From Shorts Media. I'm Ashlin McGee. This is seven AM. Nine years ago the Liberal Party said it was aiming for gender parody by twenty twenty five. 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 in droves, often in favor of the Till Independence. Now, with another election approaching, the Liberals have a fresh batch of candidates. They look
like Tills, they talk like the Tills. But will it be enough to win back skeptical voters. Today the Saturday Papers, Jason katsukis on whether the Liberal Party's problem is its candidates or its brand. It's Thursday May thirty.
Jason.
We all remember that the Coalition lost a lot of ground to the so called Till Independence 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.
One of the main findings of that review, which was conducted by Jane Hume, who's of course a Victorian Liberal senator and Brian Locknane, 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 fifty House of Representative seats if you rank them according to the number of professional women voters. The Liberal Party
now holds just ten of those top fifty seats. Before the last election, they held twenty five.
Of course, co authored the report into the twenty twenty two 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.
Dinege, you're referring to the election review.
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.
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.
And that's why, you.
Know, I was talking with George megli Janis 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 nineteen fifties and sixties, when the that the emergence of the Democratic Labor Party kind of blocked the federal aob 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 government in its own right.
And now that another elections 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 did you pick them so?
The three seats we're talking about it in Melbourne Cuyon, which was Robert Menzie's 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 harbor the seat of North Sydney, another seat that has been in Liberal Party and 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 Independence. In North Sydney Kylie Tink in Wentworth, a legri spender, and then in Kuryong that seat is now held by Monic Ryan, who of course defeated Josh Friedenberg in that very high profile election contest in twenty twenty two. So in those three seats, the Liberal Parties pre selected three very strong candidates to challenge
those Teal independents. And if you read that Liberal Party report by Jamie Hume and Brian Locknane, these are exactly the kind of candidates that human Locknane hoped that the party could find. In North Sydney they've pre selected Giselle Captarian. 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 pre selected Roe Knox, she's a former management consultant. And in Kuyong, the party's pre selected 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 nineteen seventies and she is a lecturer in finance at Swinburn University and is a very very articulate candidate and just that kind of exactly that kind of young, professional woman that the Liberal Party has been searching for.
So these pre selected Liberal candidates, they're all, you know, relatively high profile women who are now pitted against these till Independence But the Tier Independence. 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.
That's right.
I mean, one big reason that voters said that voted for the Teals was they didn't like Scott Morrison. So you would hear Liberal MPs who lost their seats would say your 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 decisions and behavior of politicians and 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 that the big question mark over the new candidates 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 kuy On, Wentworth and North Sydney are really warming too. He's very much not part of the Liberal Party establishment. Peter Dutton is kind of the anti establishment figure.
After the break, meet the three women the Liberal parties bedding on to reclaim their heartland. So, Jason, you've been speaking to these three Liberal candidates who been pre selected to run in these electorates that are currently held by these two independents. Tell me a bit more about the Liberal candidates, who they are, what they've been telling you, maybe starting with Giselle Capterian.
So one of the first things Jisel Captarian said to me was, you know, I'm a public school kid. You know, she grew up five hundred meters from where she's living now. Both her parents were migrants there of ar Median heritage. They moved to Australia in the early nineteen seventies 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 mcquarie University got a
law degree. As soon as Jiseel 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 Organization. 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 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 one of Australia's most effective and respected foreign ministers.
We're hearing it directly from businesses themselves about how the constably in 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.
So let's move across Sydney Harbor out of the seat of Wentworth. Tell me a bit more about Roeanox.
Ronox 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 Turek College done in Madaalizer. 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 two thousands they decided to move back to Australia.
They moved to Sydney.
Roe's husband was the head of Credit Sweee 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 twenty years and she's now fifty 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.
The 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.
And what about in Melbourne in the seat of ku Yong. Tell me a bit more about Amelia Hamer Well Ashlynd.
I mean, I am so old that I can remember when Dick Hamer was Premier of Victoria in the nineteen seventies, and so it's a very famous name if you are a Melbournian of a certain age. Dick Hamer was kind of, you know, the last of the the small l 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 nineteen seventies and I think many Victorians have a lot of
affection for Dick Hamer and the Hamer name. So here comes Amelia Hamer, his great niece. She's thirty one. 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 Air Wallas. 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 Kuyom for the Liberal.
Party to listen to the people with Kujong and particularly I'm hoping to provide a voice for younger Australians. So I'm in my thirties. We don't have a lot of politicians and we don't have a lot of politicians in a Liberal Party who are who are my age. And what I want to do is people in their twenties and people in their thirties in Cuyong and you know, in around Australia a sort of feeling like they're getting a bit of a raw deal.
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 Haimer 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 but yeah, 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.
So Jason, it's one thing to pick these candidates that might stand out and you know, in some ways really match the independence 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 she's like climate integrity, you know, the number of women in politics, for example, Is it enough.
So things could easily go backwards with a Liberal Party at the next election. It's not a given that the pendulum will swing 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 Kuyong, had the.
Then Federal Treasurer Josh Rodenberg, 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 Lewson'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. 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 twenty twenty two election, and certainly by advancing a policy like nuclear energy. I don't think that's going to be easy for voters in kujong Wentworth, North Sydney to warm Tube. It just seems as though that the party 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.
Jason, thanks so much for your time.
Today, Ashland. Always a pleasure talking with you. Thanks very much.
Also in the news today, News Corp Australia has begun a major restructure, with the first job losses announced yesterday. Lisa Mikexworthy, the editor in chief of news dot com dot Au, Australia's most popular news website, is among those
being let go. It follows News Corps International chair and Lachlan Murdock and Key executive Rebecca 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 organization had done on climate change as early as the
nineteen eighties. Andrew sheer Holds cened estimates the organization had first written an intelligence report on the threat of fossil fuels and the greenhouse effect in nineteen eighty one, 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 seven am today. Thanks for your company. We will see you again tomorrow.