Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Medicare) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to second the motion moved by the Deputy Leader of the Opposition. You couldn't have a better example than the example we had over the weekend of the problem this once-great Liberal Party has with women. I thought it was a joke. We saw over the weekend the member for Hughes saying that he was going to the crossbench; he was threatening to do so if his preselection was threatened. Then you had the Prime Minister—the Prime Minister who tells us that it is all about merit in this great Liberal Party—saying that he was prepared to intervene. If this is a Liberal Party of merit, you would have thought, when you had the member for Ryan's pre-selection threatened—someone who has been in this place for a long period of time, and a woman of merit—that the Prime Minister would have said, 'Actually, we want to keep the member for Ryan. We want to step in and intervene here. We know that we want to keep the member for Ryan.' But, no, the Prime Minister did nothing.

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