Other than the woman herself, no-one knows for sure why Julie Bishop strode into that press conference to sign off as Australia’s first female foreign minister, wearing those striking red shoes.
Perhaps Bishop’s only intent was to cheer herself up. She’d mentioned in the past that donning a pair of scarlet heels could raise a woman’s spirits. And who would blame Australia’s most popular politician if this was the case? Just days before, she’d been snubbed by colleagues over the Liberal party’s leadership.
Just after Bishop’s press conference, Fairfax’s award-winning photographer Alex Ellinghausen posted an unconventional shot of the event on Twitter. The compelling photo focused on her scarlet heels, blazing before the dark suits and shoes of the assembled media. The image flew around the Twittersphere, swiftly coming to symbolise what Bishop’s treatment had revealed about her party: that its merit system was a sham.
Thanks to the keen eye of one of Australia’s finest political photojournalists, and the power of social media, Bishop’s red shoes became much more than a potential pick-me-up; they became a rallying point for Liberal women who’d had enough, and a symbol of their resistance.
During the weeks that followed Bishop’s sartorial statement, her favoured red shoe emoji bloomed across social media. Even more significantly, female Liberal MPs wore touches of red to parliament. They did so to protest against the Liberal boys’ club that used intimidation to subdue them and ‘merit’ to suppress them. Those crimson jackets, dresses and heels – along with a few incendiary statements – signaled the beginning of a long-overdue rebellion.
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The collective behaviour of these women marked a fundamental shift in the way they viewed the world, as well as themselves.
The ‘old’ way of thinking was steeped in Liberal tradition, based on the values and beliefs that had long been celebrated in the first speeches of Liberal MPs. The importance of individual freedom usually sat at the top of the list, followed by the superiority of market forces and the need for reward to be based on merit. Equality was expressed as the right to equal opportunity but not necessarily to equal outcomes.
But even though they were committed individualists, these Liberal women appeared to have come to the begrudging acceptance that no one woman, not even one as well-credentialed as Julie Bishop, could overcome the gender bias that flourished within the Liberal Party’s male-dominated culture. The flashes of red not only indicated their frustration, rage and disappointment, it also signaled the acceptance by Liberal women that they’d have to follow the lead set by the ‘sisterhood’ on the other side of politics to create equality for women in the Liberal Party. They’d have to use collective action to bring about change.
The importance of this shift can’t be over-stated. Collective action doesn’t come easily to most Liberals because of their belief in the importance of the individual. The party has a long history of female parliamentarians fighting to advance the rights of Australian women, but until recently most resisted calling themselves feminists. That’s because women on the conservative side of politics equate feminism with activism, public protests and revolutionary change. The Liberal way is to work within society’s structures to create incremental change.
As the party’s most senior woman, Julie Bishop had been a prominent defender of those Liberal principles. She had emphasised the responsibility of individuals to strive for excellence and, if they failed, to accept that failure was due to their own limitations. A year after becoming the first Australian woman to hold the foreign affairs portfolio, Bishop told a women’s magazine that she still refused to call herself a feminist and urged women not to use gender as an excuse for being unable to achieve their goals. ‘Stop whinging, get on with it and prove them all wrong,’ was the advice she proffered.
When asked about this after a speech to the National Press Club, Bishop said ‘the approach I’ve taken is that if I want something I’ll work hard and set my mind to it. And if it comes off that’s great. If it doesn’t, I’m not going to blame the fact that I’m a woman. I’m not going to look at life through the prism of gender.’ Yet as Australia’s first female prime minister, Julia Gillard, explained after her own leadership downfall just a year before, gender may not explain everything, but it does explain some things.
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If the Liberal party actually did select and elect on merit, as it claimed, Bishop should have been a shoo-in to replace Malcolm Turnbull as prime minister. According to the published opinion polls, she entered the leadership contest as the people’s choice for Liberal leader, and was more competitive against Labor leader Bill Shorten than Turnbull or any of the leadership contenders. The 20-year veteran of federal parliament was also widely acknowledged as whip-smart, articulate and a formidable fundraiser.
Yet Bishop’s merit had very little to do with the outcome of the leadership vote. She was eliminated in the first round, leaving the two male candidates – Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton – to fight it out in the second. It later emerged that some of Bishop’s factional colleagues had abandoned the then Foreign Minister in a tactical play to get Morrison over the line, apparently having made the assessment that she would lose in a head-to-head contest with their mutual rival Dutton.
