Mathias Cormann, who will forever be known as the numbers man who didn’t do the numbers, has more unusable guidance for the Liberal Party. If the Liberal Party adheres to the views of a man who is out of step with Australia, it will continue to have a problem.

In an interview with the ABC’s Fran Kelly on Monday, Cormann evaded the question on gender equality and targets, even though it’s increasingly clear that members of his party, both men and women, are turning against these prehistoric Liberal Party values. It’s slow. Getting those people to speak on the record, unless they have nothing to lose, is hard. Andrew Bragg, touted by some as a near-certainty to win the Wentworth preselection, pulled out of the race on Monday saying the Liberals should have a woman candidate. That’s someone who had a lot to lose.

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Australian voters have already changed their minds about the importance of gender equality, according to one person who’s followed the beliefs of Australian voters for more than 30 years. Ian McAllister says Australians clearly value equality and have become much more tolerant and small "l" liberal on a whole range of cultural attitudes, including Indigenous people and the environment. Those trends are accelerating and McAllister attributes the changes to the fast expansion of higher education and the slow decline of the conservative influence of religion.

But one thing is clear. Those changes are not just held by those who vote Liberal. McAllister, who is co-director of the Australian Election Study and distinguished professor of political science at ANU, has been tracking voter sentiment since 1987. At the last election, the survey asked a question about gender quotas for the first time – and 58 per cent of Australians supported them; many more women than men, of course. Nearly half of Liberal voters supported quotas – but that pattern of values is not reflected in the political party itself.