The Liberal Party has been mulling over its ‘woman’ problem. Disparity might be a better way to describe the situation.

In a world where political parties measure their success via identity representation, the demographics of the Old Conservative Party is viewed as an issue to be solved. Urgently. And it is not the only one.

While membership breakdowns are difficult to source, voting intention suggests that there are other groups missing from the count, for example, certain migrant groups and anyone sporting a plural pronoun.

There is also an age concern, with the majority of the party membership over 60.

Young people can explain this. The Liberals left Labor in charge of universities and schools for five decades. Try being a conservative and see how your classmates and teachers treat you… Whichever conservative was in charge during this hostile takeover has a lot to answer for.

The rest of the structural panic is understandable. A party needs at least half the population onside to form government, and the traditional older white male vote is no longer a majority demographic. Worse, the Liberals can’t count on them. In recent opinion polls, the Coalition primary vote has sunk into the low twenties while One Nation has nudged ahead with an (unproven) majority that rivals, occasionally, Labor. There are mock-ups of a future Lower House showing orange dots where blue dots used to be. The fastest growing demographic for One Nation is young Aussie men followed closely by women and business-owning migrants.

The result is bewildering, because One Nation is doing absolutely everything the Liberals were told not to do.

Election results suggest that Labor (and even the Teals) can be successfully defeated by stepping further away from their worldview, rather than inching closer. This conclusion is backed by similar movements in the US, UK, and Europe … almost as if providing a proper contrast paints Labor in a worse light.

Have the Liberals previously taken bad advice? Probably. Is the problem primarily a policy issue? Probably. Can the Liberals fix this? Probably not. There are too many MPs living precariously in Teal zones for the party to shuffle over to the right.

This situation explains their over-reliance on (safe) economics and prior rejection of culture wars. Many politicians genuinely believe that all politics boils down to money.

They are appealing to people’s wallets when their hearts are broken.

The lesson is that the Teal seats weren’t won through money, they were conquered with a white saviour complex tailored specifically to upper-middle-class women with a history of sponsoring starving children in Africa or being Global Citizens in high school before marrying into money. Politics is a hobby that bolsters their social credit score. The movement is a sham with the intellectual heft of tissue paper that delivers policy perks for the renewable energy industry, and that’s about all.

In summary, the Liberals have a gamble on their hands. High-profile moderates might have to be sacrificed to save winnable Nationals seats in the regions before they fall into the hands of One Nation (a very likely outcome).

If history holds, the Liberals will split the ideological difference and lose both.

Fortune does not favour the middle ground.

(Just quietly, there is a chance Labor’s tax hikes might tip the Teal seats back to blue. We’ll see.)

To be fair, the Liberals are trying to do something to counter this.

The aforementioned Liberal paper is considering price reductions for membership, increased networking, and even some possible voting power. I find it particularly interesting that despite the Liberals being all-in on migration, they as good as admit that non-Western migration has screwed them. Perhaps permanently.

Unfortunately, the paper falls back on the belief that having more women elected as MPs and Senators will make more women vote for them, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of female voting patterns.

This is going to hurt the feelings of third-wave feminists, but overwhelmingly women vote for strength, power, clarity, wealth, and security. They pick their governments like they pick their husbands. Margaret Thatcher does not break this pattern. Her balls were larger than the Great Bell in Elizabeth Tower.

Arguing over quotas and other discriminatory measures to benefit women in the preselection process, which the paper briefly does, is further proof whoever wrote it has learned nothing about the women they are trying to attract.

And the one thing the authors of the paper cannot answer is why women are moving to One Nation.

The appointment of former Prime Minister Tony Abbott to Federal Party President is meant to be a declaration of intent. The Liberal Party wants to live. It has rolled over, stretched, and started looking for coffee.

Perhaps the party is attempting to shed its moderate misstep and reset to the Abbott, or even Howard, glory days.

They are banking on economic redemption. One Nation is going to the polls on a cultural restoration in line with Nigel Farage’s Reform movement.

The only way this works is with a three-way coalition with a new ‘broad church’ which brings the economic and cultural battles to Labor, the Greens, and Teals. It could even work, with Teal ideology losing its virtue and the pro-Palestine antics of the Greens acting as a dead weight to Labor.

Going forward, it is my view the Liberals needs to make peace with the underlying reality that women tend to vote left and men tend to vote right. Just as women tend to prefer social employment and men tend to seek out higher-risk jobs. This is not something that can be fixed and trying to defy the trend will tear the party to pieces.

Instead, appealing to those between 18-40 is the more achievable solution.

These people are angry, broke, and defeated. The hardship of Labor’s tax hell is breaking down their university indoctrination. Each day, they care less for pronouns and more about paying the rent.

The Liberal Party does not have a woman problem, it has a demographic vanity obsession that it must quit.

My advice to the Liberal Party would be to stop flagging demographic problems. Worry about policy, and the voters will sort themselves out.

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Flat White is written by Alexandra Marshall. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at donor-box.