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ASHLYNNE:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ashlynne McGhee. This is 7am.

Nine years ago the Liberal Party said it was aiming for gender parity by 2025, but since then, the number of Liberal women in parliaments across the country has gone backwards.

And it’s costing the party seats in the federal parliament, with professional women abandoning the party in droves, often in favour of the Teal independents.

Now with another election approaching, the Liberals have a fresh batch of candidates. They look like teals, they talk like he teals, but will it be enough to win back sceptical voters?

Today The Saturday Paper’s Jason Koutsoukis, on whether the Liberal party’s problem is its candidates or its brand.

It’s Thursday, May 30.

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ASHLYNNE:

Jason, we all remember that the coalition lost a lot of ground to the so-called teal independents at the last election, and in the wake of that loss, they did this big election review. What did it lay out about those losses?

JASON:

One of the main findings of that review, which was conducted by Jane Hume, who is of course, a Victorian Liberal senator, and Brian Loughnane, the former federal director of the Liberal Party, was that professional women are deserting the Liberal Party. Not just in the inner city, but in the top 50 House of Representatives seats, if you rank them according to the number of professional women voters, the Liberal Party now holds just ten of those top 50 seats. Before the last election, they held 25.

Audio excerpt — News reporter:

“You, of course, co-authored the report into the 2022 election loss. How long is it going to take to turn this around, particularly when it comes to the issue of female representation in the party?”

Audio excerpt — Jane Hume:

“Danika, you're referring to the election review…”

JASON:

The decline in support amongst professional women voters has been happening for a long time. And one of the key recommendations of the report was that, to arrest that decline, the Liberal Party will have to find better candidates, perhaps more professional women candidates.

Audio excerpt — Jane Hume:

“And it's so important because we want to make sure that we are more reflective of the people for whom we wish to represent, for whom we wish to govern.”

JASON:

I was talking with George Megalogenis the other day, who was saying to me, is the Liberal Party even viable in states like Victoria anymore? Because, if you look at the results of the last few federal and state elections, then it does seem like the Liberal Party is in real trouble. And, they've been going backwards for quite some time. It's a little bit like the problems that kept the Labor Party out of office through the 1950s and 60s, when the emergence of the Democratic Labour Party, kind of blocked the federal ALP from getting into government. And that's what we're seeing with the teals. They're holding these seats that the Liberal Party needs to win, if it's going to get back into government and govern in its own right.

ASHLYNNE:

And now that another election is looming, you've been looking at these three seats in particular that were won by the teals. What makes these three seats so important? Why'd you pick them?

JASON:

So the three seats we're talking about in Melbourne, in Kooyong, which was, Robert Menzies’ seat, the founder of the modern Liberal Party. In Sydney, the seat of Wentworth, which is, of course, Malcolm Turnbull's old seat. And then, across the harbour, the seat of North Sydney, another seat that has been in Liberal Party hands for most of the Australian federation. These are the jewels in the Liberal Party crown.

So, all three of those seats are currently held by the so-called teal independents in North Sydney Kylea Tink, in Wentworth Allegra Spender, and then in Kooyong, that seat is now held by Monique Ryan, who of course defeated Josh Frydenberg in that very high profile election contest in 2022. So in those three seats, the Liberal Party's pre-selected three very strong candidates to challenge those teal independents. And if you read that Liberal Party report by Jane Hume and Brian Loughnane, these are exactly the kind of candidates that Hume and Loughnane hoped that the party could find. In North Sydney, they've preselected Gisele Kapterian. She's a former humanitarian and trade lawyer who then went on to work for Julie Bishop when she was foreign minister. In Wentworth, the party has preselected Ro Knox. She's a former management consultant. And in Kooyong, the party's preselected Amelia Hamer. That's a very famous name in Victorian Liberal Party circles. Her great uncle was Dick Hamer, the very progressive Liberal premier through the 1970s. And she is a lecturer in finance at Swinburne University and is a very, you know, very articulate candidate and just that kind of, exactly that kind of young professional woman that the Liberal Party has been searching for.

ASHLYNNE:

So these pre-selected Liberal candidates, they're all, you know, relatively high profile women who are now pitted against these teal independents. But the teal independents, they didn't just win these seats because they're women, right? They won because voters in these electorates had real concerns on a policy level with what the Liberal Party was putting forward.