A few days later, resplendent in those crimson heels, Bishop called out her party for the first time for only paying lip service to the principle of merit. When asked whether the Liberal Party would ever elect a popular woman as leader, ‘Well, when we find one, I’m sure we will,’ was her pointed response.
Taken in isolation, it might be seen as an overreaction to infer from Bishop’s experience that the Liberal party has a gender-bias problem. But the snub didn’t occur in a vacuum – it occurred against a backdrop of Liberal women continually being sidelined by men. Added to this was the litany of bad behaviour inflicted upon female federal Coalition MPs by their male colleagues during the tumultuous days that lead up to the leadership vote. For those women, the intimidation and bullying was only the latest example of the hyper-masculine culture that had long dominated the Liberal party – not only within the parliamentary wing but also the party organisation.
Perhaps it wasn’t just the shoes. Perhaps it was also the #MeToo movement that emboldened those women to expose the bully-boy tactics in the days following the coup, denouncing the Liberal men who cruelled Bishop’s leadership prospects while serving their own. Whatever their reasons, the women ignored suggestions from male colleagues to ‘roll with the punches’, and went public with their experiences, brandishing the colour red in solidarity.
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It would be an understatement to suggest the red rebellion has been a long time coming. It’s been overdue since Tony Abbott unveiled his first ministry after winning government in 2013.
But long before that, one of the first Liberal women to be elected, Kathy Martin (later Sullivan) publicly castigated her party after the 1983 federal election, saying the Coalition loss was attributable to its failure to pay attention to the ‘women’s vote’. She urged the party to embrace and adapt its policies to the changing dynamics in families and workplaces, and to the changing status of women in society.
Thirty years later, out of the 19 Liberal and National MPs appointed to the most senior level of the ministry, the cabinet, only one woman made the cut. In fact, not even that woman, Julie Bishop, was appointed to cabinet by Abbott. Thanks to her election as deputy leader by the Liberal partyroom, Bishop was granted her choice of cabinet-level portfolio and an automatic seat at the big table.
When Abbott announced the controversial decision, he feigned regret that no other Liberal woman had yet attained the level of merit required to be a cabinet minister. ‘Plainly, I am disappointed that there are not at least two women in the cabinet,’ Abbott claimed at the time. ‘Nevertheless, there are some very good and talented women knocking on the door of the cabinet.’
Abbott’s deference to the so-called merit principle was a slap in the face for the well-credentialed Liberal women he’d chosen to overlook – the worthy women who’d waited patiently to be recognised while a succession of unimpressive men was promoted over them.
Academic, Liberal historian and commentator Peter Van Onselen opened an interesting window into that time, writing that ‘Most of the women from the parliamentary Liberal Party we spoke to agree that Abbott showed a lack of empathy for women who didn’t display masculine attributes – in their debating style, in their aggression, in their drinking and swearing. If Abbott was a man’s man, he wanted “warrior women” around him.
Yet one female MP told us “Abbott doesn’t like women who view the world differently to him and are prepared to express their feelings with conviction.” Warrior women MPs who he thought did not respect his authority would not prosper under Abbott’s leadership.
Dr Sharman Stone, the former Howard Government minister who also served in Abbott’s shadow ministry, was overlooked for a ministerial role in his government. After Abbott lost the leadership, and his former chief of staff Peta Credlin was reported calling for businesses and governments to do more to address the gender gap, Stone slammed Abbott’s ministerial line-up as a backward step for Liberal women, and blamed Credlin for not doing more to address the imbalance.
‘I think it was a lost opportunity for Peta and if she had perhaps realised the values she's now saying she has, if she'd realised those with Tony, he may have had a better prospect of remaining leader,’ Stone was reported as saying. ‘Women felt alienated, they certainly didn't feel part of the team. They certainly looked at our frontbench in the Coalition and saw the row of pale males in suits and didn't feel a part of that.’
But according to Credlin, the first Abbott cabinet was practically bare of women because there was ‘a lack of women in the pipeline for senior roles after the 2010 election.’ That was a curious claim to make, given there were at least five accomplished and experienced women languishing in the Liberal partyroom at the time.
