About 200 Liberal Party members attended in Western Australia a meeting that was described as a ‘polite discussion on party policies’. Topics such as Climate Change, free speech, and China were identified as issues that hurt the WA Liberals in the last May federal election at an important grass-roots post-election debrief held on June 9. 

The event offered an opportunity to allow the party’s base to express their opinions and frustrations. Failed candidates, including former Stirling MP Vince Connelly and Pearce candidate Linda Aitken attended alongside re-elected MP Andrew Hastie and senators Dean Smith and Matt O’Sullivan.

However, that meeting ‘caused friction within the party, with former defence minister Linda Reynolds raising concerns with the organiser and policy committee chair Sherry Sufi’. Apparently, Reynolds knows exactly what went so wrong. As stated on her website, ‘Senator Reynolds continues to work hard to effect genuine organisational change within the Liberty Party.’

Reynolds is now pushing for a short-term gender quota adjustment to increase female representation in Parliament. The senator is aiming to have at least 50 per cent of female federal representation in the Liberal Party by 2025. Curiously, there is no push for gender quotas in other ‘exciting’ employment areas where women are massively underrepresented such as garbage collection, grave digging, and road construction. 

But are women really underrepresented in our federal Parliament? After all, women now comprise a clear majority of 56.6 per cent in the Senate and they are 38.4 per cent in the House of Representatives. However, Reynolds is still not happy and believes that women will flock in droves to vote for the Liberals if only this party selects more female candidates. ‘The Liberal Party has nothing to lose by embracing gender reform’, she says.

First of all, any demand for more female representation in Parliament is a gross misuse of language. As far as democracy is concerned, one would be forgiven to expect that every Member of Parliament represents all Australians, men and women alike. What is more, Tony Abbott won far more women’s votes for the Liberals in the 2013 federal election, than Malcolm Turnbull in 2016 or Scott Morrison in 2019, despite being labelled by the Left as the leader with the ‘women problem’. 

When serving as the WA president of the Liberal Women’s Council, Lorraine Finlay, the Human Rights Commissioner, once commented: ‘We’re definitely opposed to a quota system and the reason is that we think the role of Parliament is too important to have anything other than the very best person in the job.’

Commissioner Finlay does not believe in gender-based criteria for a position in Parliament. In another enlightening article, she rightfully criticises the Victorian Premier, Daniel Andrews, when he announced a 50 per cent female quota for all appointments to the judiciary and paid government boards, in March 2015. Finlay commented: 

‘Unfortunately this decision actually entrenches inequality by expressly requiring that male and female candidates are treated differently. This is the fundamental problem with women-only quotas … It’s wrong to discriminate against somebody because of their gender then it is wrong even when you claim to be doing so with the best of intentions. You can’t hope to end discrimination by discriminating’.

Sir Robert Menzies would agree with Commissioner Finlay. The Founder of the Liberal Party, our longest-serving Prime Minister, considered the very idea of gender quotas in Parliament not only as profoundly unfair but also a great absurdity. In his 1958 address to the Conference of the Headmistresses’ Association of Australia, the then Prime Minister Robert Menzies observed: 

‘I have myself, on more than one occasion, listened to a woman candidate for Parliament who stood up and made it her great policy speech to say, ‘I am a woman. The woman’s point of view ought to be represented.’ … I have frequently had to say to my female political friends, ‘Look, don’t ask people to vote for you because you are a woman. Ask them to vote for you because you are the best person in the field. You are the one to represent them. You are the one who will understand public problems.’

One would expect the party founded by Menzies to honour his legacy by pre-selecting candidates only on the basis of merit. And yet, in the early 1970s Menzies expressed a concern as to how the Left had already started to infiltrate the party he had founded. As noted by Rowan Dean, a co-host of Sky News Australia program Outsiders, the embracing of left-wing causes such as Climate Change alarmism is precisely what has led to the decimation of the Liberal Party in the last election.

And yet, Senator Reynolds contends that ‘systemic issues’ may have prevented the new female ‘Teal’ (climate change alarmists) Independent MPs from running for the Liberals at this year’s election. This statement reveals far more about herself than about the Liberal Party itself. 

Senator Reynolds attracted media attention last year for her handling of former staff Brittany Higgins’ rape allegation. Higgins was allegedly sexually assaulted on a couch in the senator’s ministerial office in March 2019. Reynolds has been forced to pay compensation to her former staff after calling her ‘a lying cow’ and then saying she ‘did not mean it in the sense it may have been understood’.

In February 2018, Senator Reynolds postulated that it is in ‘the national interest’ to have women serving in combat roles in the Australian Defence Forces, thus engaging in a conversation with another federal Liberal MP, former SAS soldier Andrew Hastie, over his position to women serving on the frontline of battle. As part of the same discussion, she went on to develop the peculiar idea that sporting codes should now ‘allow women to compete against men – like the Australia Defence Force does when it comes to recruitment’. She believes that Australians should start a ‘national debate on introducing mixed gender competitions to professional sports’, including rugby and football. ‘There are outstanding female athletes, why shouldn’t they have an opportunity?’ she asked rhetorically.

Apparently, the senator is oblivious to the reasons as to why most sports need to have separate competitions for male and female athletes. According to Dr Marnee McKay, a senior lecturer in musculoskeletal physiotherapy at the University of Sydney, from 12 years of age males are stronger than women. She thinks that mixed-gender teams could only work for sports like lawn bowls. ‘But rugby league? No. I cannot see male and female professional athletes competing across all sports as a blanket rule’, she says.

Dame Enid Lyons, an Australian politician from the 1940s and early 1950s, who became the first woman elected to the House of Representatives and served in Federal Cabinet, said in her maiden speech delivered about 80 years ago that any woman entering politics ‘must justify herself not as a woman but as a citizen’.

Of course, Dame Enid was absolutely right. However, in a certain aspect I also happen to agree with Senator Reynolds. Indeed, the Liberals do seem to have a serious ‘women problem’. It lies primarily in the quality of female representation and the fact that some Liberal MPs appear to have been promoted far beyond their level of competence, ultimately doing a great disservice to all women in Australia. 

Augusto Zimmermann LLB, LLM, PhD, CIArb is Professor and Head of Law at Sheridan Institute of Higher Education in Perth, WA. He is also President of the Western Australian Legal Theory Association and Editor-in-Chief of The Western Australian Jurist law journal. From 2012 to 2017, he served as a Law Reform Commissioner in Western Australia.