as it happens, have they been the solution in the corporate sector, where gender neutrality has advanced faster than in politics not by quotas but by targets.

Organisations as diverse as the ANZ Bank and the Australian Defence Force have relied on measurable, achievable targets to improve female representation. Line managers take responsibility for meeting those targets and, crucially, have to report on them at regular intervals, ensuring that gender balance remains at the top of their in-trays.

The Liberal Party’s federal executive has taken an important step on this road by setting a target of 50 per cent female representation in parliament by 2025. It made some progress at the last federal election when the 14 new Liberal MPs elected were divided equally between men and women. In the Senate, the proportion of women on the Liberal benches increased from a quarter to a third. Contrary to popular prejudice, progress is being made.

The next step for the party must be to make state divisions accountable for reporting progress towards meeting their targets at each annual Federal Council. Targets should apply not just to parliamentary representatives but to party members, office holders and preselected candidates from the Young Liberals up. The imbalance in parliament mirrors the imbalance in branch membership. Effective change must begin at the grassroots.

Research by the Menzies Research Centre after the last federal election shows the dispropor­tionate representation of women in the Liberal Party runs deep. Female membership of the Young Liberal movement sits at 34.8 per cent women to 65.2 per cent men. The senior party records female membership of 42.9 per cent women and 57.1 per cent men. Across divisions, participation in president-level leadership from the branches up sits on average at 23.4 per cent women to 76.6 per cent men. These proportions have barely changed since the first report on Gender & Politics was published by the MRC in 2015. This should be of deep concern for each state and territory division.

Quotas applied to parliamentary representation and preselection alone will do nothing to change the deeper imbalance in the party, nor make politics more attractive for qualified women on the centre-right.

Not for the first time, however, Liberals find themselves locked in a cultural dispute framed on Labor’s terms. The sisterhood’s narrative on women’s representation is one of victimhood. It demands women receive special treatment simply because they are women.

The flimsiness of the feminist critique was exposed by Julia Gillard’s notorious misogyny speech in October 2012 that invited us to consider her as a victim. The woman who occupied the highest political office in the land wanted us to believe she had been injured by the “sexist” behaviour of opposition leader Tony Abbott, who had committed the grave misogynistic sin of glancing down at his watch. Superficial arguments such as these do nothing to advance the cause of women. Neither do the word games that lead a major Australian university to waste its time debating renaming a genus of spider as “Huntsperson”. The moral posturing, linguistic engineering and groupthink of modern feminism have alienated men and women alike.

The Liberal case for gender balance has a stronger foundation. It is motivated not by the politics of identity but the politics of empowerment, recognising that women should be selected on merit, not on the back of a sympathy vote.

That was the grounds on which the co-author of our 2015 report, Nicolle Flint, became a member of parliament the following year and was re-elected by the voters of Boothby in 2019. The only special treatment she has received has been from her political opponents, whose vicious, sexist, bullying campaign conspired to force her from office.

The disgraceful conduct continues, even after she has announced her retirement. Those responsible include at least one female member of the press gallery who set out to undermine Flint’s representation last Sunday on ABC-TV’s Insiders. The bonds of the sisterhood, apparently, do not cross party lines.

Hard as it may seem in this political climate, the Liberal Party deserves to reclaim the high ground on gender representation that Menzies held in World War II when he told a radio audience there was no reason a qualified woman should not stand for parliament, preach from the pulpit or even command the army.

“We should shake our minds clear of whatever prejudice may linger and acknowledge that there is as much room for public- spirited and intelligent women as there is for public-spirited and intelligent men.”