Anne Ruston’s dumping from SA’s top Senate spot reignites debate about Liberal party’s ‘women problem’
The dumping of a female Liberal heavyweight from South Australia’s top Senate spot has reignited claims the party has a problem with women.
The opposition’s shadow health minister, Anne Ruston, was relegated to second place on the party’s South Australian Senate ticket on Saturday after failing to stave off a factional battle with conservative senator Alex Antic.
The backbench senator took out the ticket’s top spot with 108 votes to Ruston’s 98, with David Fawcett taking the third spot. The top three spots are believed to be winnable for the Liberals at the next federal election.
But Antic’s win over one of his party’s most senior women has caused unease within sections of the Liberals.
The party has set itself a 50-50 gender parity target by 2032 in a bid to win back female voters after its devastating 2022 federal election loss.
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But there are just nine Liberal women in the lower house and 10 in the Senate. Two of the party’s most senior women, Linda Reynolds and Karen Andrews, have also announced their retirements at the next election. The top candidates in the running to replace Andrews in the Gold Coast seat of McPherson are all male.
With Andrews’ departure, the party will be represented by only one woman in Queensland – the Moncrieff MP Angie Bell – with the Liberal National party’s senator Susan McDonald and the Capricornia MP Michelle Landry representing women for the broader Coalition in the state.
A series of male candidates have also been chosen for preselection in Chisholm, Dunkley, Aston and Curtin – all previously held or contested by a Liberal woman.
Charlotte Mortlock, the executive director of the Hilma’s Network, a group dedicated to lifting the number of women in the Liberals, said South Australia’s preselection battle was yet another setback.
“How are we supposed to recruit new members to the party and get more women to run if the most senior women aren’t supported and respected?” she said.
Ruston declined to comment but one New South Wales Liberal source said the outcome made the party look bad to voters.
The NSW Liberal said the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, had successfully intervened to prevent other women, such as Lindsay MP Melissa McIntosh, from being ousted amid factional preselection brawls.
Antic told the Australian newspaper on Sunday he did not believe voters would punish the party for not se
lecting more female candidates.
“The ‘gender card’ is nothing but a grievance narrative, constructed by the activist media and a disgruntled political class,” he told the newspaper. “We need the best person for the job regardless of race, gender or sexuality.”
There have been countless attempts at addressing the party’s “women problem”, including a “fighting fund” set up in Dame Enid Lyons’ name.
The source said progress had been made behind the scenes but it remained an ongoing battle with party members resistant to change.
“There aren’t many of them, but the thing is, they’re very noisy, and they rattle the cage and they draw attention to themselves so that everybody else who’s working really hard in the background gets distracted by them,” they said.
“That’s a challenge that we’ve got.”