It’s a truth universally acknowledged in election post-mortems these days that the Liberal Party has a serious “woman problem”. It would be more accurate to suggest that the party has a man problem.

Said problem was laid bare by 80-year-old ex-party president Alan Stockdale, treasurer of Victoria under Jeff Kennett, now among an ageing trio of administrators fighting to retain control of the party’s troubled NSW division.

Stockdale put his foot very far back in his mouth during a four-hour Zoom call with the NSW Liberal Women’s Council, suggesting that the party didn’t need gender quotas because the sheilas were “sufficiently assertive”, such that it was the men who needed help.

But this was hardly the end of Stockdale’s humiliation session.

Under party rules, the women’s council president is given vice-president status and sits on the state executive. But Stockdale and his fellow administrators refused to confirm whether they would retain this rule when pushed by the council’s current president Berenice Walker.

When it was suggested that removing a key female powerbroker from the party hierarchy would be a bad look in the newspapers, Stockdale told attendees they’d be hard-pressed attracting media interest because “no one cares about the Liberal Party”.

Well, we do. And given the number of headlines the opposition is generating, we’re not alone.

Stockdale didn’t return CBD’s calls, but told one of our colleagues it was a “light-hearted but poorly chosen remark” and he did not intend any disrespect.

Discussion then turned to former upper house MP Lou Amato, who campaigned against the Liberals for expelled party powerbroker Matt Camenzuli in his failed independent run against Labor’s energy minister Chris Bowen in McMahon.

The trio said that Amato hadn’t been disciplined because they thought Camenzuli, booted from the party after unsuccessfully trying to sue Scott Morrison over preselections in 2022, would actually win the seat (he got 9 per cent of the primary vote). The same generosity wasn’t extended to the 83-year-old mother of regional independent MP Andrew Gee, who was expelled from the Liberal Party on polling day for campaigning for her son.

The superannuated administrators did, however, agree with a comment from the virtual floor suggesting that ageism was the new sexism. That’s just what the Liberals need. Quotas for 80-year-olds.

https://www.smh.com.au/cbd/nobody-cares-about-the-liberals-party-elder-s-message-to-women-20250604-p5m4zo.html

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 IT IS COMMON GOSSIP (EVEN ON THIS SITE) THAT ROBERT MENZIES "DID NOT UNDERSTAND WOMEN"...