Daily Archives: March 4, 2017

Students at Middlebury College in Vermont protested an author who has been called a white nationalist, causing the college to move a planned lecture to another room on campus. (YouTube/Will DiGravio)

As the co-author of one of the 1990s most controversial works of scholarship, Charles Murray is no stranger to angry protesters.

Over the years, at university lectures across the country, the influential conservative scholar and author of The Bell Curve says hes come face-to-face with demonstrators dozens of times.

But none of those interactions prepared him for the chaotic confrontation he encountered Thursday night at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vt.

When The Bell Curve came out, Id have lectures with lots of people chanting and picketing with signs, but it was always within the confines of the event and I was eventually able to speak, Murray told The Washington Post. But Ive never experienced anything like this.

The demonstrations began conventionally enough, with several hundred organized protesters packed into a lecture hall Thursday, chanting and holding signs. They ended with Murray being forced to cancel his lecture and later being surrounded by an unruly mob made up of students and outside agitators as he tried to leave campus, according to witnesses and school administrators.

After swarming Murray and two school officials, the protesters shouted profanities, shoved members of the group and then blocked them from getting to a vehicle in a nearby parking lot. Witnesses said the confrontation was aggressive, intimidating and unpredictable and felt like it was edging frighteningly close to outright violence.

[Trump lashes back at Berkeley after violent protests block speech by Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos]

In a message to the campus community Friday, Middlebury PresidentLaurie L. Patton said her administration plans to respond to the clear violations of Middlebury College policy that occurred the night before without providing more specific information. Patton who was on hand Thursday night said she was deeply disappointed by the events she witnessed and called the night painful for many at Middlebury, a top-tier liberal arts college with about 2,450 undergraduate students.

Today our community begins the process of addressing the deep and troubling divisions that were on display last night, her message said. I am grateful to those who share this goal and have offered to help.

We must find a path to establishing a climate of open discourse as a core Middlebury value, while also recognizing critical matters of race, inclusion, class, sexual and gender identity, and the other factors that too often divide us, the statement added. That work will take time, and I will have more to say about that in the days ahead.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled Murray a white supremacist and a eugenicist who uses racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women and the poor.

Murray, a statistically minded sociologist by training, has spent decades working to rehabilitate long-discredited theories of IQ and heredity, turning them into a foundation on which to build a conservative theory of society that rejects equality and egalitarianism, the SPLC states.

Murray bristled at the SPLCs characterization of him and blamed it for provoking protests among college students who have failed to scrutinize his work.

White supremacist? he said Friday. Lets see: if you have a guy who was married for 13 years to an Asian woman and who has two lovely Asian daughters, wouldnt that disqualify him from membership in the white supremacist club?

Murray, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, was not invited to Middlebury to discuss The Bell Curve, but instead to talk about his latest book: Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.

His lecture was co-sponsored by Middleburys Political Science Department. The other sponsor was the AEI Executive Council at the college, an outreach program by the Washington-based group that operates on dozens of campuses.

Our goal was not to create a controversy, but to start a discussion and a dialogue, said Alexander Khan, a member of the AEI Executive Council. Many members of our own club here dont agree with everything Dr. Murray has to say, but we still believe in the importance of robust discussion and the free exchange of opinions.

That is a cornerstone of what it means to receive a liberal arts education, he added.

The Associated Press reported that more than 450 alumni signed a letter calling Murrays visit unacceptable.

In this case, theres not really any other side, only deceptive statistics masking unfounded bigotry, the letter said.

Both students and other community members came out to show that we are not accepting these kind of racist, misogynistic, eugenist opinions being expressed at our college, Elizabeth Dunn, a student protest organizer, told the AP. We dont think that they deserve a platform because they are literally hate speech.

Video from the lecture in Wilson Hall showed hundreds of students turning their backs to Murray once he took the stage and began speaking.

Chants including Hey hey, ho ho, Charles Murray has got to go and Racist, sexist anti-gay, Charles Murray go away followed as Murray remained at the lectern for close to 20 minutes. The students held signs that said No Eugenics and Scientific racism = Racism.

Anticipating that the lecture might be interrupted, administrators attempted to relocate the event and a Q&A with Middlebury professor Allison Stanger to a location where the exchange could be live-streamed. Some of their discussion was recorded, but the dialogue was cut short by loud protesters who slammed chairs, chanted and periodically pulled fire alarms, which shut down the buildings power, according to Middlebury spokesman Bill Burger.

