The Liberal Party takes a punishing lesson from women (again) – but will they listen?

Australia’s Federal Labor Government retained power with 89 confirmed seats in the House of Representatives as of last night.

Just under 20 per cent of the national count remains as a record number of pre-polling day votes are still being counted.

Aside from the near-obliteration of the Liberal Party’s representation in the country’s capital cities and the Greens’ loss of three seats, to leave their lower house representation at one, the most significant change was another jump in the number of women who will take their place in the House of Representatives.

After the 2019 election, won by the Coalition, 45 women took their place in the lower house.

The Labor win of 2022 ushered in 58 female members, and its increased majority at this election will lead to at least 66 and potentially as many as 73 seats, out of 150 in the House of Representatives, being held by women.

For the first time in the House of Representatives, the Labor Party will have more women than men, as at least 47 female ALP MPs have been confirmed, compared to 42 ALP men. Labor women will outnumber the whole Liberal Party in the lower house.

This is a historic result.

The number of women elected to the lower house only exceeded 10 per cent for the first time at the 1996 election (15.5%), won by the Coalition.

At the 1998 election, where Prime Minister John Howard retained power, the percentage jumped to 22.3 per cent.

For the next seven elections, female representation did not break through the 30 per cent barrier.

In 1996, the Liberal Party had 17 women in the lower house. However, they have failed to exceed that number in every subsequent election, including six winning ones.

By contrast, the ALP only had four women (out of 49) enter the lower house after the 1996 election, less than a quarter of the incoming government’s equivalent figure.

The humiliation of the 1996 Federal election was one of the key factors that drove the formation of the Australian arm of Emily’s List, an organisation established in the US in 1985 to fund campaigns for pro-choice Democratic women, to support the candidacy of progressive women within the Australian Labor Party.

The seeds of last weekend’s result for female ALP candidates were sown in the following election, in 1998.

Despite comfortably losing the election, the ALP’s female representation in the lower house quadrupled to 16 seats (23.9%), but the number of seats held by Liberal Party women declined by 2, to 15. The National Party’s two female members meant 17 of the Coalition’s 80 seats were held by women (21.2%).

In the 2001 election, won by the Coalition, the number of Coalition women holding a lower house seat returned to the high-water mark of 18 seats (19.1% of the total seats won by the Coalition). In the subsequent seven elections, that number was never exceeded, with the percentage of Coalition women in the lower house (the National Party has never had more than two women in the lower house) bouncing around the 17 to 22 per cent range.

Labor’s 2022 win saw 38.4 per cent of the lower house’s total of 150 seats occupied by women.

After counting concludes later this month, at least 44 per cent, and as many as 48.6 per cent, of the new House of Representatives will be ALP women.

New parliamentary members will include Barton’s Ash Ambihaipahar, who retained the seat of retiring Indigenous minister Linda Burney, Claire Clutterham, who flipped the Adelaide seat of Sturt, and Ali France, who defeated Liberal leader Peter Dutton in Dickson.

The drop in the number of women representing the Liberal party is primarily due to the election losses of former Hughes MP Jenny Ware and Bass MP Bridget Archer, and the retirements of McPherson MP Karen Andrews and Forrest MP Nola Marino. Although the Coalition retained both McPherson and Forrest, men were pre-selected for each seat.

In an interview with ABC Radio Perth, retiring Liberal Party Senator Margaret Reynolds agreed with a text from a listener, who described the party as an “ocean of males”.

In the wake of the disastrous election result for the party, and a campaign Senator Reynolds described as a “comprehensive failure”, she pinpointed diminishing support from women as a fundamental factor contributing to their loss.

However, despite previous party reviews into gender representation, the reviews have just “sat on a shelf”.

The most recent of these reviews was the 2022 post-election review conducted by frontbencher Jane Hume and former federal director Brian Loughnane

The review concluded that the party had failed to appeal to female voters and should aim to preselect women in 50 per cent of seats, noting that the 2022 “teal wave” in its heartland had been driven significantly by the departure of professional women from the ranks of Liberal voters. The day after the 2022 election, Liberal Senator Simon Birmingham, who has since left parliament, said almost the same thing to host David Speers on ABC’s Insiders.

Yet, was anybody inside the Liberal Party seriously listening?

As ABC commentator Annabel Crabb wrote on Sunday;

“What is less comprehensible is the party’s decision to initiate a policy reform in the 2025 campaign that could not — even with a lab full of high-grade behavioural economists — have been better designed to infuriate women further.

Oddly enough, the policy of ending work from home for federal public servants was announced by Hume, the author of the 2022 review.

It was backed in by Dutton, whose primary target was the Canberra-based public service.”

The target was so large and inviting that Crabb couldn’t help herself.

“In an election that turned out to be a cracker-box of explosive developments, one of the most ironic — surely — is the degree of work-life balance suddenly opening up to a large number of middle-aged Liberal men.

From Liberal leader Peter Dutton to shadow ministers like Michael Sukkar and David Coleman, through backbench stalwarts like Ross Vasta and Bert van Manen, an entire cohort of busy parliamentarians woke this morning to the immensely flexible prospect of not having to go to work anymore, at all.

The ranks of Liberal MPs collecting pink slips from their electorates skewed heavily male last night.”

Crabb warmed to her theme, drilling down into the pre-election polling data.

“In a scan of ABS data on areas where people were most likely to work from home during COVID, my colleague Tom Crowley identified 25 seats with above-average numbers of flexible workers.

Seven of them were Liberal seats. Seven of them were “teal” seats. And all 25 of them were lost by the Coalition last night, including Dutton’s own seat of Dickson, where — according to the ABS — 51 per cent of people worked from home to some extent during the pandemic.

Beyond Dutton’s loss, this is a chance for a new type of politics

Flexible work has always been — and continues to be — a work-life balance technique employed more by women than men.

Dutton’s language around the policy — equating working from home with “refusing to go to work” — conveyed a set of values that was clearly heard by Australian women.

The blowback was violent and immediate.”

This week, in discussing the election with a friend, who always votes Liberal, said she couldn’t vote for Peter Dutton and cast her vote elsewhere.

Even my 83-year-old auntie, who is as dyed-in-the-wool Liberal as you would find anywhere in the country, said, “I almost voted Labor for the first time in my life. I don’t like Dutton.”

This sentiment was nationwide, as Crabb outlined in her article.

The research company RedBridge compiled six survey waves of voters in 20 key marginal seats over the course of this year. 

The first wave — conducted in February — found that Peter Dutton had a net approval rating of minus 11 among women.

By last week, the sixth and final survey identified a slump of 17 points in that approval rating; Dutton was down to minus 28.

Dutton is gone, but the Liberal Party remains, shellshocked, reduced in number and brutally confronting the lesson of the consistently rising female presence across the parliamentary chamber that’s been staring them in the face for nearly three decades.

But will they learn the lesson this time?

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