In addition to Stone there was Marise Payne, who’d been in parliament for 16 years at the time the Abbot government was elected; Sussan Ley, who’d been an MP for 12 years; Michaelia Cash, who’d already served five years in the senate; and Kelly O’Dwyer, who’d been in the lower house for four. With the exception of O’Dwyer, all had served in the Coalition’s shadow ministry, as had Sophie Mirabella, who would have been the second woman in Abbott’s cabinet if she had not been defeated by the independent Cathy McGowan at the 2013 election.
It’s no coincidence that Payne, Ley, Cash and O’Dwyer were appointed by Malcolm Turnbull to cabinet when he became prime minister two years later. O’Dwyer joined the small number of Liberal women who’d held treasury portfolios, such as Margaret Guilfoyle and Helen Coonan, while Payne became Australia’s first female defence minister. Following Bishop’s retirement to the backbench, Payne then became Australia’s second female foreign minister.
Yet even when confronted with evidence such as this that the Liberal merit principle is little more than a protection racket for men, many Liberal women have remained committed to it. As the conservative Liberals Nicolle Flint and Nick Cater wrote in the 2017 update to their report for the Menzies Research Centre, Gender and Politics, ‘The rejection of quotas is widespread [in the Liberal Party]; a top-down, bureaucratic mandate that is anathema to Liberal values and the Liberal conception of democracy.’
And as a result, Liberal woman have been caught in a type of Schrodinger’s loop, simultaneously aware that merit can have nothing to do with the progress of male Liberals, but nevertheless insisting that their own progress be based on it.
However, the emergence of the red shoe brigade suggests Liberal women may have broken free from this circular thinking. They’ve begun to not only acknowledge that the Liberals’ merit-based system is a sham, but that the claimed reliance on merit will do nothing to increase the number of Liberal women in parliament. There’s also a growing awareness that, without increased female representation, the Liberal party could ultimately drive women voters away.
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It’s accepted wisdom but a fallacy that the number of Liberal women in federal parliament has steadily declined since Paul Keating’s Labor government lost in a landslide to John Howard’s coalition in 1996. The real story is more nuanced, but no less an existential threat for Liberal women and perhaps even their party.
In truth, the total number of female Liberal MPs and senators has remained static since 1996. Twenty-three women featured in the Liberals’ parliamentary ranks for most of the eleven years that Howard was in government, dipping to a low of 19 after Abbott failed to dislodge the Labor government in 2010. That number rose to 21 when Abbott finally succeeded in 2013, and rose again to 23 following the 2016 federal election.
Even when looking at the proportion of Liberal parliamentarians that are women, the picture isn’t much different. Women made up 25 per cent of Liberal MPs during the Howard years, and after dropping at times to 21 per cent, rose back to 24 per cent despite Turnbull’s disastrous federal election campaign in 2016.
So if the number and proportion of Liberal women has barely changed over time, what is it about the Howard win in 1996 that makes people remember it so favourably? Perhaps 1996 is considered a high-water mark due to the record number of Liberal women elected that year. Thirteen female MPs were added to the Liberal Party’s ranks in 1996, increasing the total number of Liberal women in federal parliament from 11 to 23. The previous record intake was four new Liberal women elected in 1993 (despite Howard’s loss to Keating).
Many of the esteemed Liberal women who went on to fight progressive battles within their party were elected in either 1993 or 1996. Judi Moylan was part of a Liberal backbench revolt during the Howard years that forced the release of women and children from immigration detention. Judith Troeth was also part of that group, later crossing the floor to abolish the mandatory billing of asylum seekers for their detention, and support the Rudd Labor government’s carbon pollution reduction scheme. And Teresa Gambaro campaigned during the Abbott years in support of marriage equality.
John Howard may have been the ultimate beneficiary, but he was in no position to take the credit for the wave of female candidates that helped sweep him into office. That feat was due to the efforts of the Liberal Women’s Forum, formed in 1993 with the support of then Liberal leader John Hewson to get more Liberal women into parliament. Hewson appointed Dame Margaret Guilfoyle, the Liberal party’s original ‘woman of merit’ who was the first to hold a cabinet-level ministry, to chair the forum and champion its work.
However, even if the Howard era is sometimes feted as some sort of golden age for Liberal women, closer inspection reveals this to be far from the truth. At first blush, it’s impressive that ten of the 17 women elected for the first time in 1993 or 1996 were appointed to Howard’s ministry during his 11 years in office. Yet only one member of that political generation, Helen Coonan, eventually made it to cabinet.
