The woman praised by former Liberal leader Tony Abbott as being “young” and “feisty” during her successful campaign for the seat of Lindsay in 2013, says the election of Sussan Ley to the leadership shows the recently defeated party is listening to voters.
Fiona Scott held the seat until 2016, when she lost to Emma Husar, and is now the Liberal Party vice president.
She said Ley’s elevation provides “a really unique opportunity, not just for the women within the Liberal Party, women within Australia, but really embodying the Australian dream and how the Liberal Party can now rebuild around that.”
She pointed to Ley’s origins, having been an immigrant to Australia, becoming a farmer’s wife and working in shearing sheds, getting a pilot’s licence and going on to achieve a master’s degree in taxation law.
“I think the party room did make the right decision yesterday,” Scott told the ABC.
“And it’s really important for us that we’ve been given the opportunity—maybe [we’ve been] taken kicking and screaming to have to—rebuild the party and to take it back to basics and move forward from there. And I think Susan is a step forward, to say that we have listened, but it’s [also] historic.”
The election result, unexpectedly handing a 19-seat majority to Labor and taking 19 seats from the Liberal-National Coalition, was not just a warning to the centre-right party but to “the Australian Parliament in general,” Scott said.
“I think we need to listen to, not just what it is for the Liberal Party to rebuild, but what it is that the Australian public have said to our Parliament more in general, and how they want to see us evolve and change.
“Sometimes you need to look deep into history to see the future. The Liberal Party was formed at a point where various independent parties had poor results, and people thought the Labor Party would govern forever. It was in that environment that Menzies actually brought these smaller parties together.
“The result of the [last] election was not just challenging for the Liberal Party. I mean, the Greens had a pretty difficult result. The Teals were pretty adamant that they would get Bradfield, and Tim Wilson has won his seat in Goldstein.”
Scott believes the party needs to build a platform around the importance of “freedom of choice, of association, of voice, of worship,” along with the importance of reward for effort.
But at the same time, parties need to evolve to “govern for the generation they’re representing.”
The close vote for Ley—29 votes to 25 for challenger Angus Taylor—won’t lead to internal dissent, she believes.
“One of the benefits of the Liberal Party is that there is a broad array of views and perspectives,” Scott said. “I think we will see the Liberal Party rally behind Susan and Ted [O'Brien, newly elected deputy leader]. It doesn’t mean that great talents in our party like Angus won’t still provide superb input, same as Jacinta [Price, who withdrew from the deputy leadership race], and it’s good to have that diversity of perspective and view.”
As a former candidate and now a senior party official, Scott has been following measures taken by other parties to increase the pool of female candidates, something she admits has been a “challenge” for the Liberals, though she’s not necessarily in favour of quotas.
“As a woman, I haven’t felt myself hamstrung ... not going for my seat in Lindsay, [not] going into one of the four vice president’s roles, where there are two women and two men. I can see the reason why a lot of women are pro quotas, and I’m not against quotas, but I think we need to ensure that there is full diversity within our membership and within our female representation.
“Now, if we go down the line of quotas, is that going to have a negative impact on ensuring that the multicultural communities within our electorates are also represented? I think they’re the sort of ideas that we need to work through. And I think [we also need to] work through ranges of topics of how you nurture talent ... how we look after our people, how we manage our people.”
