The Liberals may well be an election-winning machine, as Christopher Pyne famously described his party, but it is a machine with a remarkable inability to elect women to the House of Representatives. The House of Representatives now boasts just 13 women among the 76 Coalition members. The Coalition, dominated by the Liberals, is way behind Labor and falling further behind by this measure.
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Such a disparity is now the largest non-policy difference between the major parties. It is also a huge intellectual puzzle, not easily solved. At a time when the social composition of the major parties in terms of professional background, religious denomination and other social characteristics is quite similar there is now a yawning gulf on gender. No one really knows why other than the fact that Labor uses quotas for women in its candidate preselection and the Liberals seem to rely on serendipity alone.
Liberal women such as the Defence Minister, Senator Marise Payne, are clearly embarrassed and angry about the situation, but I suspect that until there is some evidence this discrepancy makes a difference in the party's election performance the Liberal power-brokers will be happy to let the situation drift. Winning is just about all that matters in inter-party competition. The parliamentary benches will now look very different in gender composition but the Coalition will still be sitting on the government side of the chamber.
Adversarial politics may even be a contributing factor to the startlingly different performance of the two sides in this regard. There is such a pervasive culture in party politics that anything your opponents appear to be doing successfully can't be right and Labor's success with quotas can more easily be dismissed by the Liberals. Stubbornness is added to the intellectual argument that quotas are discriminatory tokenism contrary to liberal values.
The number of women among Liberal ranks may have hit rock-bottom but it is no fluke. In modern times, though not traditionally, Labor has clearly led the way in elevating women to parliament, to the ministry and to leadership positions in Australian state and federal politics. The Liberals have had their moments, especially in their big win in 1996 under John Howard, but otherwise the trends are clear.
There is, however, nothing inherent in liberal and conservative values, to explain this situation. The Conservative Party in Britain, for instance, has just had two women fight out the leadership contest and now has its second female Conservative prime minister. Within the Liberals, it is not as if liberal women are doing better than conservative women or vice versa nor are women doing better in some state branches than others. The malaise appears to be Australia-wide.
The possible reasons for the prevalence or otherwise of women in parliament are well rehearsed. Have a look at the Parliamentary Library paper, Representation of Women in Australian Parliaments 2014, by McCann and Wilson for good summaries. Some factors like electoral system differences are not applicable in this instance as they apply to all parties not just one. Others like structural and cultural characteristics need to be investigated in the case of the Liberals. It may be that Liberal women are less inclined to enter parliament than Labor women because of different attitudes to public and private life, including work and family, but surely any differences are not so great as to explain the now huge gap in female representation between the two sides.
Party power-brokers get want they want in modern political parties and it is reasonable to conclude Liberal power-brokers don't consider gender balance a priority. It is true that at the margins there is an element of serendipity in House of Representatives pre-selection outcomes as well as general election results. The contests in 150 seats are so individual they make establishing relative gender balance more difficult than it should be in multi-member electorates like the Senate. Nevertheless, Labor has shown it can be done.
This is not because Labor has state-wide organised factions and the Liberals don't. Intra-party competition between conservatives and progressives within the Liberals is just as organised as it is within Labor. There would be more women within the Liberal ranks in the House of Representatives if the power-brokers thought it was important enough. That is the context in which encouragement, mentoring and recruitment strategies come into play.
Whatever the reasons it has come about, the important thing is that the situation matters. The Liberal Party, the Australian government and parliament are the losers. Ultimately so are the public. The quality of our representatives falls when there are too few women in our parties and parliaments. Meritorious women are clearly not making it within the Liberals.
The diversity of our representative institutions also falls when there are too few women. Parliaments and parties work better when there is a gender mix to match an appropriate mix in other social characteristics such as background, beliefs and professional qualifications.
There are also subtle but important impacts on economic and social policy as men and women do bring different perspectives, flowing from different life experiences, to matters of policy consideration.
Furthermore, such an imbalance has a longer term impact on the composition of governments. The current situation within the Liberals cannot easily be overcome in the short term. Experience usually counts in promotion to the ministry and now it is the blokes who overwhelmingly will be accumulating that experience. It will be a long time before Malcolm Turnbull or another future Liberal prime minister has a suitably wide range of women to choose from in the House of Representatives for promotion to the ministry.
John Warhurst is an emeritus professor of political science at the Australian National University.
