The latest Workplace Gender Equality targets are the quotas you have when you’re not having a quota. They walk, quack and look very much like quotas. The unstated difference between targets and quotas is merit. Targets, being aspirational and down the track, can be consistent with merit; quotas are not.

The Workplace Gender Equality Act has held its head high on the matter of merit since its inception in 1986. Merit has given it a fig leaf of respectability and neither side of politics has deviated. Until now, with Orwellian echoes, a quota has definitionally transformed into a target.