The former Liberal MP Jenny Ware says her party must implement gender quotas for candidates for office, warning the opposition “cannot get back into government” without putting forward candidates who are more reflective of the broader community.

Ware, who lost her seat of Hughes at the 2025 election, said it was “deeply embarrassing” that the Liberal party executive had not released its own review of the electoral wipeout, and which was then tabled in parliament by Anthony Albanese this week.

The review found there was a need for urgent change the party, Ware said. She accused some in the Liberal partyroom of having “wasted” 10 months destabilising the former leader Sussan Ley instead of acting on the review’s findings and formulating new policy, and said it was critical the party engaged more with women and multicultural Australia.

“The Australian people have told us they don’t like what the Liberal party looks like. They don’t like, overall, the candidates that we’re putting up,” Ware told Guardian Australia.

“I think it is now time that, federally, that we have quotas. Even if it’s just for the next two elections, even if we say we’re not going to entrench them longer term. But this is now at crisis point, and we, as a political party, have one job, and that is to win elections.”

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Ware was first elected in 2022, winning Hughes on a 57-43 margin, but was unexpectedly unsuccessful in 2025; her New South Wales seat was not on the target seats list for either major party, with one Labor campaigner reportedly calling their victorious David Moncrieff an “accidental” winner.

She claimed Liberal losses in the metropolitan seats of Menzies, Sturt and Banks, and their failure to win now-Teal seats like Bradfield, Kooyong and Wentworth, were “because of the federal campaign” run by Peter Dutton. In particular, Ware claimed the unpopular push to end work from home rules for public servants “killed me” in Hughes, and lamented a lack of policies on aged care or childcare, which she claimed could have helped gain support from families and working women.

Ware said she did not want her comments to be perceived as “sour grapes” but said the Liberal party needed to change its approach.

Ware is now on the board of Crohn’s Colitis Australia, as well as undertaking policy work in education, and will soon launch her own legal firm. She visited Parliament House this week, and said the difference between the Labor and Coalition benches was stark. There are just five Liberal women in the House of Representatives out of 28 MPs, after Ley’s resignation; while Labor’s caucus is more than half women.

“I saw contemporary, representative Australia on the Labor side … a group that were diverse in terms of age demographics, multicultural backgrounds, Indigenous Australians, a diversity of religion,” Ware said.

“I turned a mirror back on us, on our side and I saw largely middle-aged caucasian men with a sprinkling of middle-aged caucasian women … I saw no real multicultural diversity. I saw not a lot of diversity in age as well, and that is not reflective of modern Australia. We’ve never been less representative of Australians than the Liberal party currently is in the House of Representatives.”

The NSW Liberal state council meets on Saturday for the first time since the review became public, where the division will elect a new executive. Ware said she hopes the new executive will be open to considering quotas for future elections.

“The way that we have behaved in the past – without selecting female candidates into seats that are winnable, without selecting diverse candidates, without having policies – we have proven that that has not worked. The Labor party, on the other hand, have had quotas for 20 years,” she said.

“It’s been proven. They’ve won two successive elections now, and they’ve increased their majority. It is now time, the Liberal Party must do this as well. Otherwise we cannot get back into government.”

“Already almost one year has been wasted, tearing down the first female federal Liberal leader instead of uniting and using the time to speak with Australians and develop policies for the 2028 election.”