Since the recent Queensland election, we have a situation where the NSW Parliament has the lowest proportion of female parliamentarians in Australia. One in four parliamentarians (24 per cent) are women. This low participation rate is often reported in shocked surprise but no further analysis occurs.
The 2011 state election delivered NSW a seriously women-deficient Parliament where 14 out of 34 Labor MPs were women but only 17 out of a massive 88 Coalition MPs were female. This translates to 41 per cent of Labor MPs are women compared to a lowly 19 per cent of Coalition MPs.
Sometimes individual elections throw up strange results. So an even more damaging result for the conservative side of politics is that a recent academic survey of all parliaments in Australia revealed that of the 822 state and federal parliamentarians, the ALP had achieved 42 per cent female representation whereas the Coalition had achieved only 21 per cent.
Why is this so? It is because the ALP adopted (slightly reluctantly) an affirmative action rule in 1994 which provided for National Executive intervention unless there were women candidates in 35 per cent of winnable seats ... rarely used but very effective. This was later changed to the present "unisex" rule which mandates that 40 percent of candidates must be women, 40 per cent must be men and 20 per cent can be either sex. You can imagine the jokes, but as a serious anti-discrimination measure, it works.
Labor women were lambasted by Liberal women who told us that affirmative action was demeaning and that they, the Liberals, would advance their women through other means. Bronwyn Bishop said as recently as 2013 that affirmative action would entrench women as "permanent second class citizens".
They talked about the evils of quotas and targets and told us that "merit" was the only way forward. Well, Liberal women must lack a lot of "merit" to be in the position they are in at the moment. Only one in five Liberal parliamentarians is a woman. All six women premiers have been Labor and of course federal Labor had Julia Gillard as prime minister, while the Coalition had Tony Abbott's infamous first cabinet with a sole woman.
The main myth that the Liberal women have fallen for is that they must get their positions "on merit". Julie Bishop has often used the phrase and I cringe when I hear this excuse for inaction. What is merit? Especially as regards a political position it could mean anything. In 1988 Clare Burton wrote a ground-breaking monograph Redefining Merit which challenged the whole idea of "merit" and pointed out that it was mainly middle-class white men choosing people for positions who looked very like themselves.
Merit for a political position may mean a whole lot of different things. It might mean being able to speak on your feet, it might mean being able to get a consensus or being able to read political briefs quickly. It might mean being able to drink someone under the table, it might mean dressing well or working hard. It can mean a whole lot of things but it doesn't often mean coming top of your class. I often used to joke that if merit meant academic achievement then I should have been Prime Minister because I was obviously much better qualified than John Howard or Kevin Rudd.
Some Liberal women have seen this situation as a serious problem for their party, and actually advocated affirmative action. Former Liberal Senator Judith Troeth wrote an interesting article suggesting some form of quota system in 2010.
However other Liberal women, such as NSW MP Gladys Berejiklian believe it is up to the men. "The key is having male champions. Things won't change unless men, as well as women, support change." Sorry Gladys, your men are 20 years behind Labor men and they were slow enough!
The 2011 state election delivered NSW a seriously women-deficient Parliament where 14 out of 34 Labor MPs were women but only 17 out of a massive 88 Coalition MPs were female. This translates to 41 per cent of Labor MPs are women compared to a lowly 19 per cent of Coalition MPs.
Sometimes individual elections throw up strange results. So an even more damaging result for the conservative side of politics is that a recent academic survey of all parliaments in Australia revealed that of the 822 state and federal parliamentarians, the ALP had achieved 42 per cent female representation whereas the Coalition had achieved only 21 per cent.
Why is this so? It is because the ALP adopted (slightly reluctantly) an affirmative action rule in 1994 which provided for National Executive intervention unless there were women candidates in 35 per cent of winnable seats ... rarely used but very effective. This was later changed to the present "unisex" rule which mandates that 40 percent of candidates must be women, 40 per cent must be men and 20 per cent can be either sex. You can imagine the jokes, but as a serious anti-discrimination measure, it works.
Labor women were lambasted by Liberal women who told us that affirmative action was demeaning and that they, the Liberals, would advance their women through other means. Bronwyn Bishop said as recently as 2013 that affirmative action would entrench women as "permanent second class citizens".
They talked about the evils of quotas and targets and told us that "merit" was the only way forward. Well, Liberal women must lack a lot of "merit" to be in the position they are in at the moment. Only one in five Liberal parliamentarians is a woman. All six women premiers have been Labor and of course federal Labor had Julia Gillard as prime minister, while the Coalition had Tony Abbott's infamous first cabinet with a sole woman.
The main myth that the Liberal women have fallen for is that they must get their positions "on merit". Julie Bishop has often used the phrase and I cringe when I hear this excuse for inaction. What is merit? Especially as regards a political position it could mean anything. In 1988 Clare Burton wrote a ground-breaking monograph Redefining Merit which challenged the whole idea of "merit" and pointed out that it was mainly middle-class white men choosing people for positions who looked very like themselves.
Merit for a political position may mean a whole lot of different things. It might mean being able to speak on your feet, it might mean being able to get a consensus or being able to read political briefs quickly. It might mean being able to drink someone under the table, it might mean dressing well or working hard. It can mean a whole lot of things but it doesn't often mean coming top of your class. I often used to joke that if merit meant academic achievement then I should have been Prime Minister because I was obviously much better qualified than John Howard or Kevin Rudd.
Some Liberal women have seen this situation as a serious problem for their party, and actually advocated affirmative action. Former Liberal Senator Judith Troeth wrote an interesting article suggesting some form of quota system in 2010.
However other Liberal women, such as NSW MP Gladys Berejiklian believe it is up to the men. "The key is having male champions. Things won't change unless men, as well as women, support change." Sorry Gladys, your men are 20 years behind Labor men and they were slow enough!
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