The Liberal Party is scrambling for solutions to broaden the party’s appeal after a crushing election defeat, with some suggesting gender quotas as the best move forward.

Speaking on ABC Radio last week, Liberal Senator for NSW Maria Kovacic argued that the party should hold to a moderate position. Suggesting that the party has moved too far right she states, ‘We need to move back to the centre.’

‘I think we need to look at quotas … let’s be frank, we don’t have as many women as we have men … so that’s something we’re going to have to look at.’

Federal Vice-President of the Liberal Party Fiona Scott told Sky News Australia that the party needed to be more inclusive, ‘There’s a fundamental issue within the leadership of the party, I don’t believe it’s just women.’ She argued that the party needs to be more ‘reflective and diverse of all Australia’.

Apparently, the Liberals are out of touch and that the party must therefore attract more female voters with gender quotas.

Indeed, garnering more female voters is a verifiably significant issue that the party must address. The Liberal Party’s review of the 2022 Federal Election showed that the declining female vote was a decisive factor in the 2022 election loss, with a majority of women across all ages preferring the Labor Party.

But this all cuts to the heart of the Liberal party’s identity: is it left, right, or a squishy centre? Australia already has a major left-of-centre party, so where does that leave right-of-centre Australians? The Australians who overwhelmingly rejected Labor’s Voice to Parliament, and, until February, were set to place Peter Dutton in the Lodge?

What Kovacic, Scott, and the Liberal Party more broadly fail to realise is that no one on the right wants to be a diversity hire, especially not young women.

Young conservative women who are more career-focused are insulted by gender quotas. They are smart. They care about the substance and effectiveness of real policies. Young conservative women aren’t so naïve to be caught in traps of ‘lack of representation’ and ‘no one looks like me’ arguments. To implement a gender quota, particularly with the aim of attracting young women, would be to misread key demographics.

Additionally, quotas, of any kind, are not in accordance with Liberal values, which emphasise ability and merit, not identity. To adopt gender quotas would not only be a waste of time, energy, and resources – it would be a betrayal of the very values that make the party what it is.

The policy and framework of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is not something conservatives are asking for. At this point, advocates of gender quotas look like lazy high school students peeking at other students’ wrong answers. Does the Liberal Party have any ideas of its own anymore?

It seems like realpolitik is the name and aim of the game. Doing whatever it takes to ensure more votes, even if it means undermining its own political principles. If so, it is worth asking is the Liberal Party actually conservative or is it merely the alternative progressive party that drives at the speed limit, enacting the same processes and policies that the left-wing party does only five years too late?

The issue of gender quotas really does take us to the heart of the problem: what is the Liberal Party about? What does it stand for? Ms Scott is right in stating that the Liberal Party needs to take ‘a long hard look at itself’, but not for the reason she thinks. The party is at a crossroads and needs to decide whether it will be the conservative party of choice for right-of-centre Australians, or whether it will merely attempt to imitate Labor.

The Liberals can and should work to attract more voters, but DEI gender quotas are the very last thing the party needs. Liberal voters don’t want Labor-lite anything. They want a real, robust right-of-centre political party that speaks to the disillusioned swinging votes who are not left wing but voted Labor in frustration over the Liberals’ atrocious campaign, as well as the 44.4 per cent of Australians that did not vote for Labor, the Greens, or the Teals in 2022 election.

If the Liberals adopt gender quotas in an attempt to appeal to a broader audience, they will not only further alienate their existing voters but will continue to lose potential voters, especially the votes of young conservative women.

Nathalia Monteiro is a recent university graduate and a high school Humanities teacher in Sydney.