That’s not to say Howard had a poor record appointing women to cabinet – in fact he always had at least two female cabinet ministers, which rose to three and then four in the later years of his government. However it’s difficult to accept that the bounty of accomplished Liberal women elected in ’93 and ’96 did not include at least a few more worthy of being appointed to cabinet over the following decade. If they did exist, Howard chose to squander their potential rather than cultivate it.
As a result, not one of the Liberal women elected for the first time in 1993 or 1996 remains in parliament today, although there are still two serving female parliamentarians who arrived soon after. These are the foreign minister Marise Payne, who was appointed in 1997 to fill a casual vacancy in the Senate, and her predecessor Julie Bishop, who was elected in 1998. By contrast, three Liberal men elected in ’93 or ‘96 still remain: Tony Abbott, Warren Entsch and Christopher Pyne. Two other men, Kevin Andrews and Russell Broadbent were elected even earlier.
More than half of the Liberal women who were first elected in ‘93 or ‘96 lost to Labor in subsequent elections, leaving seven members of that cohort to eventually retire on their own terms. By then, the Liberal Women’s Forum had faded away, allowing Liberal men to regain dominance over the party’s preselections. As a result, all but one of those seven women was succeeded by a male.
Judi Moylan’s successor was Christian Porter, the former West Australian treasurer. Danna Vale was followed by Craig Kelly, the staunch Abbott supporter and climate sceptic. Helen Coonan’s place in the senate was filled by Arthur Sinodinos, the former chief of staff to John Howard. Chris Gallus was followed by Simon Birmingham, who lost to Labor but later replaced another Liberal woman from the class of 1996, Jeannie Ferris, after she died from cancer. Teresa Gambaro was succeeded by Trevor Evans, and Sharman Stone by Donald McGauchie (although he lost to the Nationals’ Damien Drum).
Only Joanna Gash was succeeded by a woman, Ann Sudmalis, who became a prominent member of the red shoe brigade. Sudmalis was among the women who spoke out after the recent leadership spill to condemn the culture of intimidation and bullying that pervaded the modern Liberal party, and was particularly directed at women. Due to the bullying she personally endured, Sudmalis has also decided to retire at the next federal election. Of the people who’ve been suggested in the media to replace her, all have been men.
Flint and Cater noted that out of the 14 Coalition MPs in predominantly safe seats who’ve retired since September 2015, 13 were succeeded by men. Flint was the only new female Liberal MP to succeed a sitting Liberal.
Wesa Chau from the University of Melbourne recently confirmed the logical assumption that preselecting more women for safe seats resulted in more female parliamentarians. At the 2016 federal election, the two major parties (combined) fielded the highest ever number of female candidates. With women preselected for 16 of its 46 safe seats, Labor ended up with women representing 35 per cent of its safe seats after the 2016 election. The Liberals fielded women in seven of its 39 safe seats, ending up with 18 per cent.
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With a few notable exceptions, male dominance over Liberal preselections has persisted since the Howard government was elected in 1996. That dominance hasn’t yet significantly affected the number of Liberal women in federal parliament, but it’s likely to become an obvious factor if the Labor landslide predicted at the next federal election becomes reality,
Of the eleven Liberal women currently sitting in the House of Representatives, one has lost preselection to a man, one will retire (and probably be replaced by a man), while another three will likely lose their marginal seats in the expected Labor rout. The potential Liberal candidates being canvassed in the media to replace Julia Banks, before she resigned from the Liberals to join the crossbench as an independent, were all men. Without preselecting additional women to replace them in safe Liberal seats (that can withstand a large swing to Labor) or winnable positions on the senate ticket, the party’s female representation in parliament could be reduced at the next election to pre-Howard era levels.
Even so, there’s very little motivation for ambitious men to make way for women with merit when a safe Liberal seat is in the offing. After all, the Liberal party stands for individual freedom and a competitive market, so it’s every man (or woman) for themselves – and may the best man win.
That approach might even work if the Liberal men and women were competing for preselection on a level playing field. But just as there are factors in society that tilt the field towards male players, there are factors in Liberal preselection processes that disadvantage women. One of these factors is that most of the Liberal party members who sit on preselection panels are white, financially-secure boomers. This deeply traditional cohort may mouth the usual platitudes about merit, but can be deeply sceptical of a woman’s ability to be an effective parliamentarian while raising a family.
