In an interview with the ABC’s Fran Kelly on Monday, Cormann evaded the question on gender equality and targets, even though it’s increasingly clear that members of his party, both men and women, are turning against these prehistoric Liberal Party values. It’s slow. Getting those people to speak on the record, unless they have nothing to lose, is hard. Andrew Bragg, touted by some as a near-certainty to win the Wentworth preselection, pulled out of the race on Monday saying the Liberals should have a woman candidate. That’s someone who had a lot to lose.

Australian voters have already changed their minds about the importance of gender equality, according to one person who’s followed the beliefs of Australian voters for more than 30 years. Ian McAllister says Australians clearly value equality and have become much more tolerant and small "l" liberal on a whole range of cultural attitudes, including Indigenous people and the environment. Those trends are accelerating and McAllister attributes the changes to the fast expansion of higher education and the slow decline of the conservative influence of religion.

But one thing is clear. Those changes are not just held by those who vote Liberal. McAllister, who is co-director of the Australian Election Study and distinguished professor of political science at ANU, has been tracking voter sentiment since 1987. At the last election, the survey asked a question about gender quotas for the first time – and 58 per cent of Australians supported them; many more women than men, of course. Nearly half of Liberal voters supported quotas – but that pattern of values is not reflected in the political party itself.

McAllister describes this as a substantial long-term shift. The Liberal Party and the National Party have not yet caught up with this dramatic change in views – and that’s because they are still run by men who want to hold on to their power. These parties don’t have a woman problem. They have a man problem – men who are out-of-touch and out-of-step with commonly held views and who are risking the health of our democracy by not keeping up with the rest of us. The Liberals claim their targets for equality are set at 50/50 by 2025 but a quick glance at the Victorian Liberals, contesting a state election later this year, will show just how far they are from that target with just seven years to go. Only a tiny handful of women are up for election in safe Liberal seats.

The problem is made clear in Cormann’s response to Kelly, when she asked if he thought the Liberal Party should preselect a woman: “It’s not my job to select the candidate for Wentworth, I’m looking forward to the good Liberal members in Wentworth to select the best possible candidate, now if that candidate is a woman, that would be great; and of course we do need to do more to select women into strong and winnable seats but I am not going to interfere with the local preselection decisions.”

McAllister’s data illustrates the shift in voter sentiment is happening fast. A similar shift in the gender composition of elected candidates for particular parties may also make voters realise what real choice looks like –women already vote for the ALP in greater numbers than women vote for the Liberal Party. If the Liberals want to attract women voters, they might need to rethink their current failing gender equality strategy.

So, how do you fix the parties and the men who currently constitute the parties? If you want a decent range of candidates, how do you make that happen? You could take the lead of some of the players at Sky and hector MPs by text. Or, you could try  this solution. Join a party, become involved in the process of preselections. Sounds awful, doesn’t it?

My women friends, across the political spectrum, tell me meetings are sausage-festy. Which brings me to the ultimate horror – the National Party of Australia.

Last week, we discovered the National Party had made no finding about the case of Catherine Marriott, the rural leader who made sexual harassment allegations about former Nationals head Barnaby Joyce. The party told her that it was unable to make a determination about the allegations due to insufficient evidence, despite finding Marriott to be ‘‘forthright, believable, open and genuinely upset’’ by the incident.

The process went something like this. Marriott makes the complaint. It goes to the federal Nationals. The complaint then gets flicked back to NSW.There are no findings. Marriott put out a statement last week in which she said: ‘‘The result of this investigation has underpinned what is wrong with the process and the absolute dire need for change. This outcome simply isn’t good enough.’’

I thought conservative parties had a woman problem. I was wrong. They’ve got man trouble.

Jenna Price is a Herald columnist and an academic at the University of Technology Sydney.