In the midst of a shock election night, Sky News Australia panellists Murray Watt and Andrew Clennell both agreed heartily that culture war issues are a bad idea for the Liberal Party, it was clear that among those issues was the ‘woman problem’.

Peta Credlin interjected to remind the men that the biological rights of women is not a cultural issue. Andrew Clennell then claimed that the Australian people have just voted against it. By ‘it’ I assumed Clennell meant the issue of the material reality of female people in the law.

The implication that women speaking about the reality of female people is a dog whistle to the right, or to Trump, has been a consistent accusation that women like me have faced from the left for years. The enthusiasm and determination of moderate Liberals to take up this narrative (even after the John Pesutto saga), is an example of the power of the left to drag the right into its own game, and the willingness of the right to engage simply for the thrill of the fight.

If I can give The Liberals some free advice, among the tsunami of advice they are facing, it’s not the culture wars that are your problem, it’s your weakness to leave your core values, for political fashion, for the Woke/anti-Woke game. Liberals need to return to the tried and true classic liberalism that easily exposes and dismantles progressive narratives, but you have to believe it, and you have to hold your ground.

Woke is a word that describes a political fashion that hides illiberal policy. Structurally, ‘Woke’ or modern ‘progressivism’ is the redefinition of material categories of social justice oppression, race, sex, and disability into the cultural sphere.

This redefinition of oppression underpins cultural control mechanisms that blame structural material oppression on citizens and the political enemies of the left.

In the progressive left, really hard problems, like the ongoing structural disadvantage of Indigenous people, become a problem in the heart of the population, mostly in the working and administrative classes. The problem at the core of Indigenous disadvantage, according to the new progressives, is racism, and it can be fixed by cultural control mechanisms, speech legislation, long boring lectures, unrepresentative advisory bodies, land acknowledgements, and DEI.

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has highlighted the ongoing material oppression of Indigenous people and especially women and children, and has called for practical measures to address the problems in her community. Price is popular with people, hated by the left, and recently hidden by her own party.

The ultimate problem that government has no real capacity to solve is sex, particularly male violence and protecting women and children from male violence. Sex has been disappearing thanks to progressives in a thousand painful increments over the last 40 years. Sex has disappeared into a nonsensical ideology that claims that the violence of men is contained in a culturally developed soul that must be fixed by, you guessed it, cultural control mechanism; speech legislation, long boring lectures, unrepresentative advisory bodies, and destroying girls’ sport.

Liberal women with winning classic liberal arguments like Peta Credlin, Moira Deeming, Claire Chandler, and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, are having to fight their own party, to declare basic classic liberal arguments about the rights of women.

Harriet Taylor Mill wrote On the Enfranchisement of Women in 1851. John Stuart Mill followed by publishing The Subjection of Women in 1869, using liberal doctrine to argue for the rights of women.

At the same time as the Mills were constructing liberal arguments for women, prostitution abolitionist Josephine Butler was lobbying to revoke the Contagious Diseases Act using liberal arguments.

The Contagious Diseases Act legalised prostitution and was supported by progressive doctors, who claimed that prostitution was a necessary service to men, and keeping girls healthy with forced vaginal examination by the state, was a health imperative.

Butler argued that it was illiberal to provide working-class girls as sex slaves for soldiers on military bases, which was a justification for the legalisation of the sex trade. Butler was so much of a classic liberal that she argued that giving state authorities the right to rape women with steel inspection tools, is a violation of personal liberty.

The civil rights movement won with classic liberal arguments of the infringement of personal liberty by social oppression, as did the abolition of slavery before it.

From my perspective, classic liberalism is a very simple doctrine, it argues for the freedom of the individual from the tyranny of the state (individual rights), freedom of the individual from social oppression (civil rights), and the freedom of the individual from the exploitation of the market. People may not see all these as classic liberal issues, but women’s rights, labour rights, gay rights, and race protections have all been won with classic liberal arguments for the dignity and freedom of the individual from various forms of tyranny.

The move away from proven structural political theory, toward the more fashionable Woke/anti-Woke machinations with temperature tests of likes and shares, are alluring in their simplicity, but they are a trap for conservatives.

Anti-Woke politics is playing in defence on a field where the opposition makes all the rules. It may be a fun game, you may even block a few goals, but you are always playing by someone else’s rules, on your opponent’s field.

Conservatives need to consider that maybe there is a way to attract women as an intelligent and fully human demographic, rather than infantilising us as people who vote wrong because we’ve had too much socialism and therefore need to be softened up with a bit of progressivism.

I’ll give a tip to both the anti-Woke and liberal moderates for free. Women don’t like to be blamed for the decline in Western Civilisation for not having enough babies. Women don’t like to hear that their compassion is destroying the world. Women don’t like to be put in the same sentence as ‘young people’, as blocks of votes that need to be won with special treats.

Maybe women are not like emotional children? Maybe women recognise that the core of the Liberal Party is missing? Maybe women can have their own political traditions? Maybe women are people?

Classic liberalism is a vacant field in the Australian political landscape, and the women who are bringing it to the fore in the Liberal Party are consistently hidden, demonised, and forgotten. Maybe this is not sending a great message to Australian women? Maybe they’ve noticed?

Trump is not the problem with the Australian Liberal Party. Dutton could easily have replied to his detractors by saying that the Australian Liberal Party was not an American-style Republican party, but a party steeped in the classic liberal tradition of the protection of the freedom of the individual, of the rights of women and the protection of vulnerable people. If only it were true, that’s exactly what Dutton could have said.

Edie Wyatt writes on culture, politics, and feminism. She tweets at @msediewyatt, blogs on Substack and you can catch her on Welcome to the Dollhouse.