The Liberals need to be sufficiently assertive to fix their gender problem. Allow me to woman-splain
When former Victorian treasurer Alan Stockdale, acting as the interim head of the NSW Liberal party, suggested that women in the party were 'sufficiently assertive' and that in fact the Liberals may need to 'protect men's involvement', he said it was a joke.
The gag – made to a virtual meeting of the NSW Liberal Women's Council, during a discussion about female representation – didn't land with the crowd.
But surely I was not the only one tickled when reading reports of the comments a few days after they were made. It was the use of the adverb 'sufficiently' which most amused me – the idea that female assertiveness has an allocation, and that the allocation had been filled, as decreed by Stockdale.
It helped that the news report was illustrated with a photograph of Stockdale (80) and his co-chair, former Howard government minister Richard Alston (84), seated in front of a portrait of Liberal Party founder Robert Menzies – an earnest trio of white-haired gerontocrats. Stockdale's right hand was poised in the air, as though caught mid-mansplain.
Last year former Liberal leader Peter Dutton appointed Stockdale, Alston, and former NSW MP Peta Seaton as administrators to run the NSW division.
The NSW branch was deemed incapable of managing itself after its failure to nominate 144 candidates for local government elections in September (they had one job, etc). But after Stockdale's comments were widely leaked, the male party veterans had to go.
Ironically, their ouster (official reason given: they were too Victorian to help in NSW) only helped to prove the truth of Stockdale's remarks. It seemed very much like they were forced to quit their posts because, well, they came across a lot like out-of-touch old white guys.
In lamenting his own victimhood, Stockdale ended up proving his own point.
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