Angus Taylor very sensibly and stoically told Sky New Australia, ‘I’m not a supporter of [gender] quotas.’

The defiance came in response to Opposition Sussan Ley’s premiere National Press Club address. Remaining members of Liberal Party royalty were scattered through the media, watching Ley masterfully avoid saying anything of merit.

For some reason, the Liberal Party have adopted the belief that women are the cause of their demise. Or a lack of them, more specifically.

This resulted in ‘women’ being shoehorned into her speech at random in an almost comical manner.

The loss of Teal seats is about party pride. They are stewing over the lucrative, rich inner-city seats falling to the female mouthpieces of Net Zero and cannot figure out the critical role Liberal policies played in making that happen.

Would there be powerful renewable energy lobbies infiltrating Canberra without the work of John Howard, Malcolm Turnbull, Tony Abbott, and Scott Morrison?

Would rich women believe they could be saviours of the world without Liberal candidates furiously agreeing that the apocalypse was ‘real’ on their sensible-saviour-lite campaign posters?

Legitimising the ‘carbon apocalypse’ was easily the dumbest thing the conservatives have ever done.

Sure, the party secured lucrative funding in the beginning (something Labor is still doing), but the price has been the ideological deconstruction of the conservative movement. All these ‘scholars’ and ‘smart’ people in the party were not smart enough to notice that Net Zero was collectivism wearing a green jacket. Anyone who tried to raise the alarm was ejected.

It will be a long time before the party admit to this mistake.

‘More women’, ‘listening to women’, ‘speaking to women’, and ‘representing women’ has been floated as the answer to an ideological death cult that uses ‘Western guilt’ to transfer vast amounts of wealth between classes while undermining both capitalism and democracy.

Ley’s approach to the problem wholly misunderstands why women ‘vote climate’. If you want to know, read my earlier article.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because the ‘women approach’ is a re-hash of the reasoning offered about the demise of Scott Morrison. The party went on a listening tour and came up with Peter Dutton’s campaign under the watch of Sussan Ley.

Anyone who thinks this is a winning formula must have rocks in their head.

For those who did not make it through the first 15 minutes of Ley’s personal story, she had a lot to say about women, eventually insisting ‘I am a zealot’ before trying to calm the Blue Ribbons by adding, ‘I am agnostic on specific methods’.

‘In times of crisis, there’s always talk of returning to our foundations, often in the context of Sir Robert Menzies.

The party Menzies founded was not only for women, it was built by them. It was women’s groups, women’s voices, and women’s energy that helped shape the Liberal Party. The Australian Women’s National League as well as many other prominent women’s organisations were central to the formation of our party and we must be a Liberal Party that is proudly for women and made up of women.

Our party must pre-select more women in winnable seats so that we see more Liberal women in Federal Parliament.

Now, I am agnostic on specific methods to make it happen, but I am a zealot that it actually does happen. Current approaches have clearly not worked, so I am open to any approach.’

Sussan Ley says she is ‘agnostic’ about the method of finding more women, but is that true?

It is worth having a look at what she has said in the past.

As it turns out, she has a long history of proposing gender quotas.

In 2018, Sussan Ley suggested the Liberals consider a gender quota. As reported in the ABC:

‘We do need to do more to recruit female MPs without a doubt. If you look at our party, the picture tells its own story. In what context, I’m not sure, but we don’t have enough women. But the issue has to start long before you get to Parliament.

If we need to find a quota system at some point, we should talk about how we do that … I’m not necessarily impressed by the Labor Party quota system where they seem to tick boxes with women in what I would describe as less-winnable seats, which in itself causes problems. We don’t want women in seats that we would all describe and understand as marginal, because their longevity in the Parliament is not there. We know that women are terrific at winning marginal seats, but they’re also pretty good at holding safe ones too.’

In 2018 she added, ‘I must say recently I’ve wondered whether we should consider them.’

Labor introduced gender quotas in 1994.

In 2022, when Sussan Ley was Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party and Shadow Minister for Women, The Conversation reported:

Ley has assured women that ‘we hear you’. She has also promised to travel widely throughout Australia to listen to women … Ley identifies as a feminist. She has long argued the Liberals should seriously consider quotas for women.

In 2019 she said;

‘If I was the Minister for Women, I would say that I am a feminist, and as the Minister for the Environment, I would certainly say that I am the Minister for the Environment, so my role in discussions that I have with my colleagues is for the environment.’

A 2021 article in The Conversation said of Ley:

Ley was one of the first government MPs to voice her support for quotas within the Liberal Party – to afford more women political opportunities.

All of this strongly suggests that she was not upfront with the National Press Club. Her history is one of proposing quotas, or at the very least, ‘smart quotas’. What’s the difference? Allow Ley to explain:

‘I’m uncomfortable with something that would say, “Okay, your seat’s a woman seat, your seat’s not.” I mean, that doesn’t make any sense to me … in [the Liberal Party] constitution, it will say we accept that we will have 40 per cent or 30 per cent of women candidates in our seats. It then has to say not just women candidates, because sometimes candidates have a very small chance of winning in safe opposition’s seats. So, you’d have to say we’ve got seats that we describe as winnable … and unwinnable. And the ones that step forward in seats where there’s not so much chance would get very well supported, so they wouldn’t be left to fend for themselves.’

Quotas are a vanity project for the party.

Labor told them it was desirable and now the Liberals are falling into the trap of competing for victory in a fabricated achievement devised by their political enemy.

It is a preoccupation that annoys the one group they are trying to lure: conservative women.

The biggest problem Sussan Ley has is that she is not popular among women. Why? It is difficult to say, but it is nonetheless true. Perhaps it is the combination of nervous posturing from a legacy politician that makes women do a double-take. If you’re not comfortable in front of a mic after nearly a quarter of a century in politics, that is a red flag for competency – one that was waved vigorously in the following hour of shallow, meaningless, fact-devoid waffle that followed.

It was a real, ‘Yes, dear… I’m listening…’ pitch to the public that sent the Canberra press gallery wild and yet voters, the people who matter, struggled to endure more than a few minutes.