It became very difficult to hear in there where they were recording, Burger said. Nonetheless, there was a principle at work in that we were determined to continue the event. Both sides felt like they were standing for principle.

Murray said he felt like students were protesting a perceived persona more than a person, one theyd labeled a racist, sexist pseudo scientist. Asked why he thinks he continues to arouse such passion 23 years after The Bell Curve was published, Murray said he could only speculate.

I think there is this rage on campuses about Donald Trump and as someone who has written pretty explicitly about my disapproval of Trump I can sympathize with that.

But if you have someone that they can say, This is one of those people who is the problem, then they latch on to that person, he added. Thats who I was to them.

The University of California at Berkeley canceled a talk by inflammatory Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos and put the campus on lockdown after intense protests broke out on Feb. 1. (Video: The Washington Post / Photo: AP)

Burger said Stangers hair was pulled before she reached the car, twisting and injuring the professors neck. Burger said she later went to a hospital and was fitted with a neck brace. (Stanger could not be reached for comment.)

By the time Murray, Stanger and Burger made it to their car with a campus security escort, the vehicle was mobbed by masked demonstrators who climbed on the hood, pounded the windows and blocked the cars exit while security struggled to clear a path, witnesses said.

At one point, a stop sign was pulled from the ground and laid in front of the vehicle to block its path. After close to 10 minutes, the car managed to separate from the mob, witnesses said. Minutes later, the group was forced to leave a nearby restaurant when security informed Murray and the others that more protesters were on their way.

Murray said he harbored no ill will toward Middlebury and praised campus administrators for not backing down from protesters as the night intensified.

He said he didnt want to dramatize the events or present his final interaction with protesters as a life-or-death situation, but noted that the crowd was out of control.

Had there not been those security guards, I would certainly have been pushed down on the ground, he said. Maybe nothing more wouldve happened after that, but certainly that wouldve happened.

I was glad to get the hell out of there, he added.

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A conservative author tried to speak at a liberal arts college. He left fleeing an angry mob. - Washington Post

Delstudio/Dreamstime.comAmerica needs a new political party, one opposed to isolationism, protectionism, nativism, authoritarianism, and ecologism but which also supports free enterprise, constitutional government, human equality, liberty, dignity, and the defensive alliance of all nations committed to such ideals.

Some might call such a party "conservative," and indeed, many of those who call themselves conservatives today would find themselves in agreement with its tenets. But these are the ideas of classical liberalism; they are the ideas that made the free world free, in as much as it is free. They have been misbranded by their "progressive" opponents as "conservative" a word associated with "servility" and the service of privilege in order to make them seem reactionary. It's time for the true defenders of real liberalism to take their proud title back.

America needs a new Liberal Party because both major parties have abandoned liberalism. Neither adequately supports international free trade or the defense of the West the two pillars of the liberal world order since 1945. Both lack commitment to constitutionally limited government, separation of powers, free enterprise, human equality, and liberty under the law. Each supports its own Malthusian antihuman collectivist ideology: for Democrats, it is ecologism, for Republicans, it is nativism.

Ecologism the advocacy of state-administered collective sacrifice for the putative benefit of nature is so obviously anti-liberal, reactionary, and indeed, anti-human, that I will leave it to the would-be liberals of the left to figure out how they ever got roped into adopting it as part of their core ideology. As a result, the party that once proudly proclaimed itself the defender of the poor now centers its program on ultra-regressive sales taxes of fuel and electricity, while boasting of its ability to throw entire industries and their workers on the scrap heap. Furthermore, ecologism serves as a justification for the expansion of the powers of the state to intrude into every aspect of public, commercial, and private life reinforcing monopolies, impairing initiative, and destroying opportunities at every turn.

Nativism, on the other hand, is the ideology that brought the Trumpist Trojan horse into the conservative citadel. A mirror image of the Democrats' environmental Malthusianism, it asserts that rather than natural resources, it is human opportunities that are in limited supply. It is not a conservative ideology, because it is anti-free enterprise and anti-Judeo Christian. Our nation's founding creed is that of inalienable rights granted to men created equal by God. How can a movement which explicitly denies that faith be considered conservative, or even American? In fact it isn't conservative at all. It is alt-right. But what is the alt-right really?

