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The party has learnt some lessons from the last election in its selection of professional women to contest three seats lost to independents. Can they convince voters turned off by Peter Dutton’s platform? By Jason Koutsoukis.
Inside the Liberals’ plan to reclaim teal seats
The history of the Federation seats of North Sydney, Wentworth and Kooyong – and the men who have held them, including former prime ministers Billy Hughes, Malcolm Turnbull and Robert Menzies – not only tells the story of the conservative side of politics but of much of modern Australia as well.
After all three seats fell at the 2022 election to high-profile female independents running under the so-called teal umbrella, it seems the party has absorbed some of the feedback on its ailing appeal with women, which hit a nadir under the Morrison government.
Three professional Liberal women are now intent on winning them back. Salesforce executive Gisele Kapterian, 42, in North Sydney, is a former international humanitarian and trade lawyer. Roanne Knox, 50, in Wentworth, spent 14 years climbing the ranks at Deloitte in the United States. Amelia Hamer, 31, in Kooyong, studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford University and had a career in international finance.
“The key point for me is that people not only want to be listened to as a community, they also want to have a say in the direction of our country,” says Hamer.
“What I am offering is someone who can not only be in parliament in three years’ time or six years’ time, but in 10 years’ time or 15 years’ time, and really have a say in our future, not just as a member of parliament but as a member of a government,” she says. “That’s why I’m standing.”
Deserted by professional women at the last election, the Liberal Party now holds just 10 of the top 50 seats in federal parliament ranked according to numbers of professional women voters, compared with 25 seats in the previous term.
“The only demographic class where the Liberal Party and National Party have a stronghold is in rural electorates,” concluded Victorian Senator Jane Hume and former federal Liberal director Brian Loughnane in the party’s formal review of the 2022 election. “No party that is seeking to form Government has a pathway to a majority solely through rural and regional electorates.”
With the Liberal Party losing a total of six seats to teal independents in 2022 – Wentworth, North Sydney and Mackellar in New South Wales, Curtin in Western Australia, and Kooyong and Goldstein in Victoria – Hume and Loughnane noted that on a two-party preferred basis, the teals won majority support from women across all age groups.
“Women aged 35-54 were the most likely segment to vote Independent,” Hume and Loughnane found. “Liberal defectors in Teal seats were highly likely to agree with the statement that the treatment or attitude toward women within the Liberal Party had a strong influence on my vote.”
As experienced professional women, each of the Liberals’ preselected candidates fit the demographic matching that of their competitors in their respective seats, though Kapterian says this is not an issue of “identity politics” but rather of “perspective”.
“As a professional female, working in a technology space with a trade and legal background, as well as multicultural background, I hope voters will see a lot of the different perspectives I would bring,” says Kapterian.
Like other NSW Liberal stalwarts such as former premier Gladys Berejiklian and former federal treasurer Joe Hockey, Kapterian is of Armenian heritage. Her parents migrated to Australia in the 1970s and later built a small business selling Christmas decorations.
“I now live about 500 metres from our first home in Willoughby,” says Kapterian, who attended Killarney Heights High School and graduated with a law degree from Macquarie University.
At the age of 23, she moved to the tiny north-east African country of Eritrea to help that country’s legal case against Ethiopia for breaches of the laws of war.
“It was the first time that damages were actually being sought for a breach of these international humanitarian laws,” says Kapterian. “If only every young person had such an opportunity to see an embryonic nation like Eritrea try to find its identity, what the role of governmentn should be, how the market can play a role in fostering prosperity.”
After studying international law at Cambridge University on a Commonwealth trust scholarship, Kapterian spent five years at the World Trade Organization in Geneva before joining global legal firm White & Case.
Kapterian says she wrote to the Liberals’ then foreign affairs spokeswoman Julie Bishop to see if she had a job opening, and an opportunity came up in Bishop’s department after the party won the 2013 election.
“I was with her at the United Nations when she put it to the UN Security Council to condemn the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 and seek cooperation to set up an international, prosecution mechanism to get to the heart of what happened,” says Kapterian.
Later working for Liberal cabinet ministers Steve Ciobo and Michaelia Cash, Kapterian left the ministerial wing for US cloud-based software company Salesforce, where she now leads the company’s public sector strategy across the Asia Pacific. She decided to run for North Sydney after the last election.
Why should voters in North Sydney return to the Liberal Party, after three years being represented by Kylea Tink? Tink, who is a former managing director of Edelman Australia and chief executive of the McGrath Foundation, holds the seat by a margin of nearly 5 per cent.
“People want political representatives who can have an impact and they know that to have an impact, you need to be able to form government,” says Kapterian. She nominates cost of living, housing and industrial relations as the top issues in the electorate, where about half the population rent their home.
Across Sydney Harbour in the seat of Wentworth, Ro Knox is preparing to take on former McKinsey consultant Allegra Spender, the daughter of former Liberal MP John Spender and the late fashion designer Carla Zampatti.
Like Spender, Knox has Liberal politics in her blood. Her great aunt on her mother’s side was Thelma Bate, one of the first women candidates to stand for Robert Menzies’ fledgling party in the 1940s.
