Industry Minister Karen Andrews is on the phone from Townsville. She has spent the morning talking to marine scientists and announcing support for flood victims. But now her thoughts have turned to the question of the Liberal Party's "woman problem".
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"It's interesting that I'm actually the first female cabinet minister Queensland has ever had. It took until 2018 for Queensland to have a federal cabinet minister. That's not a good statistic." She wonders out loud: "How did that happen?"
The Liberal Party has struggled when it come to statistics and women. While Prime Minister Scott Morrison has just appointed a record seventh female member of cabinet with Linda Reynolds, only 23 per cent of its federal representatives are women. In the lower house, it is entirely possible the party will be left with just a handful of female MPs (including Andrews) after the federal election. Of the existing group of eleven, three are unlikely to hold their seats, while Ann Sudmalis quit politics and was replaced by Warren Mundine and Jane Prentice was dumped in favour of a male candidate.
On the other side of the chamber, about 46 per cent of the Labor caucus is female - a statistic that is attributed to the introduction of quotas in the 1990s. This disparity between the two major parties is not lost on Labor strategists. An attack ad pointing out the Liberals' numbers in the lower house was released online on Saturday.
In 2016, the Liberals set a non-enforceable target of 50 per cent female candidates by 2025. But senior members of the party, including federal president Nick Greiner, concede it is unlikely to be met. "It's tough from where we are now, given the realities of the timetable," Greiner said last year.
NSW Liberal powerbroker Alex Hawke says the party's organisation "dropped the ball" when it came to the issue of women. NSW senator Arthur Sinodinos notes the leadership turmoil in in recent years - moving from Tony Abbott to Malcolm Turnbull to Scott Morrison - has "absorbed a huge amount of time" that could have been spent on issues like female representation.
However, senior Liberals interviewed by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age insist those at the top echelons of the party genuinely understand the need to get more Liberal women into Parliament. And that this is both good policy and necessary politics.
Sinodinos says the party needs to be able to "signal to the electorate that [it is] modern and contemporary". Hawke, who is Special Minister of State, is even more blunt: "We will suffer as a political movement if we don't get serious about [electing] women."
Amid the ongoing concern - and slow progress - on the "women problem" some MPs have taken matters into their own hands. "I think that there is actually quite a lot happening behind the scenes," Andrews says.
Reynolds (who was sworn in as Defence Industry Minister on Saturday in the wake of Steve Ciobo's resignation), has been calling for an overhaul of the party's preselection processes. She wants to make them more like the UK Conservative Party, which begins with a rigorous test of generic skills. Jobs Minister Kelly O'Dwyer has started a "fighting fund" to help women into Parliament, while Julie Bishop has been leading a recruiting drive of Liberal women in Western Australia (although both women will leave politics at the election).
Foreign Affairs Minister Marise Payne is known as an active mentor to women coming into the party. Andrews says she will work with any woman to help them into a career in politics. "It's a standing offer."
There are also some green shoots springing up ahead of the election. Since taking on the top job last August, Morrison is understood to have made it clear to members in his home branch of NSW that women are to be preselected for winnable seats.
When asked about numbers of women in his party, Morrison was upbeat. "Since I have become Prime Minister, 18 women have been selected in either Senate or House of Representatives seats," he told reporters in Canberra on Saturday. "I think we've got a very strong story to tell they are, and we will continue to move forward in that area."
Morrison's influence did not work in Wentworth (where Dave Sharma was successful ahead of the Prime Minister's preferred candidate, Katherine O'Regan) and gender diversity did not win out in the south coast seat of Gilmore (where sitting member Sudmalis quit claiming she was bullied and former ALP president Mundine was installed in a captain's pick).
But women will contest key marginal seats such as Lindsay (community housing executive Melissa McIntosh) and Macquarie (local councillor Sarah Richards) in western Sydney and the regional NSW seat of Eden-Monaro (farmer Fiona Kotvojs). Upcoming preselections in Dobell on the central coast and Parramatta could also add female candidates.
In Victoria, lawyer Kate Ashmor will contest Macnamara, while paediatrician Katie Allen is O'Dwyer's replacement in Higgins.
There is optimism around Tasmania, where Wendy Askew will fill the casual Senate vacancy left by (her brother) David Bushby, making her the first Liberal woman to represent Tasmania since Jocelyn Newman left Parliament in 1998. In a state that preselected six men on the double-dissolution ticket for the Senate in 2016, women have been chosen for what the party deems "winnable" second and third positions on the ticket for 2019.
Having said that, no one is seriously expecting the upcoming election to fundamentally change the gender balance. The 2019 poll is not going see the Liberal Party pick up a huge swathe of seats that would allow a wave of women to come to Canberra. Hawke predicts it will take "two election cycles" before the numbers are more even.
At a basic level, Andrews says more women need to be attracted to come into the party in the first place, to get experience at the branch level and see how politics works in winnable seats. The Industry Minister says women need to be there making contact with the branch members who will ultimately vote for them to be preselected.
"Politics is clearly about the numbers and people will vote for who they know and who they like."
Andrews says the first step is for the Liberal Party to get to a "critical mass" of about 30 per cent women. "Once we've got that, we will actually have a significant amount of women who are able to support each other ... and then they can work with their local branches and their communities to encourage and attract women to come into Parliament."
There are also moves within the party for more concrete approaches to fixing the issue, including quotas, which has long been viewed as a no-go zone for the conservative side of politics.
But Hawke says Liberals have been "stuck" on the issue of quotas rather than addressing the broader issue of gender diversity itself. "I don't really oppose quotas anymore, as long as they're intelligently applied," he says, adding they should not be "universally applied".
He suggests quotas could be implemented in a pool system. For example, if there were four preselections for safe seats, then two of those should go to women.
Either way, he says the issue of female representation is no longer seen as an "optional extra" for the Liberal Party and attention needs to stay focused on improving the situation beyond the election. "I think there is an acceptance that change has to happen."