In his classic 1944 work, The Road to Serfdom, Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, then living in exile in England, shocked readers with his diagnosis of Nazism. National Socialism, he argued, was not the opposite of social democracy many of whose adherents could be found fighting in the ranks of the Allies but its evolutionary extension. All Hitler had done, said Hayek, was to grasp that racism is required for socialism, because to mobilize the passion necessary to achieve the full collectivist agenda, it is necessary to invoke the tribal instinct. Thus, contrary to Marx, the ultimate development of socialism is not stateless international brotherhood, but various forms of rabid tribal nationalism. Similarly, tribalism leads to socialism.

Not to put too fine a point on the matter, tribalism or "identarianism," if you will is not a conservative ideology; it is collectivist ideology. It is the oldest, most powerful, lethal, and most degrading collectivist ideology, because it is based on primeval animal instinct. By using xenophobic agitation to mobilize mob support for a program of socialistic policy, unlimited government, and strongman rule, the international alt-right has embraced a political methodology clearly identified seven decades ago in The Road to Serfdom.

Running up taxes on fuel, electricity, and fuel for the putative purpose of stopping climate change is an alternative version of human sacrifice for weather control. Excluding immigrants for the putative purpose of making jobs available is merely an alternative version of the counterfactual case for population control to wit that we supposedly would all be better off if there were fewer people (in fact, we weren't). Neither is a liberal, moral, rational, or practical position. On the contrary, increasing human numbers, freedoms, and living standards accelerates the rate of invention, and thus humanity's ability to deal with any problem. That's the liberal, moral, rational, and practical program for advancing the human condition. It's also the winning political answer to both the brown and green anti-humanists. Immigrants and free enterprise, together, are what made America great and they both need each other.

To see clearly what the Liberal Party needs to oppose, it is useful to examine what freedom's most dedicated enemies are for. Aleksandr Dugin is one of the principal philosophical theoreticians of totalitarianism internationally, and his publications are regularly featured in such American identitarian outlets as Radix (Dugin's English language translator is the wife of American alt-right leader and Radix publisher Richard Spencer). While he greatly admires Nazism, Dugin's "Fourth Political Theory" seeks to transcend traditional Nordic racism's self-limited market appeal by proposing multi-centered tribal fascism, and allying it with other anti-liberal ideologies including communism but also ecologism in a new synthesis to counter the liberal ideas of individualism, intrinsic rights, and universal human dignity. It is the raising of "blood and soil" over "all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights;" of animal instinct over human reason; of the id over the superego; of greed and lust over justice and love. This is the metaphysics of tyranny.

James Madison said, "If men were angels, government would be unnecessary." The corollary to this is that if men were beasts, freedom would be unacceptable. Dugin understands this. So like Circe, he seeks to use the sorceries of tribal and ecologic anti-humanism not merely to weaken and break up the Western alliance, but to turn men into unreasoning beasts, the better to end the specter of liberty everywhere.

This is the enemy we now face. Encouraged, supported, and in some cases directed by the Kremlin, the green, red, and brown rainbow alliance of tyranny is on the march across much of the globe. In Europe, the socialists and environmentalists mismanaging the European Union are discrediting the dream of a united Europe, providing the opening for Moscow-backed tribalist parties to break up and take over the continent. This effort is being further helped by a concerted campaign of economic sabotage by the green and red parties whose anti-fracking initiatives are making sure that Europe remains dangerously dependent on Russian natural gas, and by the armed forces of Russia and its Iranian and Syrian allies, whose ethnic cleansing campaigns are stampeding millions of refugees into Europe to rapidly accelerate the rise to power of the Kremlin's brown fifth column.

America should be opposing this offensive against the free world with might and main, but under the mis-leadership of the partisan careerists who dominate both major parties it is not doing so. On the contrary, with the near unanimous support of the Democrats in Congress, the Obama administration helped to fund Iran's brutal offensive in Syria to the tune of 100 billion dollars released in accord with the terms of its nuclear deal, and failed to effectively assist Syrian rebel forces fighting the Iran-Assad-Russia alliance on the ground. Not only that, the Obama administration opened the door to overt aggression by failing to honor America's treaty commitment to defend the territorial integrity of Ukraine, and by reducing U.S. Army troop strength in Europe to 30,000 men, an amount less than one-tenth that of its late Cold War strength and smaller than the New York City Police Department.

