Why Bridget Archer is the jewel in the Libs’ tarnished crown

The party has moved to the right. Australians have not. And who ate the Liberals’ lunch when it came to those traditional blue ribbon seats? Women whose pedigrees are Liberal but who would not be seen within a bar of these tired old blokes with 1950s values.

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I asked the only person considered to be the expert on women within the Liberal Party, Margaret Fitzherbert, author of Liberal Women and So Many Firsts and a former state Liberal MP in Victoria who took on the party’s practices. She outed Liberal preselectors who only asked women about their family plans and childcare.

Fitzherbert’s blunt: “The only way back is to be brutally honest about the issues that caused this result and especially in Victoria. To focus on only two of many – climate change is a mainstream issue and needed to be treated as such, and much earlier.

“And there is undoubtedly a woman problem. Not enough women MPs and not enough in what we used to call safe Liberal seats. Too many examples of appalling behaviour towards women, including an allegation of rape at Parliament House and of a staffer masturbating on a woman MP’s desk.

“And too many examples of men who are caught out behaving badly yet seem to be a protected species. Women saw this and it impacted in polling booths all around Australia last Saturday.”

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Ben Raue, election analyst at The Tally Room, tells me there is extensive evidence which shows parties do well when they offer women candidates. It took the Labor Party time to recognise it needed to give voters those choices in both safe and marginal seats, says Raue, and the Liberal Party hasn’t quite adapted to that.

Liberal women feel abandoned and excluded by the powerbrokers. Over the past two days, these women tell me they didn’t see a place for themselves in a party so bereft of a centre.

One sent me an excerpt from Robert Menzies’ book The Forgotten People: “In the long run, will our community not be a stronger, better-balanced and more intelligent community when the last artificial disabilities imposed upon women by centuries of custom have been removed?”

These women want change and unless Liberal men want to be consigned to the vacuum cleaner bag of yesterday, they should want change too.

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