When David Cameron was elected leader of the UKConservativesin 2005, he faced up to the party’s existential problem. The Tories were out of touch with voters and no longer looked anything like the modern British electorate.
Smashed in three general elections by Tony Blair’s New Labour, Cameron’s party had 198 MPs, but only 17 were women and just two came from multicultural backgrounds. There were more people named David in the shadow cabinet than women.
“We were the oldest political party in the world – and we looked it,” Cameron said years later. The Tory grandee Michael Portillo went further, warning the parliamentary party was “reactionary and unattractive to voters”.
Cameron took action. He put a freeze on candidate selection and introduced a priority list to be considered by local branches conducting preselections. Half of the names on the so-called “A-list” would be female, and a large number would be from minority backgrounds. Open primary contests were established, to include non-party members interested in standing for office.
Despite strong internal opposition, within five years, the A-list and rules that required gender parity among candidates being considered by branches led to a near quadrupling of women in parliament. After 10 years, multicultural representation within Conservative ranks had increased threefold. The wider UK parliament is significantly more diverse than Australia’s.
The results were also noticed publicly. While the UK tabloids regrettably labelled women recruited to the party “Cameron’s Cuties”, a new generation of senior Tories arrived – including the first Muslim woman to sit in cabinet, Sayeeda Warsi, home secretary and conservative favourite Priti Patel, and female prime ministers includingTheresa Mayand Liz Truss. The party has since been led byRishi Sunakand Kemi Badenoch.
As she starts to pick up the pieces from the 3 May electoral drubbing suffered by the Coalition here in Australia,newly elected opposition leader Sussan Leycould do worse than look to the Tories for a way forward.
The A-list was not a magic bullet – among those elected for the Conservatives at the 2024 UK election, 76% were men and only 12% were ethnically diverse. But bold thinking is clearly needed as the Coalition faces the strong likelihood of at least two more terms in opposition.
Labor takes great pride in the fact women outnumber men in the caucus in 2025, but the party first put in place quotas for preselection way back when Paul Keating was in the Lodge. In 1994, women made up just 12.5% of the caucus as the ALP national conference in Hobart thrashed out a proposal by the activist Sheila O’Sullivan calling for women to make up at least 35% of candidates in winnable seats by 2002.
After her victory over Angus Taylor this week, Ley said she would bring a fresh approach to the job. The first woman to lead the party and the first to lead a federal opposition, Ley insists the Liberals “must respect, reflect and represent modern Australia”.
As party activist and former staffer Charlotte Mortlockhas pointed out, the average Liberal member is a bloke in his 70s, while the average Australian voter is a 37-year-old woman. Worse, Mortlock warned quality female candidates were forced to sell a bad message to voters and paid the price themselves. To that end, Ted O’Brien, the new deputy Liberal leader, has said he mourns for the 28 women who stood for the Liberals and lost.
Fortunately for Ley, some of the work has already been done – and some in the party are rejecting the usual conservative pushback against change.
A review of the Liberals’ 2022 defeat, led by the Victorian senator Jane Hume and the former Liberal director Brian Loughnane, found that a majority of women across age segments preferred Anthony Albanese and Labor, while the opposition’s two-party preferred vote was weakest among women aged 18-34.
The review warned the Liberals had failed to attract new members in the numbers needed to campaign effectively, pointing to multicultural communities, women and anyone under 40.
It called for a much larger number of strong female candidates contesting key winnable seats, and for internal mechanisms to recruit and build up women who might otherwise not consider standing for parliament. Hume and Loughnane recommended a target of 50% female representation in Liberal parliamentary ranks within 10 years, or three terms.
Hume has led on this herself, helping to establish the Dame Margaret Guilfoyle Network, charged with boosting female representation. But the kinds of targets the review recommended don’t have the force of set quotas and can be routinely ignored.
The review also proposed a special outreach program for culturally and linguistically diverse communities, including Chinese Australians, and for better campaign tools to win over multicultural voters. The Liberals could do a lot more to tap into Australia’s naturally conservative south Asian and east Asian diaspora, and to recruit quality candidates from other culturally diverse places. The reviewers should speak to Liberal Jason Wood and defeated MP Keith Wolahan about this challenge.
Surely the first step of this year’s postmortem must be careful analysis of where these ambitions from 2022 have yet to be met, and where they were quietly ignored.
Liberals including Simon Birmingham, Fiona Scott, Maria Kovacic and Linda Reynolds have all urged quotas be put in place to address the diversity problem now. The Sky News host Peta Credlin, however, on Thursday argued that the way back for the Liberals is better policy to fight Labor, rather than quotas she said would “force” the party to install women candidates. Credlin is married to Loughnane.
Ley herself has an incredible story to tell. Born in Africa to British parents, arriving in Australia as a teenage migrant, studying at university as a mature-aged student and raising her family in regional Australia, the Farrer MP might be as well placed as anyone to speak to voters who turned away from Peter Dutton or Scott Morrison.
Ley should style herself as a no-nonsense grandparent, out to get the job done and impress voters just enough to take another look at the Liberals.
One of the other silver linings from the Coalition’s drubbing might also be that a new generation of talent – including Dave Sharma, Zoe McKenzie and Aaron Violi – now have a clearer path to senior roles. Tim Wilson and Bradfield candidate Gisele Kapterian will help inject badly needed energy in the months and years ahead.
Since her victory, Ley has promised to meet voters “where they’re at”. Right now, that almost certainly isn’t aLiberal partybranch meeting.