Until recently the Republicans chose to criticize the Democrats for their foreign policy weakness, but the new Trump administration promises to be even worse. While the Obama administration offered only feeble help for the Syrian rebels, Trump has said he supports the Assad-Iran-Russia war effort. While Obama limited the U.S response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine to ineffective economic sanctions, Trump has offered justification for Putin's attack. Furthermore, notwithstanding his U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley's Samantha Power-like grand verbal denunciations of Putin's aggression, Trump has dismissed criticisms of the Russian strongman's murderous regime across the board. While Obama cut American military power in Europe to mere tripwire levels, Trump has offered to render even that symbolic level of support to Europe's defense moot, by stating that he sees no reason to be bound by the NATO treaty's requirement to come to member states' aid should any come under attack.

Under such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the Kremlin chose to interfere in the American election with both covert and overt actions to assist the rise of Donald Trump. What is disheartening, however, is the degree to which the Republican Party has rallied to deny or dismiss this intervention in America's internal affairs, an outrage which verges on an act of war against the U.S. homeland itself. And while the Democrats are currently making much of Trump's Putinophilia, an honest recollection of their own behavior prior to the Trump candidacy makes it difficult to take their newfound ardor in the defense of the West seriously. That said, we now have a president whose self-interest apparently requires him to suppress or silence the nation's intelligence agencies that have brought to light the enemy conspiracy on his behalf, and a majority party in as much as it remains a party bound to support him in this endeavor.

This is a five-alarm fire. America needs a new party, one that will in the present emergency bravely rise to the defense of the republic and the grand alliance of the free nations which it leads. It needs a party of economic sanity, which will not destroy the basis of our livelihood through either a combination of trade war and immigration restriction, or top-down suppression of business. It needs a party of humanity, which rejects tribalism, not only for the harm it inflicts upon its targets but for the moral and intellectual degradation it infests within the minds and hearts of its converts. It needs a party of liberty, one which will defend not only the borders of freedom, but the ideas and institutions that make freedom possible.

In short, America needs a Liberal Party. Scattered, the forces of liberalism are weak. Together, we may yet prevail.

Dr. Robert Zubrin is president of Pioneer Energy of Lakewood, Colo., and the author of The Case for Mars. The paperback edition of his latest book, Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism, was recently published by Encounter Books.

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America Needs a Liberal Party - Reason.com - Reason (blog)

A fundraising club linked to the hard-right of the Liberal Party is obscuring its donors by failing to make disclosures to the Australian Electoral Commission as required by law, according to a political donations expert.

The Deakin 200 Club was launched in June 2014 by Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, along with right-aligned federal MPs Kevin Andrews, Josh Frydenberg and Michael Sukkar, and then Victorian Liberal Party president Tony Snell.

With membership about $200 a year, the club also hosts regular fundraising events, attracting luminaries such as businesswoman and football identity Susan Alberti.

Former prime minister Tony Abbott will be guest of honour at a club dinner this month, with attendance costing up to $500 per person.

Rising right-wing recruiter Marcus Bastiaan is organising the dinner, which is being promoted to conservative elements of the Victorian branch, Fairfax Media reported last month, and will raise money for Deakin and other marginal seats.

The club's current members as disclosed on their parliamentary registers of interests include conservative Liberals Sukkar, Victorian MLC Richard Della-Riva and federal MP Scott Ryan.

Senator Ryan is also Special Minister of State, with responsibility for the AEC, including the integrity of the disclosure integrity regime.

Despite its fundraising activities, the club has never lodged a disclosure as a so-called "associated entity" of a political party, unlike similar clubs run by candidates and their supporters.

Josh Frydenberg's Kooyong 200 Club raised $464,000 in 2015-16, its disclosure as an associated entity on the AEC website shows. Kelly O'Dwyer's Higgins 200 Club raised $263,000.

A Liberal insider estimated the Deakin Club raised a "six-figure sum" annually.

Assistant Treasurer Michael Sukkar, the member for Deakin, denied the club was an associated entity, and said funds raised by the club were managed by the Victorian division of the Liberal Party.

"It's a club/brand for Deakin ... to fundraise on behalf of the Victorian Division of the Liberal Party," said Mr Sukkar's spokesperson Joshua Bonney, a former Glen Eira council candidate and evangelical churchgoer who is organising a cocktail event for the club in April.

"All funds are therefore reported in the Victorian Division of the Liberal Party's return in the usual way," Mr Bonney said.

Under Australian electoral law, only donations over $13,200 need to be disclosed. The Liberal Party disclosure does not identify any donations made to the Deakin fundraising body, nor the amount the club donates to the party itself. It does identify donations made by the Higgins and Kooyong clubs.

