Annabelle Sheehan, now the CEO of the South Australian Film Corporation, dropped a rhetorical bomb to state a few realities.
‘I’m going to be a bit more about context and behind the scenes, and I want to start by talking about employment and affirmative action, because a lot of our ideas around change centre around affirmative action. The initial surge of action and politics around affirmative action occurred in the 1970s.’
For Sheehan, that affirmative action is now so undermined that campaigners apologise for deploying it, and they should not. History shows us why.
‘That means one thousand nine hundred and seventy years of affirmative action for men ran unabated. And it wasn’t just by using levers of policy and discussion – it was engineered, it was hard wired into employment law regarding jobs that women could and couldn’t do, and that married women could and couldn’t do and then had to give up.
‘So one of the things that I want to say is that men are not above affirmative action – they are the masters of it. They have chosen on the basis of gender for thousands of years and maybe they have some tips for us.
‘The other thing about affirmative action for me is that they didn’t really have a quota in mind, a fifty-fifty idea, they went for the full one hundred percent…
‘People talk about affirmative action and the quotas to redress this system and suddenly get really concerned about the merit selection process, as if it had been operating prior to this.
‘I would just ask, give me the definition of merit or excellence.’
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