Foot in the mouth elder statesman has done the Liberals no favour

Just when the Liberal Party is struggling to rebuild and move into the 21st century following a series of self-inflicted wounds and May 3’s near-death electoral defeat, a blundering tribal elder has glanced backwards and shown that political parties are quite capable of rotting from the top.

Alan Stockdale, a former Liberal Party federal president and ex-Victorian treasurer, brought in to save the NSW Liberal branch from self harm, has managed to shoot himself and the party in the feet, telling a Zoom meeting of the NSW Liberal Women’s Council this week, “women are sufficiently assertive now… we should be giving some thought to whether we need to protect men’s involvement”.

As bewildered outrage raced along the Liberals’ bush telegraph and federal Opposition Leader Sussan Ley all but sneered, Stockdale apologised. “Following a discussion of quotas, I made a light-hearted but poorly chosen remark. I certainly intended no disrespect to anyone, and I regret that people felt disrespected,” he said.

Not good enough, sir.

A current perspective on Stockdale could explain such shellback obstinacy: as a state treasurer he played Elon Musk to Jeff Kennett’s Donald Trump when the Liberals swept a floundering Labor government aside and imposed radical financial reforms and massive public service cuts. Post politics, board chairmanships and a six-year stint as federal president followed.

Former leader Peter Dutton last year appointed Stockdale, 80, another outsider, former Victorian senator Richard Alston, 84, and former NSW MP Peta Seaton, 65, as administrators to run the NSW division after its failure to nominate 144 candidates for local government elections. However, there is deep division over whether their planned term should end on June 30. The federal executive of the party will consider an extension of the trio’s term at a meeting on June 17.

The Liberals’ plight has forced modernisation. But Stockdale’s antediluvian comments on Liberal women are absurd, especially when commonsense demands the party abandon the entrenched opposition to affirmative action and quotas for women. His words also display political ineptitude unworthy of an elder statesman charged with rebuilding his party to recapture its lost heartland.

As the Herald’s state political editor Alexandra Smith noted, Stockdale’s pitch to Liberal women should be enough to send the clear message that he and Alston were not the right pick, let alone demographic, to turn around a troubled party which has been reduced to a rump of just six federal seats in NSW. Their term should not be extended, and consideration to appointing talented women of the Liberal Party should take the reins.

This does not mean the end of federal intervention. The Liberals remain a mess that must be cleaned up and a new beginning found. Democracy needs the party to be fighting fit and move beyond internecine brawling, factionalism and living in the past. The cause has not been helped by Stockdale’s foot in mouth. He is a case study of the people put in charge of the Liberals who have brought the party to its current parlous state.

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