JASON:

That's right. I mean, one big reason that voters said that they voted for the teals was they didn't like Scott Morrison. So you would hear Liberal MPs who lost their seats would say, you know, voters would come up to them and say, well, we love you, but we just can't vote for Scott Morrison. So that was one reason. But there were two other big reasons as well. One was the Liberal Party's stance on climate change, which many voters in those seats saw as being stuck in the last century. And then the other key issue for voters in those seats was integrity in politics and the failure of the Morrison government to set up a body that can review, you know, decisions and behaviour of politicians and, you know, apply the sort of scrutiny that we've seen in all the states around Australia. And that body, of course, is now a living and breathing thing, the national Anti-Corruption Commission. So those two issues were very important for voters in the teal seats. And the big question mark over the new candidates, the Liberal Party candidates, is, has the party moved on sufficiently to win back the trust of voters?

I think as we get closer to the election, the pressure is really going to be, you know, amped up on these candidates, and they're going to have to start talking about not just their own personal vision, but they're going to have to start defending the policies of Peter Dutton and the federal parliamentary party. And I think that's going to be very difficult for them because, you know, while Scott Morrison might be gone, Peter Dutton is not the kind of person that you would imagine the voters of Kooyong, Wentworth and North Sydney, really warming to. He's very much not part of the Liberal Party establishment. Peter Dutton is kind of the anti-establishment figure.

ASHLYNNE:

After the break, meet the three women the Liberal Party is betting on to reclaim their heartland.

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ASHLYNNE:

So, Jason, you've been speaking to these three liberal candidates who've been preselected to run in these electorates that are currently held by these teal independents. Tell me a bit more about the Liberal candidates, who they are, what they've been telling you, maybe starting with Gisele Kapterian.

JASON:

So one of the first things Gisele Kapterian said to me was, you know, I'm a public school kid. You know, she grew up 500m from where she's living now. Both her parents were migrants. They're of Armenian heritage. They moved to Australia in the early 1970s and set up a small business which they're still running to this day. And, she didn't go straight into Liberal Party politics at university. She went to Macquarie University, got a law degree, and as soon as Gisele left university, she went off to Eritrea to work with the government there. After working in Eritrea, she moved to Geneva, and started working with the World Trade Organisation. And it wasn't until she was watching the then coalition's foreign affairs spokeswoman, Julie Bishop, being interviewed on television, that she thought, gee, I wouldn't mind trying to get a job with Julie Bishop. So she wrote to Julie Bishop. They said we can't. We don't have a job for you right now, but maybe if we win the next election, get back in contact with us then and we'll see if we have a place for you. And, of course, that's exactly what happened. And she moved back from Geneva to Australia, and started working here in federal parliament with Julie Bishop, who was, you know, one of Australia's most effective and respected foreign ministers.

Audio excerpt — Gisele Kapterian:

“We’re hearing directly from businesses themselves about how the cost of living crisis is actually making a pinch, and so what we are hearing over and over again is that they need representation that allows them to…”

ASHLYNNE:

So let's move across Sydney Harbour now to the seat of Wentworth. Tell me a bit more about Ro Knox.

JASON:

Ro Knox is now living in Wentworth, in the heart of, the eastern suburbs of Sydney. But she is from Melbourne. The Mornington Peninsula, to be exact. She was the school captain at Toorak College down in Mount Eliza. She went to Ormond College at Melbourne University, was the chair of the student body. She joined Deloitte Consulting and she had a very long and successful career with Deloitte in New York. And then in the early 2000s, they decided to move back to Australia. They moved to Sydney. Ro’s husband was the head of Credit Suisse in Australia. And, she decided that she would set up her own business in clothing retailing. And she's been deploying her entrepreneurial skills in Wentworth, for the last 20 years. And she's now 50 years old. You couldn't get a candidate more out of central casting when it comes to that area. You know, her husband's a banker, she's an entrepreneur. They're both very successful. I think, you know, really inculcated in the small kind of business values of the Liberal Party.

Audio excerpt — Ro Knox:

“Country and Wentworth is really looking for strong leadership and my view is Wentworth wants to get rid of this Labor Albanese government and the only way we can do that is by electing a Liberal member for Wentworth.”

ASHLYNNE:

And what about in Melbourne in the state of Kooyong? Tell me a bit more about Amelia Hamer.

