Zoe McKenzie on everything that went wrong and whether a gender quota could help the Liberals

The Liberals, still reeling from their crushing 2025 election defeat and following with brief split in the Coalition, have a new frontbench and their eyes turning to the long road of rebuilding.

New leader Sussan Ley stresses the importance of the Liberals “meeting people where they are” and the party represents modern Australia.

But what that will actually look like for the party is still an open question. To talk about this uncertain future we’re joined by the newly-minted Shadow Assistant Minister for Education, Early Learning and Mental Health, Zoe McKenzie.

McKenzie was elected to the Melbourne electorate of Flinders in 2022. Her seat encompasses the Mornington Peninsula, mixing urban and rural areas. At the May election she held off a Climate 200-funded teal challenger.

On the Liberal Party’s commitment to net-zero by 2050 – which is likely to come up for debate this term – McKenzie says she thinks net-zero is “a given”.

It’s where the markets are heading. It’s our responsibility as a developed economy to contribute to the decarbonisation of the planet. I went to COP-27 a few years back, and you can see that the world’s markets, investment markets, research and development markets have all moved into preparing for a net-zero environment and Australia will be part of that. I do think, though, people are right to say, please don’t take away our manufacturing base.

I am confident that net zero is here to stay. But you cannot disconnect it from what it says about the energy market, energy security, and the future of Australian industry. We’ve got to keep this as an investment rich country.

On the party’s issues with the women’s vote, while McKenzie says the Liberals should look at “all options” she still has some concerns with the idea of quota’s,

I am reluctantly coming to the conclusion that we must look at all options. I am fearful for what happens if a woman is selected by the operation of a quota and whether she will feel she has deserved her place there and or whether it will be asserted that she only got there because of a quota.

Asked if Labor’s introduction of quotas is proof they can work, McKenzie says,

Labor sacrificed a generation of talented Labor men to get to 50-50.

That sacrificed generation coincided with our many years of successful leadership of this nation. They are now though, because of that decision and because of the sacrifice that was made, and because of the way they went about it, they are in the enviable position of attracting talented, capable women for election, routinely, for each and every seat.

The Liberal Party, it tends, by its very nature, to preference people who have been able to devote a significant amount of time, often while in your 20s or 30s, to both party and community events. […] It will favour men. It will favour women who don’t have their own biological children, or it will favour women who can afford high quality in-home help. So we are not getting the breadth of women we need presenting for pre-selection and we are going to have to think out of the box.

On the rise of the teals, McKenzie’s looks to global examples to explain why two-party systems are changing,

I’m not sure yet whether teal is here to stay but what I do know is that we have moved well beyond the paradigm when I was a kid, which is when it was a 40-40-20 voting bloc. We all fought over that 20 in the middle. It now looks like the 30-30-40 pattern is here to stay.

That’s a message for all of us, in fact, to do better. So I should say, though, this is not unique to Australia. The demise of the two-party system can be observed worldwide.

If you look at the United States, the Republicans and the Democrats remain, but some would say they remain in name only. They have both morphed significantly as political movements. The Labour and Tory parties in the UK have both evolved over time.

On the Liberal’s lack of appeal to younger Australians McKenzie highlights what went wrong and why the party must do better with those voters,

We hadn’t explained to them the basics of home ownership, let alone what a tax deduction on your interest payments on your first mortgage might look and feel like. If you’re 18, 19, 20, your first mortgage still feels 10 to 15 years away.

We didn’t do enough, I think, to talk about their lives, to understand their lives and their aspirations and how Liberal policy was going to make their life easier. We must do a better job of that […] because the average voter now is either Gen Z or a millennial, no longer Gen X, which is my generation, or boomers above.