‘Deal with the women’s issue or enjoy oblivion’: conservative women on whether they can still call the Liberal party home
Until last week’s federal election, Daria Taplin-Buck had always voted Liberal.
The 31-year-old, who moved from Russia to Australia as a teenager, had been a dues-paying member of the Young Liberals for years. During the 2019 election campaign, she could be found door-knocking in Adelaide, and outside a polling booth handing out how-to-vote cards for the Liberal party.
But this time around, she cast her ballot for Labor.
“What were they offering?” she says of the Liberals. “I didn’t understand.”
Labor’s campaign was “way better”, she says, and clearer on what the party offered, with its housing and Hecs policies appealing to her most.
From the Liberals, she saw “a lot of just negative things: ‘oh, we’ll cancel this, cancel that, going back to the office, no work from home.’
“I know quite a few people, even in my family, who switched for this election.”
Taplin-Buck, who describes herself as “conservative, but centre-right, not too rightwing”, wants to return to voting Liberal – her natural political home. But she says the party’s meagre policy offerings, lack of female representation – she would have voted Liberal if the party had fielded a female candidate in her seat – and Peter Dutton’s leadership all turned her off.
“[He] is not very appealing to women,” she says. “He’s one of those hard, boomer old guys. You don’t want to vote for them.”
Taplin-Buck is emblematic of a vast and obvious problem facing the Liberal party, one that has prompted much discussion in the week since the Coalition’s thumping election loss: how to win back women.
But she also represents a problem besetting conservative women: as the Liberal party has increasingly alienated, sidelined and lost the support of women, where do centre-right-voting, conservative-leaning women go? Can the Liberal party be their home any more?
Not a one-off
Last week’s disastrous result for the Coalition confirmed the Liberal party’s loss of female voters, identified after its 2022 election loss, was not a one-off blip.
A review of the defeat by Senator Jane Hume and the former federal Liberal director Brian Loughnane found that a majority of women in all age segments preferred Labor, and the party’s two-party preferred vote was the weakest among young women aged 18-34.
“It hasn’t been an easy decade to be telling people that you’re a Liberal woman. Sometimes, people have this kind of pity on you because they assume that you don’t have enough self-respect,” says former the Liberal staffer Charlotte Mortlock, a journalist who runs Hilma’s Network, which aims to connect Liberal women and get more women preselected.
Mortlock says the attitudes of centre-right women she has spoken to since last week’s election have ranged from “white-hot rage” to exhaustion.
For her personally, there was also embarrassment. After the 2022 election, she says there was a feeling the “women’s problem” within the party was largely to do with Scott Morrison’s leadership, but that after his departure, the party was ready to take women’s concerns seriously.
“I feel really embarrassed that when we got to the election, all of that evaporated.”
She says “systemic flaws” in the party need to be addressed, from the grassroots to the top of leadership, from preselection to policy creation.
“This has to be a watershed moment,” she says. “Unless [the party] fix it this time, I think a lot of people will start to walk away. We’ve already seen voters do that, but I believe that Liberal members that are women will also do that.”
Time for quotas?
Key among the issues that need addressing, Mortlock says, is female representation.
In 2022, the Liberal party recorded the lowest number of women in its parliamentary ranks in 30 years, with just nine women (21%) among its 42 MPs, and 10 women out of 26 senators (38%). This is despite the parliament then having a record number of women.
In 2021, Morrison, then prime minister, called for the party to consider quotas, supported by the Western Australian MP Melissa Price and NSW senator Andrew Bragg.
Hume said she was “open” to a discussion at the time, then recommended 50-50 targets in her review.
Labor introduced quotas for women in 1994, requiring women to be preselected for 35% of winnable seats (the numbers have changed over the decades). In the outgoing parliament, 47% of Labor MPs, 70% of Labor senators and 53% of overall representatives were women.
This year’s election drubbing – projected to bring a new record of elected women – has the Liberal party talking about gender quotas again.
The NSW Liberal women’s council president, Berenice Walker, says she has historically been “resistant” to quotas, but now is the time for change.
“It is evident that what we’re doing hasn’t moved the dial at all far enough, so I would now be open to looking at that [quotas],” she says.
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“The time for change within our party was years ago; we haven’t taken on board the learnings from past election reviews, and we’ve failed to refresh and grow the Liberal party brand.
“Our membership needs to reflect the diversity of the population. We have twice as many male young Liberals as we do women, and most of our membership is over 60.”
Mortlock has experienced this disconnect first-hand in branch meetings, which she says need to cater “to different life stages”.
“There’s no disrespect, but people in their 70s aren’t reading the same books or watching the same TV shows as people in their 30s … [They] aren’t experiencing the same life experience.”
She is a strong supporter of gender quotas. “You need the women at the table to generate the policy,” she says.
“I’m not saying as soon as [voters] see a photo where [the party has] half women, half men, they’ll vote for us. I’m saying, we can’t come up with the policies if we don’t have the right people at the table.”
In Guardian Australia on Wednesday, the Liberal senator and former NSW Liberal president Maria Kovacic wrote: “Of course we should be considering quotas. This is not about ticking boxes – it’s about removing entrenched barriers and making space for talent we have long overlooked.”
‘A bigger problem than policy’
Anna Finizio ran as the Liberal candidate in a 2024 byelection in the South Australian state seat of Dunstan. She says that when she was door-knocking, people told her: “We really like you, but we just don’t like the leader of your party.”
“There’s a bigger problem than policy, and that’s perception of the party,” Finizio says.
Finizio, a 39-year-old lawyer and policy adviser for the South Australian opposition leader, Vincent Tarzia, says she is precisely the sort of candidate the Liberal party is being called on to preselect: a young, professional woman.
“There’s a lot of women like me out there; I’m not a unicorn. I’m just someone who is socially progressive; I want to see great opportunity in Adelaide. I’m a professional woman … I just don’t see that in the parliament right now, which is really disappointing.”
It’s why she wants to run. But running under the Liberal banner, so damaged in the eyes of many voters, is difficult. And the federal result spelled fear for next year’s South Australian election, when she has been endorsed to run for Dunstan.
“It’s really clear that we’ve lost relevance. We don’t resonate with demographics, in particular women and young people. So I think there’s a lot of work to do.”
Finizio is not opposed to quotas, but believes they are a “blunt instrument” that should have been introduced in the 1990s alongside Labor’s. “Even if we get a hard 50% quota … we don’t have really many safe seats any more, so … what’s the incentive for good professional women to go into politics? At the moment, there isn’t one, right?”
It’s time for “soul-searching”, she says. “The only way we’re going to change the culture of the Liberal party is to change the membership … If we want to be a viable political party, we’ve got to start acting and thinking like one.”
Mortlock says the next three months or so will be critical for members of her network deciding if they can continue to call the Liberal party home.
One thing they’ll be watching particularly closely, she says, is the direction of its leadership.
“If, you know, it’s Angus Taylor, or if it’s Sussan Ley, and the first thing they do is get up and say, ‘We don’t have a women’s issue, it’s just about our messaging,’ everyone’s going to roll their eyes and not bother.
“At this point, it’s like, cool, if you think that the way to fix this is by putting Angus Taylor in … and continuing to not address the women’s issue, then fill your boots.
“But enjoy oblivion.”
