5 days ago
Liberals hose down Alan Stockdale's women comment while parliament achieves parity
Welcome back to your weekly federal politics update, where Brett Worthington gets you up to speed on the happenings from Parliament House.
Senior blokes in the Liberal Party have long had an issue reading the room.
Just look to the last two federal elections to see the extent of the damage wreaked on the party.
Enter Alan Stockdale, whose biggest party sin until recently was that he's a Victorian. A former state government treasurer, he was brought in as an external administrator to run the far from thriving NSW division of the Liberal Party despite coming from south of the Murray River.
You'll remember just how high performing the NSW division is. It's the one that failed to nominate candidates for council elections (talk about literally only having one job to do).
Addressing the NSW Liberal Women's Council on Tuesday he said that women were "sufficiently assertive" and the party might need to "protect men's involvement". Even if he thought it was a hilarious joke, no one was laughing.
The comments were made during a discussion about female representation and gender quotas.
It's worth remembering that the once mighty Liberal Party managed to just get just six MPs elected to NSW's 46 federal seats last month.
NSW voters also elected six crossbenchers, five of whom are women, including the newly victorious independent Nicolette Boele who joins Sophie Scamps, Allegra Spender and Zali Stegall in once-safe Liberal seats in Sydney.
Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald just days after the Liberals were repudiated at the ballot box, Charlotte Mortlock (a former adviser and founder of a group tasked with bolstering female representation in the party) wrote that without reform the party would remain "beholden to a smaller and smaller cohort of angry men, blinded by their own ideology, so detached from reality that we will never be in power again".
She argued that the Liberal Party had its highest calibre of female candidates at the last election but the issue was they were "forced to sell a shit sandwich".
In a sign that at least some leaders in the Liberal Party are reading the room, federal Opposition Leader Sussan Ley (one of just two Liberal women elected in NSW) was quick to condemn Stockdale's comments, arguing she wanted more assertive women in her ranks.
State Opposition Leader Mark Speakman offered a similar sentiment on ABC Radio Sydney on Thursday morning.
"Honestly, Alan, read the room," Nationals senator Bridget McKenzie told the Today Show.
"It was a shocking comment. I think it's time for Alan to head back to the Melbourne Club, have a stiff whiskey and chat with the old boys about what went wrong."
Just when Liberals thought things couldn't get much worse, their only glimmer of hope from the May 3 election was snuffed out.
Liberal Gisele Kapterian initially won Bradfield by eight votes after the full distribution of preferences.
But given it was under 100 votes, a full recount was required.
More than a month on from polling day, the recount ended with Boele winning by 26 votes.
It's certainly not without precedent that the victor would change after a recount.
In 2007, Labor candidate Rob McEwen beat incumbent Liberal Fran Bailey by a handful of votes in the Victorian seat of McEwen. After a recount, Bailey was ahead by 12.
Labor and McEwen took the case to the Court of Disputed Returns, challenging the validity of some of the 643 invalid votes.
Sadly, the judgement from the case, in which all 643 votes were re-scrutinised, is far less dramatic than the scenes that played out in Selina Meyer's recount in HBO's Veep.
In the end, Bailey's lead grew and she won the seat by 31 votes (Mitchell would comfortably win the seat three years later when Bailey retired).
In 2016, the LNP considered challenging Labor's 37 vote victory in the Queensland seat of Herbert, but the party ultimately decided against it.
Kapterian and the Liberals say they're considering a challenge in Bradfield but it's too early to know what their decision will be.
There are no shortage of people who see Kapterian as the future of the party. She's modern, the daughter of migrants and has worked at senior levels of politics and tech.
It's for the same reason that Ley rewarded Kapterian with a junior portfolio in the outer frontbench, a move the leader said was to reward once safe Liberal seats for sticking with the party.
Like Mitchell before her, if she is to be the future of the party, she'll likely have to wait three more years to have another crack.
There's always an old quote that comes back to haunt politicians.
A week ago, then Greens senator Dorinda Cox insisted Labor's contentious extension of the north west shelf gas project was a climate bomb that "must not go ahead".
A week later, the now Labor Senator Cox insisted "it wouldn't be suitable for me to have public commentary during that stage".
When Fatima Payman quit Labor, no shortage of party leaders insisted she should quit parliament (which of course they would because they would pick her replacement).
There were no such calls coming from Labor when its ranks were bolstered by Cox's defection.
Beyond all the noise that has surrounded the defection (not to mention no shortage of internal matter bubbling over publicly), it highlights the growing pains the Greens have experienced in recent years.
After the 2022 election, the party reached a high-water mark of four MPs and 12 senators.
Today, it has just one MP and 10 senators.
The Cox defection also brings with it risks for Labor, even if the PM insists all internal matters in the senator's office have been dealt with.
Any issues now will be for him and Labor to explain.
But in not going to the crossbench, Cox's move keeps the Senate maths simple. Labor only needs the Coalition or the Greens to pass legislation.
If Cox had become and independent, Albanese would have needed the Greens and one crossbencher to pass legislation.
Cox's defection takes the Labor caucus to 123 politicians, comfortably more than double the Liberal partyroom of 51. Add in the 19 Nats and the official opposition will have 70 members.
The new-look parliament will have 40 new politicians and will have gender parity for the first time, with 113 women and 113 men across the House of Representatives and Senate. It will also be the most culturally diverse parliament.
Queensland is the only state where the Coalition has more MPs than Labor — 16 to 12.
Labor will hold four of the six seats where the winner had a two-candidate preferred margin above 70 per cent. Of the six seats with a winner on 69 per cent, Labor holds four of them.
At the other end of the spectrum, seven seats have a winner on a margin between 50 and 50.7 per cent. Teal independents hold three of them, Labor holds three and the LNP one. Go out a little further and Labor holds six of the seven seats with a winner on 51 per cent.
Within the parties, Labor is 57 per cent female, the Liberals 33 per cent, the Nationals 26 per cent and the Greens 63 per cent.
Both Coalition parties fare better with gender parity in the Senate (a chamber that is almost 57 per cent women) with the Nationals 50 per cent women and the Liberals at 48 per cent. Labor's ranks are almost two-thirds women in the Senate and the Greens on 60 per cent.
The prime minister has taken to taunting the Liberal Party over female representation, noting he has more women with a name starting with A in the House of Representatives (10) than the Coalition does women MPs (9).
And yet for all the talented women in Labor, the party can't find any to promote to its House of Representatives leadership.
Talk about blokes being unable to read the room.
