Right now, politics can only break our hearts

This time, the Liberal women are coming.

It's kind of weird. For years, a small handful of Liberal women would go on the record demanding equality and sorority. They were brave and awesome: Sharman Stone, Chris McDiven, Sue Boyce. Even at the end of her political career, Stone was calling for quotas. McDiven did phenomenal work in the '90s, wrangling the range from Hewson to Howard while ensuring women were nominated for winnable Senate spots. Boyce was still talking about a kind of Enid's List when she left the Senate in 2014.

But with the emergence of Brittany Higgins, Dhanya Mani and Chelsey Potter, the switch flicked. Industry Minister Karen Andrews now says it is time for the Liberal Party to seriously consider introducing quotas, to try and get more women into Parliament. She's had, as she said, a gutful. The Invisible Minister for Women Marise Payne, Defence Industry Minister Melissa Price and Environment Minister Sussan Ley all want quotas.

But will quotas solve the problem in an institution as poisonous as the Liberal Party? Surely we should have the capacity to have a conservative government which isn't dominated by members who have zero respect for women, who slutshame, who interrupt women being asked about parliamentary culture, as well as by staffers who are alleged rapists, desk masturbators, and more recently uncovered, workplace orgyists? Sorry. The entire parliamentary year has been a source of more sex jokes than even I thought possible; and more importantly, also a source of more heartbreak than anyone thought possible.

So the culture needs to change, and quotas might be a tool to make that happen - but the Prime Minister would have to galvanise his entire party to make that happen, and soon. Instead, he is too busy putting out grassfires of his own making, from the revelatory press conference where he went off his nana at Sky News's Andrew Clennell to sitting by and saying nothing when a radio show host, speaking to the Prime Minister, said men having consensual sex with other men was disgusting. [Of course this fits in with Scott Morrison's original views on gay marriage, which apparently shifted when the majority of Australians mailed in their support.]

Is the culture of the party changeable? Morrison himself managed cultural change within the NSW division of the Liberal Party back in the early 2000s, according to David Clune, an expert in NSW politics and an honorary associate at the University of Sydney.

Yet two experienced handlers, Morrison's chief of staff John Kunkel and his principal private secretary Yaron Finkelstein, have had no luck in getting their charge under control to assert a positive message about women. It is almost as if the Prime Minister himself doesn't believe what he says.

And the grassroots of the party isn't on board either. I called Sharman Stone to ask her what she thought. Stone is still a member of the Liberal Party and resisted the attempts of both Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin to poison the culture, so she attends local branch meetings of the seat she represented for 20 years. On Monday, in Shepparton, she did her party duty. Only about half of those attending thought quotas were a good idea. They talked about "merit", and that it was important for women to be chosen on merit and not because of gender quotas.

Stone has one thing to say to them, and to others in the Liberal Party. Unless there are measures to bring about speedy change, the conservative party will struggle to get support in the community.

"Without bringing party representation to 50 per cent, the Liberal Party is doomed," she says.

But there is more to it than that. More than the influence of the boss, more than the culture in one party. There is also the significant problem of how Parliament works.

The former member for Chisholm, Julia Banks, who left politics because of sexism, misogyny and bullying, has some very useful advice.

Start by instituting normal working hours - say, from 8am to 6pm. Also, halve the Canberra sitting weeks, and do some of those weeks from the members' actual electorates. That's not remote working - that's working from where members were actually elected.

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"And alcohol should be banned from offices ... there is an obligation to hang around until 8 o'clock, and then people bring out the booze," she says.

This kind of life destroys families. Divorced, rewedded, divorced, separated and lonely. Sharman Stone remembers seeing women parliamentarians at Melbourne Airport, one woman in particular, weeping as she boarded the plane for Canberra. She also remembers seeing women loaded up with the luggage needed to keep up appearances, while men would swing their suit bags and freshly pressed shirts. Someone else was doing their ironing.

Men, she says, revel in their time away from home and in Parliament, socialising with their mates.

"For women, going to a fly-in-fly-out high-pressure environment is much more difficult because of their other caring responsibilities," she says.

Imagine being able to serve your country only if you leave your children for months at a time. That's a choice made for women who aspire to politics by the institution and processes of Parliament. We could change that.

And when women get into Parliament, unless they behave like the boys, with long, cosy chats, gossip and jokes about who uses the prayer room and how often, they are excluded: "Lonely and unlikely to be promoted."

That affects voters, too. It means there is a choice between women of merit and men who fit the mould.

That's a choice no voter should have to make.