Such talk overshadowed Kelly O’Dwyer’s preselection bid for the very safe Liberal seat of Higgins when it was vacated by her former boss, Peter Costello. According to a media report at the time ‘some preselectors had reportedly been told that Higgins was “not a seat for a woman because it’s a leadership seat”, and that questions had been raised about whether Ms O’Dwyer’s marriage would last if she won a federal seat.’ Of course, O’Dwyer went on to prove the doubters wrong. She went on to become the federal parliament’s youngest female Cabinet member and the first serving cabinet minister to give birth. She also managed to retain her marriage.
However, her detractors didn’t give up easily. When O’Dwyer was on maternity leave from cabinet with her second baby, a posse of disgruntled millionaires tried to ‘conscript’ the arch conservative commentator, Peta Credlin, to challenge O’Dwyer for preselection. Credlin, the former chief of staff to Tony Abbott, is the epitome of the warrior women that Van Onselen says Abbott favours. In fact, Abbott has publicly praised her as such on numerous public occasions. However Credlin was politically savvy enough to see that the politics optics of such a move were all wrong.
O’Dwyer’s example also brings us to the other factor that has prevented women of merit from progressing in the Liberal party. This is the seemingly never-ending battle between the party’s factions. Historically, Liberal women have come from both the right-wing conservative faction as well as the centre-right moderates. However, the growing dominance of (mostly male) conservatives in the party’s state divisions has seen the number of moderate Liberal women (including those from the Class of ’96) dwindle over time.
This helps to explain why the Liberal women who were bullied and intimidated during the recent leadership spill included moderates, whose preselections were threatened if they didn’t support the conservatives’ favoured candidate, Peter Dutton.
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Even though they might come from different factions, Liberal women have generally been of one mind when it comes to the question of quotas. Julie Bishop has been reported saying ‘I think quotas miss the point about merit-based preselections and elections’. Perhaps surprisingly, at least two other members of the red shoe brigade concur. Jane Hume, whose preselection was threatened during the leadership skirmish, has rejected the idea of quotas.
Linda Reynolds, who took to the Senate to call out the recent bullying behaviour and said she no longer recognised her party, does not identify as a feminist. But she has argued that, as the party with equality of opportunity as its unifying and foundation principle, the Liberal Party had failed to rectify ‘the very obvious dissonance’ between this principle and its poor record on the equality of opportunity for women’. However Reynolds does not identify with the imposition of quotas and believes that approach ‘does far more harm than good for women today’.
Less surprisingly, the former minister for women, the conservative Liberal Michaelia Cash, has said preselection ‘should recognise merit and excellence rather than be based on some unilateral quota’.
Flint and Cater argue that, ‘while it is tempting to assume that the only way to improve the representation of women in the Liberal Party is to follow the path of Labor, to do so would be to betray the very principles our Party is founded upon.’ The two Liberal conservatives strongly reject the imposition of quotas, claiming that ‘quotas are part of the semantics of socialist collective action. They are tools preferred in centrally planned command economies. They are anti-democratic and hostile to freedom. They are anathema to Liberalism.’ Even the Sydney Morning Herald has editorialised that quotas are ‘a form of political correctness that rewards mediocrity’.
This resistance stems from the fundamental Liberal belief that success must be achieved through merit rather than special treatment. Although former Liberal senator, Helen Kroger, warned the Liberals cannot afford to go backwards on women, and that she has no problem with quotas, has also mentioned the idea of quotas is anathema to Liberals because it’s seen as being ‘owned’ by Labor.
But as some Liberal women have grown to understand that Liberal men without merit are still being rewarded, they’ve lost faith in the principle and begun to seek other ways to advance. That includes women from the Class of ’96, who would likely have worn red in solidarity with Julie Bishop if they were still in parliament today. One of those women would certainly have been Judith Troeth, who originally didn’t support quotas but eventually concluded that they were needed to modernise the Liberal party. ‘If the “merit” standard isn’t providing greater numbers,’ Troeth later wrote about her 2010 proposal to introduce quotas for the preselection of women, ‘wouldn’t logic tell us to try another approach?’
In arguing her case over subsequent years, Troeth dispensed with many of the excuses used to resist the adoption of quotas for female Liberal candidates. She argued it was illogical for the party to reject such quotas when it already had similar allocations for women in the party organisation. She challenged the myth that only the best candidates would be found by focusing on merit, and that the imposition of quotas meant dropping the bar for achievement levels. And she stressed in 2015, given there’d been no significant rise in the number of female Liberal MPs since her earlier proposal, that it was time for the party leadership to introduce quotas to boost the number of women.
