Albanese handing the Governor-General’s gig to tame activist Sam Mostyn gave the Liberals a perfect opportunity to call out Labor’s unfettered cronyism and obsession with rewarding identity politics.

Faced with that opening, the Liberals scuttled away like a swarm of cockroaches fleeing a sudden bright light. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s meek mention that Ms Mostyn was ‘well known’ to Labor had the oratory power of a damp sock.

Meanwhile, puffy-faced Liberal strategists praised the brilliant avoidance of even the faintest whiff that the party might be ‘mean’ to a woman.

The Liberals are able to recognise that they have a women problem. Unfortunately, the problem is not what they think it is…

Their real problem with women is that Labor has conned them into believing that it is in their best interests to keep their heads down and not challenge anything that might remotely relate to women. With the frantic support of a fawning feminist cheer squad, Labor has been remarkably successful in convincing the Liberals that the affluent left’s special brand of fist-pumping, grievance-fuelled, gender activism represents vast swathes of Australians.

According to this worldview, women’s foremost concern when deciding how to vote is whether a political party embraces quotas, sensitivity training, and the absolute conviction that a painfully mediocre woman is always the best person for the job. Apparently, any political party that fails to parachute a certain number of women into Parliament actively despises women. Yet there is a glaring flaw in Labor’s rhetoric that should have long since undermined every attempt it has made to weaponise women.

Voters have shown, time and time again, that when it comes to the ballot box they don’t care what the local member has in their trousers. At local, state, and federal levels we see female Labor candidates defeated by male Liberal candidates, and female Liberal candidates defeated by male Labor candidates, or major party candidates beaten by independents, regardless of whether the candidates on either side are male or female.

It seems voters have a funny tendency to opt for a strong local candidate who shares their own values and concerns, rather than gender. They vote for the party they think will do the best job and look after their interests the most. In the real world, where people have to work for a living and worry about whether they can afford to feed their families, the girl-power credentials of political parties mean little. How rude of the great unwashed to not vote in line with the gender diktats of self-serving Woke warriors…!

When you look at individual seat demographics from the last federal election, it is clear that allegations about how women working in Parliament House were treated had little to do with the fabled women’s vote. The only possible exception was in eye-wateringly wealthy seats where luxury virtue-signalling dominates, and even there it is questionable. Yet because of vastly unrepresentative seats where privileged female Teals knocked off privileged male Liberals, Liberal advisors are still clutching focus group reports and muttering grimly about how the women problem – not incompetence, smarm, and overall dodginess – sunk them.

In the majority of seats, regardless of which candidate won, the most apparent influence on the undecided women’s vote was that Labor promised to splurge filthy great wodges of cash on things like child care. They also sounded far more convincing about this than the dysfunctional and desperate Liberals. Who would have thought that women would vote for the party that talked the most about pressures on the family budget, as if it genuinely understood those?

Well, anybody with a brain.

Rather cleverly, though, Labor relentlessly reframed household budgets as a ‘women’s issue’. In doing so, it cloaked cash for votes in the pretence of having empathy that the Liberals lacked because … women problem! Since then, the Liberals have fully bought into what Labor has told them about themselves. Perhaps this is easier for them than admitting that their private school inbreeding has rendered them policy feebles. Now, all manner of taxpayer-funded gender-driven idiocy slides by unchallenged because they are terrified that even questioning it – let alone opposing – would prompt a new flurry of anti-women accusations.

Talk about giving Labor an easy run.

Ironically, all of this silliness obscures a genuine women problem in politics. On the one hand, the Liberal Party spends too much time ignoring sharp women who tell it what it does not want to hear. On the other hand, the Labor Party spends too much time listening to dull women who tell it what it wants to hear. The only real difference between the two is that the Liberals are dancing to Labor’s girlish tune, while Labor laughs at them from its safe hiding place behind an endless row of designer skirts. The end result is bad policy all around, and an increasingly disillusioned and angry electorate who will turn to anyone who offers something better – man, woman, or otherwise.

Lillian Andrews writes about politics, society, feminism and anything else that interests her. You can find her on the site formerly known as Twitter @SaysAwfulThings.