Liberal Party will miss its decade-long target for female representation
At the National Press Club today, Shadow Treasurer Angus Taylor was asked about how few women the Liberal Party is nominating as candidates.
It’s a reminder that despite women making up half the population, men outnumber women in most Australian parliaments and most party rooms.
Ten years ago the Liberal and Labor parties set the same target for women’s representation: 50% of parliamentarians to be women by 2025, this year.
While the Labor Party meets that target, the Liberal Party is far short of it.
When The Australia Institute crunched the numbers last year, male Liberal parliamentarians outnumbered female Liberal parliamentarians more than two to one.
The Liberal Party used to lead on women’s representation. Eight of the first 10 female federal MPs and Senators were Liberals.
Gough Whitlam’s “It’s time” win in 1972 included 93 male MPs and Senators – and not a single woman.
While things soon improved (it was not possible for them to get worse), it would be another three decades before the Labor Party was consistently more gender-representative than the Liberals at the federal level.
Nor were early Liberals opposed to quotas. As former Liberal senator Judith Troeth notes, “from 1944 the Liberal Party had reserved 50 per cent of the Victorian Division’s executive positions for women”.
The argument that quotas do not allow women to be selected on “merit” is facile: Coalition Cabinets always have a quota for National MPs.
For more details, see last year’s article here.
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