Mr Sukkar said the Victorian Liberal party had ruled out the establishment of new stand-alone fundraising entities in the wake of a row over the party's control of funds raised by the Higgins 200 Club in 2010. A similar row between the party and Liberal investment vehicle the Cormack Foundation is currently ongoing.

However political donations expert Joo-Cheong Tham said the club's activities clearly fell within the definition of an "associated entity" under the Commonwealth Electoral Act.

"It's not up to the Victorian Liberal Party to decide which organisations are associated entities and which are not," said the associate professor of the University of Melbourne Law School. "That is determined by the application of the law and the objective facts about the activities and the objectives of those organisations."

Meanwhile the rise of candidate-linked fundraising entities such as the Deakin Club showed the creeping Americanisation of our political finance system, said law expert Graeme Orr, where individuals increased their internal party power and leverage through their fund-raising prowess.

"[What we are seeing is] the American phenomenon, of well-connected candidates in wealthy districts building treasure chests to increase their factional or ideological influence in the party, versus the Australian tradition of strong, centrally controlled parties," said Professor Orr, from the University of Queensland.

Simon Frost, state director of the Liberal Party, said the Victorian division "and its associated entities and electorate conferences conduct robust auditing and reporting of contributions, in accordance with relevant laws."

Senator Ryan denied any involvement with the management of the Deakin 200 club, through a spokesperson, and directed operational queries to "the club's executive," and disclosure queries to the Liberal Party and the AEC.

An AEC spokesperson said as the status of various associations or groups arises from time to time, the commission "addresses issues directly with the entity concerned."

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The right-wing Liberal club hiding donors and building conservative clout - The Age

Bishop Carroll led throughout on their way to a state clinching win at the Big House in Liberal Friday night. Carroll, who went 20-5 and took third at state last year beat LHS 40-30. The Lady Redskins had a rough night offensively struggling against Carrolls press in the first half. Carroll also gained a lot of offensive rebounds in the first half.

Carroll led 10-6 after a quarter and 24-13 at the half. Liberals push came in the third quarter when LHS cut the Carroll lead to 28-23 with 1:38 to go in the third. The Lady Eagles led by as many as 13 (36-23) on the way to the win. LHS was 4-4 at the foul line while Carroll was 8-22. BCHS made 7-16 threes and LHS was 4-15.

Bishop Carroll held Jada Mickens to two points in her final game. Reyna Gonzalez led LHS with eight. LHS finished 17-5 while Bishop Carroll is 18-4 and going to state.

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Bishop Carroll Holds Down Liberal - KSCB News.net

In a truly open contest, writes Don Macpherson, Yolande James would be at a disadvantage against Alan DeSousa. Pierre Obendrauf / Montreal Gazette

Nobody comes out ofthis weeks DeSousa affair looking good.

Start with Alan DeSousa himself, who sayshes a victim of character assassination in the federal Liberal partys mysterious refusal to allow him to seek its nomination for the April 3 by-election in the Montreal riding of St-Laurent.

Then theres Yolande James, the star candidate who has been made to look as though the party Establishment, which is reported to favour her for the nomination, doesnt believe she could beat DeSousa in a fair fight.

And last but not least theres Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose vauntednew style of politics has again been exposed as merely cosmetic.

In addition to participating in pay-for-access fundraising events, Trudeau has at least tolerated the repeated apparent rigging of theopen nominations of his partys candidates that he promised.

When he ran for the Liberal leadership in 2013, Trudeau promised that all the partys candidates would be chosen by votes of their constituents. Since he became leader, however, there have been several instances when would-be candidates complained that the party meddled in the nominating process before the vote.

For example, in the Toronto-area riding of Markham Thornhill, where another by-election will be held April 3, the party hastily and retroactively cut off registration for the vote after a member of Trudeaus staff became the first potential candidate to enter. This stopped other would-be candidates from registering their supporters.

In St-Laurent, the partys national candidate-vetting committee informed DeSousa this week that his name would not be on the ballot, for reasons that remain unexplained.

DeSousa has been borough mayor inSt-Laurent since 2001, and its public knowledge that in 2013, the boroughs offices were raided by UPAC, the provincial anti-corruption squad.

Four years later, however, DeSousa has not been charged with anything. And he told me he received encouragement to seek the nomination at all levels of the Liberal party, from the riding executive up to the prime ministers office.

