Attorney-General Christian Porter is on leave after he vehemently denied allegations he raped a 16-year-old girl when he was a teenager at a Sydney debating competition. A male Liberal staffer was sacked after videos emerged of him filming himself masturbating over a female MP’s desk.

In an emotional press conference on Tuesday, Mr Morrison said he was “very open” to the idea of introducing quotas for female MPs.

Mr O’Brien said female representation in the party was “not good enough” and the Liberals must “do better”.

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“I want to see more women voting Liberal, I want to see more women joining the Liberal Party and I want to see more women elected to represent the Liberal Party,” Mr O’Brien said on Wednesday afternoon.

“Am I open to quotas? Yes, I am. I’m open to anything which will achieve the outcome ... it’s ultimately a matter for the party organisation to make those changes. The changes need to be made and I’m completely up for debate and conversation about what the nature of those changes should be.

“Where we are at the moment is not good enough and I want to see us do better.”

The Age called the Liberal Party’s seven female MPs, and only Evelyn MP Bridget Vallence did not respond to calls.

Upper house MP Bev McArthur said quotas were a “form of active discrimination”.

“Taking quotas to their logical extension, should an election result be overturned if a man defeats a woman merely to achieve a balance of sexes in the parliament?” Ms McArthur said. “Which talented man is going to step aside in the name of virtue signalling? Do women want to be selected on gender tokenism?”

Georgie Crozier said: “There are fabulous strong women and our party wants more women in Parliament”, while Cindy McLeish said there was no question that more women were needed in Parliament. “This is a discussion we must have.”

Louise Staley said: “As somebody who has tried everything, quite frankly, to get more women into Parliament, we now need to seize this moment and deliver.”

Roma Britnell said: “We must do whatever we can [to get better outcomes]”, while Wendy Lovell also added: “It’s clear that what we’ve been doing hasn’t been working and we need to look at how we get more women into Parliament.”

A senior Liberal source said the party had been arguing for 50 years about quotas, “and in the last 10 years we’ve had how many bloody meetings, mentoring, women’s leadership groups, women’s preselection things have we had?” The source added, “enough’s enough”.

Mr Baillieu said the party shouldn’t be shy in exploring options to introduce quotas.

“I don’t want to dictate how to do it, but it’s possible,” he said. “You can look at retiring members and allocate some of those seats [to new candidates] in advance, or introduce quotas for three or four state and federal elections combined and you keep it going until you get to 50-50 [gender equality].”

Former Victorian Liberal MP Andrea Coote, who headed the Women to Win group in 2016, said the Liberal Party needed to be “absolutely and utterly” debated in the current climate.

“The notion of quotas is a very emotive concept for the Liberal Party, but I feel it needs to be heartily debated and I’m really pleased to see the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition openly discussing it,” Ms Coote said.

In the federal arena, senior frontbenchers Marise Payne, Karen Andrews, Sussan Ley and Melissa Price along with a number of female MPs also said it was time to consider quotas.

NSW federal Liberal MP Trent Zimmerman said he wanted the party to adopt mandatory quotas of 50 per cent female candidates on Senate tickets then look to boost women in the lower house, but other male MPs on the government’s benches were reluctant to advocate for a formal policy, with many pointing out their grassroots members would not agree.

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Labor introduced quotas for women running in winnable seats in the mid-1990s, which has led to almost half the federal caucus being female compared with just a quarter for the Coalition.

At a state level, Labor’s caucus is 48 per cent women, compared with the Liberals’ 22 per cent.

However, it would likely be more difficult for the Liberals to establish female quotas than the Labor Party. The ALP often picks its candidates in deals between factional operatives, meaning those officials can work to ensure enough females are picked. But Liberal candidates are generally are chosen in grassroots local preselections, where a field of candidates are voted on by local branch members.

Individual state branches of the Liberal Party have the power to implement changes such as quotas. The reform would likely need to be voted on at a meeting of the party’s state council, and would likely face stiff resistance from sections of the party.