Sharman Stone, who is now the Ambassador for Women and Girls, was also one of that generation’s Liberal rebels who argued that quotas for women were needed on the conservative side of politics.
And then there are the Liberal women from more recent generations, such as Sussan Ley, who eventually became the second woman to join Tony Abbott’s cabinet. Not long after the latest leadership spill exposed the Liberal party’s toxic culture and poor relationship with women, Ley said she wasn’t a fan of quotas, ‘but I must say recently I’ve wondered whether we should consider them.’
Former Liberal woman Julia Banks, who claimed she was ‘bullied, pressured and intimidated’ by three male colleagues during the lead up to the leadership spill, later resigned from the party in protest against the party’s thuggish culture. At the time, she denounced the ‘scourge of cultural and gender bias, bullying and intimidation [that] continues against women in politics, the media and across business’. Banks also told parliament that ‘the meritocracy argument is completely and utterly flawed’ and that given women represent half the population, ‘so should a modern Liberal party’. Banks also argued that quotas would work as a reset mechanism that could make parliament more representative.
This modest but growing acceptance among Liberal women that quotas may be needed to address their party’s gender imbalance appears to be reflected in the views of Liberal supporters. Back in 2013, an Essential poll found that only 17 per cent of Liberal voters were concerned about there being only one woman in the first Abbott cabinet. Yet an Essential poll held one month after the leadership change that brought on the resignation of Julie Bishop, found a staggering 68 per cent of Liberal voters supported the party adopting quotas to increase the number of Liberal women in the parliament.
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Perhaps the best argument in favour of quotas for women is the numbers.
The Gender Quotas Database currently lists over 130 countries that use gender quotas to overcome ‘institutionalised bias against women in politics’, as the academic Marian Sawer describes the problem. ‘Thanks to quotas, the proportion of women in parliaments across the world has nearly doubled in the past 20 years.’
During a recent public lecture on women in leadership, Julia Gillard noted that ‘in 1994 the ALP and the Liberal party had around about the same percentage of women in their federal caucuses.’ This was 14.5 per cent for Labor and 13.9 per cent for the Liberals. ‘Today, women are 46 per cent of federal Labor, a jump of over 30 percentage points. In contrast, the Liberal party has inched forward to 23 per cent, a jump of just over nine percentage points. ’Put another way, 37 Liberal women have been elected to the House of Representatives since 1943, and 29 to the Senate. In contrast, 69 Labor women were elected to the lower house, along with 40 to the Senate.
Labor didn’t reach these milestones because the party’s ambitious men were happy to make way for its talented women. Perhaps the most memorable demonstration of this reality is the 2012 preselection of South Australian factional heavyweight and ‘faceless man’ Don Farrell, who was awarded the first spot on Labor’s senate ticket, relegating the then Finance Minister, Penny Wong, to second place. While this was still a winnable position for Wong, it nevertheless created a very bad look for the progressive party. Farrell ended up yielding to pressure from the party’s leadership and gave up the top spot to Wong.
To put it bluntly, quotas recognise that men in male-dominated organisations, if left to their own devices, will tend to choose other men. As the academics Anika Gauja, Fiona Buckley and Jennifer Curtin explain, ‘the reality is candidate selection is often determined by interpersonal links … Given the male dominance of politics, this practice privileges men, who disproportionately hold positions of power within political parties and tend to recruit and select other men for political office.’
Unlike the Liberals, the Labor party is less wedded to individual freedoms and will accept restrictions on those rights, such as the imposition of quotas, if those restrictions are for the greater good. Former journalist and now academic Chris Wallace has written that ‘Practical politics runs on quotas. They are the tools of last resort when dominant powers refuse the share power fairly… They work.’
Labor first adopted quotas for women candidates in 1994, committing to preselect women for 35 per cent of winnable seats by 2002. The former Labor Minister, Susan Ryan, who was influential in her party’s creation of laws to establish equal opportunity for women, wrote that Labor’s quota rules were ‘bitterly resented by many men in the Party, and when they favour a woman from the wrong faction, they upset some women as well.’
With the support of the National Labor Women’s Network and the activist group EMILY’s List Australia, the party’s preselection of women increased from 14.5 per cent in 1994 to 35.6 per in 2010. Labor currently has a quota of 40 per cent for female MPs, with the goal of reaching 50 per cent by 2025.