Even if gender quotas are part of the answer, they are still not the full answer. Employing more women is not the same as serving women better. | OPINION by Parnell Palme McGuinness
The numbers just underline a known problem, but they are still worth repeating. At the last election, 14 of the 18 seats that the Liberal Party lost were won by women representing other parties or political brands. That was enough for Senator Linda Reynolds to revive the idea that gender quotas will solve the party’s “woman problem”. As“Once again, proportionally fewer Liberal women were preselected … and eight out of 10 of elected Liberal members are men.
But I will leave the discussion on the pros and cons of quotas for the time being, having written about it in the. In any case, even if gender quotas are part of the answer, they are still not the full answer. Employing more women is not the same as serving women better. You only have to think about “the Chicago school of economics”, which refers to a particularly libertarian strain of economic thought developed and nurtured at Chicago University, to see that is nonsense. Left-wing ideas have not always been dominant on campus and their future dominance is not inevitable.
In response, the parties of the right have too often decried welfare dependency and the rise in social spending, before eventually giving in and matching the spending when electoral realities hit home. This is a twofold capitulation: it is both a betrayal of principle and a failure of imagination.