Women in the Liberal Party are sick of the politics of there-there. They’ve had enough of being told — for generations — that their role is important, that their contribution is valued and that more of them should absolutely gain powerful positions, while the men who already have them use structures and systems to ensure they don’t.
Opposition leader Sussan Ley’s decision to prioritise getting more Liberal women into parliament has set the course for what will be a rugged showdown with her party’s old guard and its more contemporary lieutenants. It already looks like conservatives opposed to moves to “modernise” the Liberal Party might use the issue to undermine their first female leader and foment a split designed to make her fail.
It won’t be a carbon copy of the Julia Gillard days, when Liberal leader Tony Abbott appeared at rallies in front of placards declaring “Ditch the witch.” Treating their own leader that way would be unacceptable and counterproductive. For this, they’d probably prefer to use party processes, the privileges of power and the appearance of cooperation — with the occasional public disagreement on issues such as, say, gender quotas — to seed doubts about their leader’s judgement and erode her support.
This week, the centre-right Ley declared herself a “zealot” when it came to facilitating more women, even if it meant state divisions introducing quotas. “I’m agnostic about how we get more women,” she told the Nine network. “… I stand ready to work with them every step of the way to make sure that we get the outcome that we all seek.”
Within twenty-four hours, Abbott had declared himself firmly against quotas. Shadow defence minister and fellow conservative Angus Taylor, who Ley only just defeated for the leadership, also spoke out. “We should take substantial action,” Taylor told ABC24. “… But I’m saying that subverting democratic processes through quotas is not the way to do it.”
If there was ever a case study in why Liberal women are suspicious of the lip service some colleagues pay to the need for change, it’s the now-infamous NSW Liberal Women’s Council meeting held on 3 June. This was the marathon video conference call during which Victorian party veteran Alan Stockdale mused that women were doing well enough in the NSW division and men might need a hand up.
Seated under a portrait of party founder Robert Menzies, the former Kennett government treasurer was alongside fellow Victorian elder Richard Alston, who served in John Howard’s federal cabinet. Stockdale, Alston and former NSW state MLA Peta Seaton were appointed as temporary administrators of the NSW division last September after the division catastrophically missed the candidate nomination deadline for local government elections and Peter Dutton ordered an intervention.
Having called for submissions and established a clandestine second committee to redraft the state party’s constitution, but not yet having consulted anyone else, the three-member administrative committee was appealing to the Women’s Council to support giving them a second nine months to get the job done.
It was the night before the seat of Bradfield was finally declared lost to independent Nicolette Boele, who beat the Liberals’ Gisele Kapterian by just twenty-six votes. Some of Kapterian’s campaign team were on the call, and by then they knew it was over. Their dejection — and their sense that the administrators had made their job harder — set the tone for the evening.
The women had questions about what they considered an opaque and obstructionist intervention process, not least why this was the first they’d heard from the administrators and what the trio had been doing while a federal election came and went and the Liberal Party — to quote Sussan Ley’s subsequent observation — “got totally smashed.”
Fortunately for anyone fascinated by the inner workings of a political party, at least one of the sixty-plus people on the video conference call recorded it. The transcript of the almost-four-hour grilling makes for compelling reading.
Stockdale’s observation about the relative power of men and women in the NSW Liberals, which found its way into the newspapers, was just a taster. It came about three hours in, after a fair bit of robust dialogue. Before the observation about women’s assertiveness, he had been asked about reports of a second secret committee drafting a new constitution and whether anyone had been consulted. The council — a key formal body within the division — had not.
Because the administrators couldn’t consult everyone before the federal election, said Stockdale, they didn’t consult anyone so as not to “distract” from the campaign. Given the administrators were supposed to remedy problems so the Liberals had a better chance of winning the election, the decision to defer consultation beyond polling day defied logic.
When Stockdale was asked who appointed the drafting committee, he said the federal executive proposed it. Others who’d been present at the meeting authorising the September intervention recalled no such instruction. Stockdale confirmed the drafters included Women’s Council rural vice-president Rhondda Vanzella — whose work he praised effusively — and two others he declined to identify. One had been excused, having been little help. The other anonymous contributor he hailed as crucial.
“But there has been no consultation,” he insisted. Talking to the drafters, he declared, didn’t count.
Stockdale said the drafters’ committee had been kept secret so it wasn’t subjected to public lobbying. Several women asked why the administrators hadn’t just consulted the existing constitutional standing committee, comprised of seven lawyers, whose job is to review the constitution. One of the lawyers, Sarah McMahon, told Stockdale it was “exceptionally inappropriate” to set up a new committee when one already existed. She warned it would be “a breeding ground for resentment,” adding: “You had a resource at your hand of intelligent, educated people.”
Richard Alston responded that he and Stockdale “had a much better understanding of the problems” than the lawyers necessarily would — though both men are former barristers — because they had “been around the party organisation for fifty years or more” and seen things in action.
As the discussion ensued, the two men — and Seaton occasionally chiming in with support — confirmed they had handpicked several other senior NSW party figures to oversee fast-tracked preselections before the election. All men, the group included former Howard government minister Phillip Ruddock and former NSW party treasurer Mark Bailie.
