Politics with Michelle Grattan: New Liberal Deputy Jane Hume on why she wants a woman contesting every seat

After a coup by the Liberals’ conservative faction, the party has dumped its first female leader Sussan Ley, who had dire polling, in favour of Angus Taylor.

Jane Hume, from the moderate side of the party, won the position of deputy leader. Before entering politics Hume worked in the financial sector. Her win in last week’s ballot came after a turbulent year for her, with mistakes in the election campaign, and then being removed from the frontbench by Ley.

Now back in a big way, Hume takes the shadow portfolio of employment, industrial relations, productivity and deregulation, which will give her a major role in the economic debate.

On her new roles, Hume says she wants to get Australia’s industrial relations system working for employees and employers:

I can understand why previous Coalition governments have been timid on industrial relations reform. They are still scarred by WorkChoices back in 2007. And that’s an easy slogan, I think, for Labor governments to throw, or Labor oppositions to throw, at Liberals and at the Coalition. I’m really not interested in revisiting WorkChoices.

I’m very much interested in looking at job opportunities and career opportunities. What is it that my kids and their kids are going to be looking for in a workplace? […] How do we get our industrial relations system working for both employees and employers? And to some extent, I think that requires a new level of imagination. We want workplace flexibility.

On what a Coalition childcare policy may look like, Hume points to restoring choice and rejecting “dependency” in Labor’s one-size-fits-all approach to childcare:

I do think that there has been an objective, if you like, of dependency that has been part of the Labor Party’s tactics of government, but that’s not healthy. And we can see it in something like childcare.

We need to make sure that we encourage innovation and aspiration, that we reward effort so that when people want to step up and say, hey, I’d really like to start a business, I’d like to really start a family, I’m going to work really hard so that I can send my child to the school that I choose, that there are opportunities for families and individuals to do exactly that.

[A] one-size-fits-all approach [makes] the place a little greyer. I’d like to inject some optimism and some colour back into the Australian economy and to society.

On women in the Liberal party, Hume says the party needs to attract more women but rejects the idea of quotas, saying she’s proud to have made it on merit alone:

I fundamentally believe that we need more women in parliament from every party, not just the Liberal Party. Women’s voices are more than 50% of the Australian population. It’s really important that their voices are heard loudly and clearly in the places where decisions get made about their lives. And I have always been a champion of women within my party.

When we talk about female representation, it’s almost like people say the word “quotas” in the same breath and it’s not that binary. […] There are so many different ways of doing this and quotas is only one way. And it’s one that doesn’t necessarily suit the culture or the nature of the Liberal Party.

I think that the women that I know within the Liberal Party, both those that aspire to be in parliament and those that are already there, would feel a level of insult if they felt that they needed special dispensation just for their presence. […] I love the fact that I know that I got to where I am on merit alone and that my female colleagues did the same. It makes us more powerful, more confident and more able to do our jobs.

Asked whether the Liberals need to run a female candidate in the Farrer by-election to maximise their competitiveness, Hume says a women candidate be “terrific” but stresses the decision is up to the party organisation.

There’s no doubt that female candidates are hard workers, they’re great communicators, they feel very representative of the community and they tend to know their communities extremely well.

I’d like to see female candidates in every seat across the country because the more women we have in parliament, the better represented women’s voices are.

Reflecting on how she has changed in her nearly 10 years in parliament Hume said she was surprised how little of her business experience translated to politics:

I think I’m far less naive. I did come in bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, nothing but a ponytail and a dream. And I did feel at that stage too that perhaps my business experience would translate over easily to politics. They are very different beasts.

In business, when teams work together, […] you can be part of the boat that rises on the tide. Politics is a little bit more of a zero-sum game, one in one out. You’re either the party of government or the party of opposition, you’re in the ministry, or you are out of the ministry. […] Because of that, it can create interesting relationships, challenges that perhaps I hadn’t expected before I entered parliament. But I love it. […] What I didn’t realise, but I love most about the job, is that every single day is different.

I think it’s a far better workplace now than it was when I first arrived. It’s far more welcoming to newcomers and to those that might not necessarily fit the cookie-cutter mould of an Australian politician.