Liberals’ men in blue go zap and hope we forget their women problem

He is treating Christian Porter with kid gloves. He doesn’t want to risk losing him; his government is teetering on the brink. If Porter should quit Parliament, it would force a by-election in his West Australian seat of Pearce. He held it by a modest 3.6 per cent margin at the 2019 election and a current redistribution is likely to make it even more vulnerable.

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The Morrison government lost its working majority when the populist fantasist Craig Kelly quit the Liberal Party a couple of weeks ago. One more loss and its absolute majority would be lost too. If Porter doesn’t want to be subject to an independent inquiry, Morrison isn’t going to force him to face one.

“This leaves us with a very serious problem,” writes University of NSW law professor Rosalind Dixon. “How can we expect the public to have trust and confidence in our legal or political system while these allegations remain in circulation and untested?

“We cannot. We need the Prime Minister properly to test these allegations by initiating the kind of investigation conducted by Vivienne Thom at the request of the High Court, when faced with credible allegations of sexual harassment against Justice Dyson Heydon.” Professional bodies including the Women Lawyers Association as well as Labor, the Greens and some independent MPs, agree.

Morrison’s differs. His argument is that only the police legitimately can investigate, and anything else is an assault on the rule of law. Move on. Zap. Forget.

Morrison’s second incentive to protect Porter is to insure against future leadership challenges. He is determined to demonstrate loyalty to his ministers, however hopeless or beleaguered they may be. In a government with any real standards the Aged Care Minister, Richard Colbeck, would have been sacked for presiding over the COVID-19 catastrophe in Victorian aged-care homes, for starters.

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But prime ministers of the past decade have learned that the biggest threats to their tenure are not the opposition or the electorate but their own colleagues. Palace coups have come thick and fast. Morrison hopes that by showing eye-wateringly implausible levels of denial to protect his colleagues, they will stick with him in the event of any future coup attempt. No minister is responsible for anything. Move on. Zap. Forget.

Morrison’s third motivation is that so long as the news is dominated by the government’s problems with women, Labor is winning. The Coalition desperately wants to get the political debate back onto its winning grounds of economic management, national security and virus management. Anything to do with women is a quagmire for the Coalition; it can’t find its footing and it just keeps sinking. So move on. Zap. Forget.

Can he get away with it? You’d see why he thinks so. The intensity of the internal jousting during the Peter Dutton challenge to Malcolm Turnbull – the one that ultimately delivered the prime ministership to Morrison – shocked and dismayed quite a few Liberal women.

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Liberal MP Julia Banks quit the party. Banks said she’d been badly bullied by male colleagues. Her resignation moved Kelly O’Dwyer, then minister for jobs and industrial relations, to tell her colleagues that the widespread view of the Liberals was that the party was “homophobic, anti-women, climate-change deniers”. She announced her resignation from Parliament two months later.

Liberal senator Lucy Gichuhi took her concerns to the new Prime Minister: “I told him everything,” Gichuhi said. “After the leadership spill, I was ready to say everything that had happened. I saw adult women crying, even ministers. It was very, very tense. Scott said, ‘Leave it with me.’ They were the last words as I left him.” That was the last she heard of it. She lost her seat at the 2019 election.

But it was the treatment of the most popular and high-profile Liberal woman that caused the biggest sensation. Julie Bishop, the first woman to be elected deputy leader of the Liberals, was humiliated in her tilt at the top job when a group calling themselves “swinging dicks” mobilised against her. She confirmed the blindingly obvious – that the Liberal Party had a “women problem”.

In spite of all of this, Morrison led the Coalition to win the 2019 election only a few months later. Nothing had changed. The Liberals still had a “women problem”. But they managed to scrape back into power regardless. They got away with it, and keep getting away with it.

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If you conducted a vox pop on any street in Australia today, how many people would be able to tell you the name of Australia’s Minister for Women? Just about nobody. Because Marise Payne has done just about nothing. Move on. Zap. Forget.

Even after these torrid and shocking weeks with accusations of rape against a Liberal staff member and a Liberal cabinet minister, senior Liberal men do not think their grip on power is under threat. These controversies might increase the Labor Party’s winning margins in seats they already hold, but are not powerful enough to cost the Coalition any of their seats, they assert.

This has the whiff of hubris. It’s true that Scott Morrison’s approval rating is strong, in the 60s. This is a result of his handling of the pandemic and the recession. But it’s also true that nothing has budged the critical measure – voting intentions.

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All the polls have the two main parties evenly matched, within their margins of error. There is no surge of voting support for the Coalition. In other words, people appreciate what Morrison has achieved but are suspending judgment on which party to vote for.

The pollster Peter Lewis, director of Essential polling, says the electorate is waiting to see which of Morrison’s two personas emerges as dominant: “The ‘I don’t hold a hose’ persona of dodging, or the PM who leans in on the vaccine and gets things done.” His performance on the rape accusations so far seems to be a relapse to dodging.

But surely Morrison gets credit for appointing the Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Kate Jenkins, to review Parliament House’s workplace culture? That depends. The Jenkins review was announced on Friday, exactly a year since she delivered her landmark Respect at Work report into sexual harassment in the workplace. Same woman, reporting on a very similar issue. The government has given her last report and its 55 recommendations only scant attention. Move on. Zap. Forget.

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Morrison is trusting that, by sending the Parliament House workplace question off for review, and stonewalling to protect Christian Porter from further scrutiny, he can once again deploy the electoral neuralyser of talking about his favoured topics and ignoring the Liberal Party’s “women problem”.

But Australia is changing. Brittany Higgins came forward and told her story. Australian of the Year Grace Tame is telling hers. She had this message for survivors of sexual abuse this week: “Share your truth. It is your power. One voice, your voice, and our collective voices can make a difference. We are on the precipice of a revolution.”

These voices will be hard for Morrison to neuralyse. The Liberals’ “women problem” is becoming Morrison’s problem.

National Sexual Assault, Family & Domestic Violence Counselling Line: 1800 737 732. Crisis support can be found at Lifeline: (13 11 14 and lifeline.org.au), the Suicide Call Back Service (1300 659 467 and suicidecallbackservice.org.au) and beyondblue (1300 22 4636 and beyondblue.org.au).