That, however, was before James confirmed her decision to run.

DeSousa wasnt scared off by the prospect of having to face the former Quebec Liberal minister, whose potential candidacy had already been floated before DeSousa announced his.

James is an unproven campaigner, even though she was elected to the National Assembly four times. She was never seriously tested, since she ran in a safe Liberal riding, and her majorities were smaller than those of the previous Liberal MNA.

Still, James would be a lock to win the by-election in St-Laurent, which is such a safe ridingfor the Liberals that the real election thereis the one for theirnomination.

In a truly open contest, however, James wouldbe at a disadvantage against DeSousa.

Hes won several contested elections in his 31 years in localpolitics. And that suggests he could count on an established network in the riding to sign up supporters and get them to a nominating meeting.

James is from outside St-Laurent. And she brings some heavy political baggage with her.

In provincial politics, James was best known for campaigningagainst the niqab. As minister of immigration and cultural communities in the former Charest government,she was a leading supporter of proposedlegislation that would have denied public services to women wearing suchveils. And she had an immigrant woman expelled from a French course for refusingto remove her niqab.

In the three years since James left provincial politics, shesays her thinking has evolved. Coincidentally, St-Laurent was 17-per-cent Muslim at the 2011 census.

If James is such a weak candidate that she needs to be carried by the party to a nomination tainted by a backroom fix, then it would be better if Trudeau did what old-style leadershave always done. That is, he should name the candidate himself.

It would be no less democratic. Andit would be cleaner, and more honest.

dmacpgaz@gmail.com

twitter.com/DMacpGaz

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Don Macpherson: The messy Liberal nomination fight in St-Laurent - Montreal Gazette

Victorian Opposition Leader Matthew Guy's bid to tackle his party's gender gap has been a given a much-needed boost, with a woman finally preselected into a safe Liberal seat ahead of next year's state election.

After Liberal preselections in Brighton, Nepean, Narracan and Burwood were all won by men in recent months, 37-year-old Goodyear procurement manager Bridget Vallence bucked the trend when she was chosen on Saturday as the new candidate to replace retiring MP Christine Fyffe in the outer eastern seat of Evelyn.

The well-regarded Liberal nudged out a competitive field including Ms Fyffe's son, Scott before eventually beating key rival Grant Hutchinson (who is aligned with controversial Liberal numbers man Marcus Baastian) in the final round, 39 votes to 31.

"This sends the right message to the party," one senior parliamentarian told The Sunday Age. "Yes, we need more women, but we also need quality women. This is a great result."

Ms Vallence's victory is viewed as an important win for Mr Guy, who warned Liberals last year it was time to "get serious" about narrowing the gender gap and announced an ambitious goal to lift his party's female representation in parliament by a further 10 per cent at every election.

However in the four consecutive preselections that have taken place since, the male candidate has prevailed: Brighton was won by former Napthine government staffer James Newbury; Nepean was won by Russell Joseph, the 56-year-old electorate officer to retiring MP Martin Dixon; Narracan was won by 65-year-old incumbent MP Gary Blackwood; and Burwood was won by sitting MP Graham Watt.

After the convention, Mr Guy said: "Bridget will be a tremendous candidate for the Liberal Party in Evelyn. I'm proud to see the Liberal Party select someone of such calibre and promise as our Evelyn candidate."

The under-representation of women in parliament has long been a problem in Australia, which has low levels of female participation compared with other developed democracies.

In a bid to tackle the issue, the University of Melbourne recently developed a new course, Pathways To Politics, to encourage more women to get involved. Following the success of a pilot last year, the program was launched formally last Tuesday.

Under the program, which is modelled on a similar Harvard initiative, participants are given 12 weeks of intensive training on everything from negotiating the party machine, to speech writing, to knowing when to run. Past guest speakers have included Tony Abbott's former chief of staff Peta Credlin and former governor-general Quentin Bryce, while Ms Vallence is one of its first graduates.

Dr Andrea Carson, the academic coordinator of the program, said the aim was to lift female representation across all levels of politics: local government, state parliament, and federal parliament.

"It's about women thinking that politics is not outside their reach," she said. "It also offers very practical skills about how to negotiate the boys club and let's face it, that boys club does exist, particularly with parties that don't have quotas or targets."

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Liberal preselection for Evelyn: Bridget Vallence boosts Guy's gender targets - The Age