The Liberals are struggling in this moment, writes Parnell Palme McGuinness.
There was another outburst of female anger that came before this one. It was a clue to the deluge of frustration that has surprised the government over the last weeks. It was unleashed during the leadership spill that saw Malcolm Turnbull rolled and Scott Morrison installed as Prime Minister. While claims of bullying and intimidation of female MPs were widely reported, it remained a beltway issue. Eventually the media grew sick of the story and the government’s economic message started to cut through again. The Coalition went on to win the election.
This time might be different. According to Essential, the Prime Minister is now less trusted by women than he was in November 2020, while his rankings remain stable among men. Coalitionvoting women are 16 per cent less likely than Coalition-voting men to believe that the sexual harassment scandal that has engulfed Parliament is ‘‘just a Canberra insider story’’. Roy Morgan notes that the ‘‘gender gap’’ now favours the ALP.
None of these polls is important by itself, but together they may represent a tipping point in a longer-term trend. Women, for almost two decades, have been shifting their support from right to left. The Australian’s Greg Sheridan points out that: ‘‘The inability of centre-right parties to garner more female votes is a failure on their part, and a broader failure of the conservative intellectual movement.’’
It is indeed a failure by conservatives, and it explains why the Liberal government is struggling to fully understand the zeitgeist. There are simply not enough women in leadership positions who can represent the diverse perspectives of half of the population within it. If Morrison has seemed tin-eared in his response to the women drawing attention to bad behaviour in Parliament House, it is not because he is a misogynist, but because he lacks the female confidants who could help him appreciate the resonance of the moment.
The Liberal Party has always resisted quotas for women, but it has not put enough effort into identifying and preparing women for preselection to obviate the need for them. The lack of electable women representing the party is compounded by a lack of female strategic input. Slowly but surely this is adding up to a lack of women voters.
The men of the Labor Party are having their own problems adjusting to equality, partly documented in the stories of aggressive and inappropriate behaviour submitted to a private Facebook group by Labor staffers. But the ALP is not as much at sea in the current moment as the Coalition. It has women who can interpret and align it with the current anger. Where the Liberal Party has responded to allegations of sexual harassment and rape as individual cases to be managed, the ALP has responded to a wider problem. It reflects an understanding that men’s poor treatment of women is part of a bigger social picture.
The ALP is flaunting the contrast. Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese fronted the press to acknowledge the complaints of Labor staffers flanked by men and women in his team – and, importantly, their babies. There is nothing that tells women more clearly that they are unwelcome in an environment than a ban on small children – and nothing that says parliamentary sex party like male MPs flanked by their lower-ranking female nodders. The symbolism will not have escaped women and familyoriented voters.
The right often moans that it is losing ground in the culture wars even as it wins elections. You can’t do culture without half the population on side, especially when it’s the half that mostly provides children with their earliest and stickiest values.
The matrilineal structure of Jewish culture has helped sustain it through the diaspora and hardship. Protestantism drove the success of the Western world by insisting on educating its girl children. In conservative lore, family is the unit of cohesion and trust that stands bulwark against totalitarianism; the totalitarian Soviet empire realised this and made government employees children’s first teachers.
The government could fail to understand that improving the behaviour of men and ensuring women are safe and valued is as important to conservatism as it is to feminism, and still win the next election. But in picking the wrong battle, it will continue to lose the culture war.
Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director strategy and policy at strategic communications firm Agenda C. She has in the past done work for the Liberal Party.