In our latest opinion piece, Em Bagg looks to history in considering how the West Australian Liberal Party can rebuild after is near-decimation in the March 2021 election. She argues that increasing the number of women in its parliamentary ranks is a vital step.
By Em Bagg*
The ALP’s landslide victory in the WA Election almost resulted in gender parity for the Liberal Party in the Legislative Assembly. The WA Liberals now have an opportunity to reset the party’s culturally male dominance and demonstrate that it is possible to achieve and maintain gender parity without institutional special measures.
The ALP’s landslide victory in the WA Election resulted in the WA Liberal Party achieving gender parity in the Legislative Assembly with only two seats held by the Liberals’ David Honey (Cottesloe) and Libby Mettam (Vasse). The evisceration of the party’s incumbent members provides the perfect experimental conditions for proving whether it is possible to achieve gender parity purely through cultural change.
The Liberal Party has maintained its strong opposition to quotas in favour of cultural change, asserting that meritocratic pre-selection processes are only possible in a gender-blind environment. Most recently this has occurred in the WA Liberals through the election of higher numbers of women in senior party leadership positions as well as a training and mentoring program for young Liberal women.
Let’s be clear: gender parity in representation must be the goal. That it has not yet been achieved, a century after conservative Western Australian Edith Cowan became the first woman elected to parliament in Australia, is an affront to her legacy as well as a snub to the millions of women who have been consistently denied full representation in Australia.
Foundational liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote in 1861 that under truly democratic systems:
A majority of the electors would always have a majority of the representatives; but a minority of the electors would always have a minority of the representatives. Man for man, they would be as fully represented as the majority. Unless they are, there is not equal government, but a government of inequality and privilege.
Even without relying on the democratic principle of proportional representation to support gender parity, the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that diverse representation leads to higher quality candidates, policy design and decision-making.
Women will hold only 25% of seats in the parliamentary Liberal Party: 50% in the Legislative Assembly and 17% in the Legislative Council. This is actually an increase on Liberal women’s representation in the previous parliament, which sat at only 16%: 21% in the Assembly; 11% in the Council.
This election was, in sporting terms, a true drubbing of the Liberal Party; but it provides the organisation with an opportunity to reset and remake its image in line with the population it seeks to represent. This result will force the Liberal Party to look for new party members and candidates and it is imperative that they do so with gender parity as a guiding principle for their selection.
Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche! provides a case study for the power of reaching beyond the pool of incumbents to achieve this goal. In order to achieve parity – 50% of En Marche! 2017 candidates were women; women won 47% of En Marche!’s 2017 national parliamentary seats – the party actively broadened its search pool beyond (overwhelmingly male: 72% French national parliamentarians pre-2017) traditional political actors.
En Marche! was formed after Macron’s victory in the 2016 French Presidential Election in order to oversee the legislative passage of his reform agenda. Macron sought to capture previously marginalised groups to build his constituency, rejecting populist generalisations of traditional French culture to declare that “there is not a French culture. There is a culture in France and it is diverse”.
The WA Liberals now have a prime opportunity to follow Macron’s – philosophically liberal – lead and embrace diversity as a fundamental tenet of strong representation. Without being burdened by replacing incumbent members in order to reach parity, the party can expand its base in both principle and person.
In the WA Election the ALP achieved gender parity across its parliamentary caucus largely as a result of its quota system, introduced federally at 35% in 1994, and the cultural change this forced on the party. The advantages of incumbency have proven the Liberals’ reliance on cultural change to be statistically inadequate in established political parties; however, with this barrier removed there is no principled problem with demand for women candidates.
So is there a problem with supply? In short, no.
To field a full ticket at the next election, the WA Liberal Party needs to pre-select 95 candidates, 48 of whom should be women. That is 48 women lawyers, teachers, doctors, administrators, nurses, cleaners, plumbers, carpenters; the list goes on. 48 businesswomen, retailers, homemakers, engineers, florists.
In a state of more than one million women, failing to recruit 48 of those women to run for parliament is a diabolical failure of political engagement. Save for some of the more geographically expansive rural electorates, each electorate in the Legislative Assembly comprises roughly 30,000 electors eligible to become their local member.
That’s approximately 15,000 women in each electorate with valid and valuable skills, experience and policy ideas. A competitive pre-selection may only include three nominees; but let’s say we have five, and they are all women. That is 0.0003% of the women in the electorate; 0.00017% of the entire electorate.
Even if we account for party loyalties and split the electorate in half, five women in each electorate is 0.0006% of women in the electorate; 0.0003% of the entire electorate. These are mind-bogglingly small numbers.
There will of course be women who are intimidated by the social and cultural barriers to political participation and women for whom the time is not right. Women who are too young, too old, or too sick. Women who don’t want to sacrifice their work-life balance or change their career; women who don’t have the confidence to be the face of a campaign. These are excuses, they are not reasons.
In the indomitable Edith Cowan’s own words,
Women are very desirous of their being placed on absolutely equal terms with men. We ask for neither more nor less than that.
The WA Liberal Party has two choices in the next parliamentary term: it can continue to deny the talents, experience and availability of women candidates and prove that quotas are necessary for basic democratic rights; or it can seek out, engage with and mentor women to prove that cultural change is possible with only good intentions. Whichever way it goes, the world will be watching.
Conservative Western Australian women have been trailblazers before; let that be the case again.
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