Former Liberal MP Sophie Mirabella has confessed to feeling “responsible” for the lack of women in cabinet during a debate about how to fix a lack of female political representation in Australia.
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Mrs Mirabella would have sat in Tony Abbott’s cabinet as Industry Minister had she not lost her seat of Indi to independent Cathy McGowan at the 2013 election.
Speaking in her new role as a public policy fellow at the University of Melbourne, Mrs Mirabella said she felt “propelled” to do something to boost female participation after watching recent Victorian Liberal preselections.
“I felt somewhat responsible having lost my seat and deprived the government of a second woman in cabinet and thought perhaps there is something I can do to precipitate this discussion,” she told a panel discussion in Melbourne on Wednesday night.
Less than one-third of Australia’s parliamentarians are women and less than one-fifth of Abbott government ministers are female.
Former Labor staffer Nick Reece, a fellow with the University of Melbourne, was also on the panel and showed a graph that named Rwanda as the country with the highest number of women in parliament.
Australia’s world ranking in terms of the number of women elected to its national parliament has plummeted from number 21 in 2001 to 45 in 2013.
Another graph showed the Liberal Party has failed to significantly lift the percentage of women in Australian parliaments for a decade.
Despite gains in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the number of women in Australian parliaments is now lower than at its peak in 2010.
But Mrs Mirabella warned against short-term measures like changing party rules or legislating quotas to address the problem.
“They come from long term change in the culture of the political parties and the communities in which we live,” she said.
Several female members of the outer ministry, including Sussan Ley and Marise Payne, have performed well.