They had also unilaterally reappointed Bailie as honorary treasurer, having decided he could best raise fast money for the federal campaign. Stockdale insisted he was the right choice but refused to say how much he had raised.
Moderating the meeting, Women’s Council president Berenice Walker observed that she was authorised as a member of state executive to oversee preselections but, like others, had been told she wasn’t needed. The women were increasingly unimpressed by the extent to which the administrators — it was Stockdale and Alston leading — had made executive decisions and sidestepped democratic processes with only electoral disaster to show for it.
Stockdale also earned a personal rebuke for noting he must have suffered “an attack of insanity” in agreeing to take on the administrative role. His joke that he had given up playing golf twice a week to do it also seemed to fall a bit flat.
So the tension had been building for hours when Stockdale made his observation about the relative power of men and women. He had punctured it a few seconds earlier by endorsing the women’s demand to abolish an existing constitutional requirement that branches must send both a male and female delegate to state council, even if they comprised only women. Stockdale said the rule didn’t make sense.
Monitoring the online chat, Walker reported: “Well, you’ve won some brownie points for that.” She then observed that more representative women were needed further afield.
“Mind you,” Stockdale quipped, “I think that women are sufficiently assertive now that we should be giving some thought to whether there’s a need to protect men’s involvement.”
His brownie points evaporated. Walker responded: “I welcome the day.”
A few minutes later, one of the council’s urban vice-presidents, Adelaide Cuneo, posed two questions. Under the proposed redrafted constitution, would the Women’s Council president retain her position as a vice-president with automatic state executive membership? And what did the admin committee think of quotas?
On quotas, Stockdale said there was “a very strong division of opinion.” He didn’t have a firm view and encouraged their feedback. “I suppose as a Liberal,” he went on, “my basic inclination is that preselections, for example, should be on merit and the gender shouldn’t enter into it either way. But I’m open to persuasion.”
Adelaide Cuneo responded bluntly. After speaking to women across the party, she had concluded most were resigned that a quota system “might not be the best solution but it is the only solution” for reaching Liberal gender balance in state and federal parliaments. Merit, she said, was an unhelpful term weaponised against women. “When we’re talking about preselections, you never hear a man have to defend his merit.”
The third administrator — and only woman of the trio — Peta Seaton ventured that she had occasionally felt “token.” She reflected that she had sometimes concluded “I’m not here because I’m the right one. They needed a woman, so I was the one.” Nevertheless, she’d eased her long opposition to quotas and now had an open mind.
The meeting did find some common ground when the discussion turned to the election defeat. Several women eviscerated the federal party’s policies, labelling both the proposed petrol subsidy and the abandoned work-from-home policy “ridiculous,” the latter with an expletive attached.
Stockdale agreed Labor had comprehensively out-campaigned the Liberals. He referred to Labor national secretary Paul Erickson’s post-election address to the National Press Club — a venue Peter Dutton eschewed — and said he hadn’t yet seen it. “My wife says ‘you’ve got to make time,’” he added.
But the ceasefire was shortlived. Cuneo had to make several attempts to have her question about the future status of the Women’s Council president answered. Eventually it transpired that there was, indeed, a proposal to reduce the size of the state executive. Stockdale insisted he wasn’t proposing specifically that the council president be dropped. “But we’re not ruling in or ruling out anything.”
Walker reminded him that the federal Liberal Party was founded on a handshake agreement between Robert Menzies and Elizabeth Couchman of the Australian Women’s League that the Women’s Council’s president would be constitutionally enshrined as a vice-president of the Liberal Party. “You’d be reversing Menzies’ work — Menzies’ decision himself — if that were to end,” she warned.
“That was a very long time ago, Berenice,” Stockdale replied.
When he eventually confirmed one option was not having all NSW vice-presidents automatically on the state executive, Walker was furious.
“How do you think it would look on the front page of a newspaper that a Women’s Council president was no longer a vice-president of the party after eighty-one years?” Walker demanded. “What do you think that would do to our vote?”
Stockdale waved away her concern. “I think it would be very unlikely that even with your best efforts, the newspapers would focus on that,” he replied.
Stockdale’s remark about being “sufficiently assertive” hit the media less than twenty-four hours later.
In the days that followed, Walker convened an urgent meeting of the NSW Women’s Council executive that drafted a protest letter to federal executive on the handling of the intervention and its impact on the election result, and opposed any extension of the administrators’ term.
By the time federal executive met on 17 June to consider an extension, it had received a second letter — from conservative Rhondda Vanzella — opposing the first letter and insisting it was unrepresentative of all council views.
Stockdale asked for the extension. Sussan Ley said it would only be granted if he and Alston were replaced by a seven-person committee of NSW members — including a reappointed Peta Seaton joined by Berenice Walker, Mark Bailie and three others. The conservatives were in uproar. Walker was labelled “a terrorist” for her letter. Ley stared the opponents down and won.
Sussan Ley is determined to prevail over those who practice pat-on-the-head politics with women in the Liberal Party. In her home state of New South Wales and beyond, she has a hell of a fight ahead. •
