Hume, Henderson, Price demotions are no great loss for women

Crumbs! In a move widely seen as a slight on each of them, three of the most high-profile Coalition women have been dumped from the frontbench.

Jane “WFH is creating inefficiency” Hume has handled her demotion from finance with her standard singsong poise, telling Sunrise she was “hurt” but would — in the words of her mother — “straighten [her] tiara and get on with the job”.

Victorian right-winger Sarah Henderson showed less grace, releasing a pointed statement noting “a number of high-performing Liberal women have been overlooked or demoted” — a group in which she presumably includes herself. It was an interesting note of concern from someone on record as being opposed to quotas in the Liberal Party, arguing women shouldn’t get roles just because they are women.

Nat-turned-Lib Jacinta Nampijinpa Price was relegated to the outer ministry — a half-smart move, wrote Bernard Keane, given she will “find it impossible not to go on Sky News and freelance across everyone else’s portfolio”. Appearing on Sky after the reshuffle, Price did not hide her disappointment, arguing, without a hint of irony, that it seemed people had not been selected on “experience or merit”.

But it’s not just Henderson who’s taken a sudden interest in the representation of women in the Liberal Party. Others have sought to paint this as a backward step for women, including over on Sky, that bastion of feminism, which has spent the past few weeks undermining the first-ever female Liberal leader. Newfound feminist Sharri Markson called Sussan Ley’s cabinet “a hit job on high-profile women”, suggesting she was “threatened by other women” — just a fortnight after labelling Ley a “placeholder” leader.

On last week’s Party Room podcast, Patricia Karvelas revealed that Liberal insiders had been backgrounding against Ley, briefing journalists about the fact that many women had been dumped.

There are indeed fewer women in Ley’s shadow cabinet than in Peter Dutton’s — eight instead of 11, or 35% instead of 48%. Ley has been forced to defend the decision, telling Today that “of course” she wanted to see more women in the party. Liberal sources told Guardian Australia that Hume was demoted in order to “promote fresh blood”, with Women’s Agenda noting a few were promoted, including Melissa McIntosh and Angie Bell.

But the idea that the demotion of Hume, Henderson and Price is any great loss for women is laughable, a ludicrous stretch from those for whom women’s issues are only relevant when there are points to be scored.

Henderson and Price are both conservatives, more concerned with fighting culture wars than for the rights of women. Price is one of the most anti-abortion people in parliament, with even LNP Senator Matt Canavan unwilling to back her attempts to make abortion an issue ahead of the 2025 election. Henderson, meanwhile, has been one of the Liberal Party’s most loyal servants, always willing to defend it from claims it has more of a women problem than broader society.

Hume, while notionally a moderate, is not much better. She was most recently the face behind the Coalition’s disastrous anti-work-from-home policy, which anyone in touch with modern women would have known would go down like a lead balloon. But as Kristine Ziwica has repeatedly argued in these pages, Hume has never really been a friend to women, using the role as minister for women’s economic security to argue women simply needed to become more financially savvy, while dismissing policies that would actually help them as “welfare”.

Hume’s 2022 election review was big on the need for the Liberal Party to learn to “talk to” women — a superficial makeover that Hume and Ley were happy to help lead, while apparently never passing on any of the information they gleaned. In fact, nothing in the last term indicated that senior Liberal women were even remotely interested in listening, preferring instead to tell us all how great the party is.

Ultimately, gender parity in cabinet isn’t worth much if it doesn’t involve elevating women who are willing to fight for their gender. Women don’t need tokens on the frontbench — women who won’t rock the boat, who vote with the party against things like reducing the gender pay gap, women who were more than willing to stand by Scott Morrison and then Peter Dutton (Ley fits into this category too, for what it’s worth).

Ley was rewarding her backers with her cabinet choices, as leaders often do. It’s frustrating that the election of Liberal Party’s first female leader comes with a backwards slide in female representation, with female Liberal MPs now outnumbered by female crossbenchers (women fare better in the Senate, though not by much).

But an equal number of women on the Liberal frontbench will not bring equality to women, especially not with frontbenchers like these.