Melissa McIntosh, the Shadow Minister for Women (and Communications), sat down with the ABC on Insiders to talk about the Liberal Party’s position on gender quotas and it was … concerning.

Quotas are, by definition, anti-conservative.

They are also eye-roll inducing.

While the Liberals may be seeking congratulatory headlines about their progress in gender representation, the Blue Ribbon base won’t thank them.

It is a shame because Ms McIntosh seems nice, but the Liberals don’t need nice – they need the scorching embers of Thatcher.

The voter is asking: What is the achievement at the end of this quota experiment? A better quality Liberal Party or a party that ‘looks right’…

Here’s a tip.

Balancing gender is about as useful as balancing hair colour.

It doesn’t make a jot of difference to the quality of policy being offered to an electorate struggling to fathom the direction of conservative politics.

That is not to say there isn’t a ‘boys’ club’ problem leftover from previous generations. There is. In the transcript of Ms McIntosh’s interview below, you will find hints of what many of us have seen first-hand in the industry.

However, the solution is to encourage the ambition of better quality individuals, not the lazy application of quotas.

The Liberals are mulling over the question: Why aren’t women lining up to be MPs?

The obvious answer has never occurred to them. Even from a distance, Australian politics presents as a rigged game where factional loyalty, not merit, is rewarded. It’s a tiresome industry that newcomers know they cannot win and so Canberra continues to fester with its culture of staffers-to-leaders-to-cushy-jobs. Too many of the players are controlled by the soft, unspoken power of a network of people who know damaging things that could be leaked to the media at an opportune time. It is not an attractive career and the very last thing a political party wants is a popular, capable, charismatic outsider.

Imagine if more business people found their way into Canberra… They would look at political factions as mean girl gossip clubs, dwindling at the bottom of the gene pool. The factional expertise is limited to subverting the democratic process. It would be nice if those in power, the party leaders, turned around and tore the factions to pieces in a selfless act – but I bet they won’t.

It is my long-held suspicion that ‘quotas’ are being offered up as the solution to a problem created by the factions.

To buy time, not help women.

Regardless of my speculation, the Liberal Party, under the direction of Sussan Ley, is going through a ‘listening’ and ‘learning’ exercise to appear as a ‘modern’ party actively chasing the vote of women.

And so it is that the Shadow Minister for Women, Melissa McIntosh, found herself in the jaws of the ABC, answering pointed questions about a topic known to be divisive.

‘My feelings around quotas is that quotas – and the talk that we’re having in the media – oversimplifies the issue which is around the culture in the Liberal Party and how women are treated in the Liberal Party.

‘I think, first and foremost, we need to have an investigation as part of the review of the election, and of the Liberal Party, into the culture.

‘What are the pathways for a woman from the grassroots through to leadership?

‘We should be looking at mentorship programs.

‘We should be looking at those pathways.

‘Possibly, we could look at gender-balancing candidate pools to make sure that women are at least in the pre-selection process.

‘But right now, people can’t get people into branches within the Liberal Party. We are being blocked. I had two attempts to take me out as a sitting member of Parliament by blokes … very aggressively.’

‘So, until the culture is addressed, we could have all the quotas in the world but it would be a revolving door of women.’

The latter half of this story is concerning and what many voters would like to know is why this toxic part of the Liberal Party culture is not made public… Surely hostile takeovers would be more risky if they were scrutinised by the public? Naming and shaming sounds more productive than quotas with the benefit of helping all MPs instead of limiting the beneficiaries to women.

‘How do you change the culture?’

It is a reasonable follow-up question.

‘I think we need to be looking to the experts that have gone into other organisations to review the culture. It needs to be an organisational re-design, I think, done by professionals, done by experts. It is too important to be relying on instinct or people’s ideology. This is not a conservative versus moderate issue. This is about the future and the sustainability of the Liberal Party. Everyone agrees, I believe, that we do need more representation of women in the Liberal Party, in our Parliament, and that helps ensure that we have policies that appeal to Australian women too.’

Who checked out at the word ‘sustainability’?

Call me a cynic, but I doubt throwing money at ‘experts’ will fix the factional empire. What it will do is waste a lot of time.

When asked directly if she was opposed to quotas, Ms McIntosh replied: ‘I think that we need to be looking at every single mechanism right now, and when I think about quotas, I think, first and foremost, we could be looking at gender-balance in the candidate pre-selection process. At least, getting that right. We are going from having “not very much at all” to “quotas”. There is a lot in between. And, without the culture being addressed, without the cultural change, as I said earlier, quotas won’t go anywhere.’

You can listen to the full interview below:

“Without cultural change, quotas won’t go anywhere”
Shadow Minister for Women Melissa McIntosh on whether or not the Liberal party should implement quotas or review party culture to increase representation of women in the Liberal party. #auspol pic.twitter.com/LxDOsvwx6A

— ABC News (@abcnews) July 6, 2025

Ms McIntosh goes on to point out that there was a large number of women in the Liberal Party during the Howard-era. Without quotas. Why was that, I wonder?

This conversation continues on the topic of leadership battles, which raises another question: How does a quota system solve the problem of these seat-wars? Surely a faction can play the same game with women-vs-women as it does now?

What I am hearing, and you can judge for yourself, is that quotas are being offered up as a solution to left-wing media criticism, as cover for factional warfare, to provide a shallow pitch at Teal voters, and as a desperate attempt at ‘modernisation’ that fails to address the root problem of why women are not voting conservative.

None of this presents ‘quotas’ as a winning idea.

As some of our readers online noted, the Liberal Party flirtation with quotas is tiresome.

Do it. Don’t do it. Make a decision and live with the consequences.

At the moment, all the party is doing is proving it has no idea what it believes in.