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Further implications
The movement to increase female participation within the Liberal Party has been in existence since the early 1990s under the leadership of John Hewson. During John Hewson's leadership (1990-94) a Liberal Women's Forum was established to find and promote female candidates.
Women in the party sought out and trained suitable women who prevailed in pre-selections and went on to have successful parliamentary careers. It bore significant fruit in the 1996 election which brought John Howard to power and saw a large increase in Liberal seats, many of which were held by women. This period is the current high water mark of female representation within the Liberal Party. Since 1996 there has been a progressive decline in the number of women pre-selected or promoted to ministries or shadow ministries within the Liberal Party. John Howard appointed two women to his first cabinet, Senators Amanda Vanstone and Jocelyn Newman. However, philosophically, Howard appears to believe there are inevitable limits to the extent to which women are ever likely to be represented in parliament. When asked for his view on women in parliament in 2016, former prime minister Howard stated, 'I would like to see a natural process whereby there are more women, but I don't think you will ever...have 50-50. It is a fact of society that women play a significantly greater part of fulfilling the caring role in our communities, which inevitably places some limits on their capacity.'
Following Howard there appears not to have been the focused attempts to promote women that were a feature of John Hewson's leadership. Tony Abbott's ministry in 2013 famously contained only one woman, Julie Bishop. The number of capable women overlooked for cabinet posts has been noted on numerous occasions.
Once the number of women within parliament reaches a significantly low point it becomes difficult to increase as there are few female role models for women in a party's political support base to shape their political aspirations around. Further, when there is only a small female talent pool within the parliament, it becomes easier to justify not finding them places within cabinet. It also creates an atmosphere where, as Labor senator Kristina Keneally has noted, women become rivals competing for ever fewer places rather than colleagues seeking to advance the collective interests of women.
Some critics of the selection processes currently used within the Liberal party argue that its opposition to a quota system is hypocritical. Sussan Ley, Assistant Minister for Regional Development and Territories in the Morrison Liberal government, has been quoted as saying that the Liberal and National parties already have unofficial quotas to balance out representation. The ministry is divided up to ensure there is sufficient representation from across the states and territories, and between the Liberal and National parties. 'So why,' Senator Ley has asked, 'can't we find a way of doing this with gender?'
There are those who have suggested that part of the Liberal Party's opposition to quotas may be a substantial majority of male Liberal members of parliament seeking to hold on to their positions. Ultimately it may well be a matter of political pragmatism whether the Liberal Party decides to adopt quotas or not. The Liberal Women's Forum experiment under John Hewson suggests that even without quotas it is possible to build up significant practical momentum to get more Liberal women into parliament. The current Liberal prime minister, Scott Morrison, supports an increase in the number of Liberal women elected to parliament. He put his backing behind a female candidate for the upcoming by-election in Wentworth, a seat vacated by the former prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull. The local selection committee ignored the prime minister's preference and endorsed a male candidate promoted by John Howard.
This has been seen as a very public demonstration of the Liberal Party machine's refusal at a branch level to prioritise the pre-selection of women in winnable seats. Former Liberal prime minister John Hewson has urged the residents of Wentworth to use the by-election 'to register a protest vote'. It is not certain what the result of the next election will be regarding attempts to increase the number of Liberal women in parliament. If the party suffers a significant loss, particularly a loss contributed to by a decline in support from women voters, this may prompt the party to reenergise its efforts to put more women candidates in winnable seats. In the short-term; however, a Liberal Opposition is likely to have very, very few women members.