The daughter of an engineer father and a physiotherapist mother, Knox says politics was a regular topic of discussion in the family home on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula.
Knox met her banker husband, John, at Melbourne University, where she chaired the students club at Ormond College. The couple moved to the United States soon after Knox was offered a graduate position with Andersen Consulting.
Moving to New York with Deloitte, Knox was later a founding partner of an entrepreneurial incubator. Nearly two decades ago, she moved to the Wentworth electorate, where she now lives with her husband and two teenage children and runs a small business.
Needing a swing of more than 4 per cent to move Wentworth back to the Liberal Party, Knox faces one of the toughest challenges among the Liberal candidates taking on the teals.
Climate change, integrity in politics and the unpopularity of then Liberal prime minister Scott Morrison dominated the 2022 campaign in Wentworth. Now Knox says the only issue she is hearing from voters as she knocks on doors across the electorate is the cost of living.
“It’s the first issue, it’s the second issue, it’s the third issue,” she says.
Peter Lewis, executive director at left-leaning political consultancy Essential, is sceptical that an issue so central to the success of the teals’ campaign with Climate 200 can be easily downplayed. “Particularly on climate, the Liberals are clearly not positioning themselves with those teal voters.”
He cited Peter Dutton this week questioning the CSIRO research on the cost and benefits of the transition to renewable energy.
Knox is clear that climate change and the transition from fossil fuels will again be important to voters in the election that is expected in May next year. She expresses no concern about her electorate’s reception to Dutton’s plan to focus his energy policy on nuclear power, the detail of which was anticipated before the budget and has since been promised to appear in the coming weeks.
“I think what people want is a mix of possible energy sources,” says Knox. “They are looking for affordable energy, they’re looking for clean energy, but they’re also looking for reliable energy.”
In Melbourne, Amelia Hamer, a great niece of Liberal premier Dick Hamer and a lecturer in finance at Swinburne University, is up against former paediatrician Monique Ryan, who defeated then Liberal deputy leader Josh Frydenberg in 2022 and holds his former seat of Kooyong by a near 6 per cent margin on the two-party preferred vote.
Hearing the very strong message that voters sent at the last election, Hamer says she started to think about all the things a Liberal government could and should be doing.
“Talking to my friends about this, especially women in their 30s, people were telling me that when they look at federal politics what they see is too many older guys who can’t relate to their own personal experiences,” Hamer says. “What they want in politics is someone who understands what their life is like, what it’s like to rent and what it’s like to be entering the labour market at a time like this.”
Having lived abroad for eight years after finishing secondary school, Hamer returned to Australia during the pandemic, landing a job as an adviser to the then minister for superannuation and financial services, Jane Hume.
“I think that politics has become very short term, and what I want people to know is that I stand for the long term,” says Hamer. “I’m genuinely worried that in 20, 30 or 40 years, all the things that make Australia a great society and better than a lot of other places that I’ve lived in, that we won’t be able to provide those things anymore.”
Kooyong recorded one of the highest “Yes” votes in the country in last year’s Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum. Asked whether Dutton’s opposition to the Voice will hurt her chances, Hamer is sanguine.
“My honest perspective on this is that the reason the referendum didn’t pass was that the prime minister refused to compromise,” says Hamer.
She is often described as a Liberal moderate but firmly rejects the label.
“Being called a moderate says that you’re not willing to be bold and you’re not willing to put in place radical reform where radical reform is needed,” says Hamer. “It’s important to be thoughtful, it’s important to have well-researched and well-thought out policies, but sometimes we also need to be bold.”
If picking stand-out candidates is one part of winning back seats in an election, so is recasting a party’s political brand.
Peter Lewis remains unconvinced the Liberals under Peter Dutton have done enough to back the voters who turned their backs on the party in 2022.
“It wasn’t like they had bad candidates in those seats in 2022,” he says. “What hurt them was the Liberal brand, and in the two years since, especially on issues like climate change and the Voice, I am yet to see a strategy to win back voters in seats held by the teals.”
He says while it’s positive for the party that it is preselecting women in some of these inner-city seats, their preselection decisions in the majority of seats haven’t changed the face of the party.
In the Melbourne seat of Goldstein, former member of parliament Tim Wilson has been preselected for a rematch against now-sitting member and former ABC journalist Zoe Daniel. In Western Australia, former Uber executive Tom White has been preselected to run against the west’s only sitting teal MP, Kate Chaney. The Liberal Party’s NSW division has yet to preselect candidates in the seats of Warringah and Mackellar.
“Where’s the credible story that these candidates can put out that says, We the Liberal Party have listened to your concerns and we have changed? I just don’t see it there yet,” says Lewis.
One senior Liberal strategist acknowledged that getting quality candidates in key seats held by the teals had been central to efforts to win back those seats, though the party still faced an uphill battle.
“History suggests that once a seat falls to an independent, it’s very difficult to win it back, so we’re definitely facing some big challenges there.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 25, 2024 as "Inside the Liberals’ plan to reclaim teal seats".
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