JASON:

Well, I mean Ashlynne, I am so old that I can remember when Dick Hamer was premier of Victoria in the 1970s. And so it's a very famous name if you are a Melburnian of a certain age. Dick Hamer was kind of, you know, the last of the small Liberal premiers that had kind of ruled Victoria for so long and he's very much seen now as a very progressive politician. He introduced a lot of social reform during the 1970s. And, I think many, many Victorians, have a lot of affection for Dick Hamer and the Hamer name. So here comes Amelia Hamer, his great niece. She's 31. She went straight from high school to Oxford University, where she studied philosophy, politics and economics. She stayed in London after graduation, got a job with a private equity firm. She worked in private equity and finance in the UK, for about eight years and then came back to Australia and took up a position with, I think with Airwallex, the Australian finance Startup. And after the last election, she decided that she wanted to put her hand up and try to win back the seat of Kooyong for the Liberal Party.

Audio excerpt — Amelia Hamer:

“And particularly I'm hoping to provide a voice for younger Australians. So I'm in my 30s, we don't have a lot of politicians, and we don't have a lot of politicians in the Liberal Party who are, who are my age. And what I want to do is for people in their 20s and people in their 30s in Kooyong and, you know, around Australia are sort of feeling like they're getting a bit of a raw deal.”

JASON:

She has been described as a liberal moderate. And listening to her and interviewing her, that's the box that I would put her in. But Amelia Hamer herself rejects that label. In fact, she said to me she hates being called a moderate. And the reason why is that she feels that by being called a moderate, it implies that she doesn't have a kind of a bold vision for reform. But she thinks that, you know, that's not how she would describe herself. She's someone that really wants to get into federal parliament and try to affect meaningful change. But, if she makes it into federal parliament, I think that label will stick to her.

ASHLYNNE:

So, Jason, it's one thing to pick these candidates that might stand out and, you know, in some ways really match the independents that they're running against. But I wonder, will that be enough to also counter all of those other issues that drove voters away from the Liberal Party in the first place? So issues like climate integrity, you know, the number of women in politics, for example, is it enough?

JASON:

So things could easily go backwards for the Liberal Party at the next election. It's not a given that the pendulum swings back their way.

One of the people that I interviewed for this piece was Peter Lewis from, the left leaning political consultancy essential. And, one of the things he said was that it wasn't as though the Liberal Party had bad candidates in these three seats at the last election. In Kooyong, they had the then federal treasurer, Josh Frydenberg. In Wentworth, Dave Sharma, who's now a senator from New South Wales and in North Sydney, Trent Zimmerman. All three of those people were seen as very solid candidates, very, very talented, politicians.

So if it wasn't the candidates, then how did the Liberal Party lose those three seats? And in Peter Lewis's view, it's the Liberal Party brand. And he hasn't seen Peter Dutton do enough to change the Liberal Party brand to be able to win back those three seats.

JASON:

I think on integrity and women in politics, the Liberal Party is making progress. But with climate change, it's not clear how the party has learned from the results of the 2022 election, and certainly by advancing a policy like nuclear energy, I don't think that's going to be easy for voters in Kooyong, Wentworth and North Sydney to warm to. It just seems, as though that the party is, is going in the opposite direction there. So I think it's going to be a very difficult sell for Peter Dutton in those three seats.

ASHLYNNE:

Jason, thanks so much for your time today.

JASON:

Ashlynne, always a pleasure talking with you. Thanks very much.

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ASHLYNNE:

Also in the news today

News Corp Australia has begun a major restructure with the first job losses announced yesterday – Lisa Muxworthy, the editor-in-chief of News.com.au, Australia’s most popular news website, is among those being let go.

It follows News Corp’s international chairman Lachlan Murdoch and key executive Rebekah Brooks arriving in Sydney last week to oversee the restructure of the Australian operation.

And the head of the Office of National Intelligence, which is responsible for some of the most important intelligence reports that end up on the desk of our prime ministers, said yesterday that he was proud of the work his organisation had done on climate change as early as the 1980s.

Andrew Shearer told senate estimates the organisation had first written an intelligence report on the threat of fossil fuels and the greenhouse effect in 1981, but when asked if it was listened to by leaders at the time, he conceded “I can’t comment on how our product is received.”

That’s all from the team here at 7am today. Thanks for your company. We will see you again tomorrow.

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