Mark Latham: Gender politics burning down the house

IT is Left-wing gender theory gone mad when in NSW, it is now Fire and Rescue policy to apply a 50/50 gender quota to the recruitment of firefighters.

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In my southwest Sydney community, barely a day passes without people asking me: What’s gone wrong with our country, whatever happened to common sense in politics?

These are good questions, reflecting the single greatest tension in Australian public life today, between theory and reality.

Political elites have a theoretical view of society, wanting to impose their values and beliefs on what we should be.

This is what we call social engineering.

Mark Latham.

The public is much more practical, believing that in reality there is no point in pursuing changes that conflict with the basic laws of human nature.

For most people, what matters is what works.

Take, for example, the question of physical strength.

Nature has made our species so that men are stronger than women.

This is a reality we accept in most parts of life.

In the world of sport, who would pretend that female footy players could match it with men?

A battle-of-the-sexes game in the NRL or AFL would result in an all-male team scoring hundreds of points and an all-female team zero.

That’s the simple reality of men at that level enjoying a massive advantage in size and strength.

Why then, in jobs dependent on the exercise of physical power, is there a political push to recruit women in equal numbers to men?

This is left-wing gender theory gone mad. In NSW, it is now Fire and Rescue policy to apply a 50/50 gender quota to the recruitment of firefighters. Regardless of physical strength and prowess, for every man who gets a job there must be a corresponding woman.

If you are overcome by smoke ­inhalation and need to be carried out, you want a strong man for the job. Picture Cameron Richardson

A male applicant who narrowly misses out on a position can have test results far superior to the weakest female recruit yet still be excluded. Merit has gone out the window.

With major Australian employment sectors now enjoying majority female representation (such as GP doctors, lawyers, teachers and federal public servants) why do we need to reserve spots for women in emergency services?

If your family is trapped in a car accident, you want the best available firefighter to rescue them, not a gender quota.

If you are overcome by smoke ­inhalation in a burning building and need to be carried out, you want a strong man for the job — not someone hired on the basis of having a vagina.

Sorry, but this is the reality of life-and-death situations.

There is no room for sentimentality or political correctness.

Fire and Rescue NSW (FRNSW) recognises this fact in its Health and Safety standards but not in its recruitment testing.

The agency has developed a split personality.

It wants new recruits to be able to “drag a collapsed firefighter to safety on their own”, yet to accommodate female applicants, the Physical Aptitude Test has been reduced from a 90kg dummy drag over 20 metres to the relatively easy task of carrying a 30kg weight for 10 metres. Official safety standards require “the use of fire rescue ladders which are 10.5 metres long, 49kg and awkward to manoeuvre, requiring a high degree of upper body strength”.

Yet the ladder test has been watered down, with one participant describing it as “a hopeless joke that even weak people can pass”.

In a further concession to female applicants, the separate test component for Mechanical Reasoning has been removed, as has the Shuttle Run Assessment.

The gender warriors making these changes are trying to overcome the way in which past tests have exposed big differences in male and female performance.

In the first round of the 2013 Work Safety test, for instance, 47 women scored below 50 per cent but not a single man.

As a senior FRNSW officer told me: “The tests have been changed so women are far less likely to fail.

“It’s been rigged for the sake of politics.”

Firefighters from Fire and Rescue NSW in action. We are unsure how tough their particular training regimen was. Picture: Riverstone Fire & Rescue

The Fire Brigade has turned itself inside out with PR spin, pretending that employment quotas can be introduced without compromising public safety.

When announcing the new recruitment system to coincide with International Women’s Day in March last year, then commissioner Greg Mullins said: “The overwhelmingly large number of male applicants and the staged processes we employed (in the past) had the unintended consequence of disadvantaging female applicants.”

Mullins continued: “Changes will be made to address this imbalance.”

In an amazing piece of Orwellian doublespeak, he claimed that: “Merit selection will determine the best candidates for the job, regardless of gender, but we will deliver equity in the number of male and female firefighters.”

How can the selection process be merit-based if gender-based outcomes have been predetermined?

How can men easily outperform women in the Work Safety and Physical Aptitude tests but not be awarded extra positions?

Commissioner Greg Mullins. Picture: Toby Zerna

The reality of emergency services is that none of us know when we might need them.

This is why Fire and Rescue should never be made into a political plaything.

The only policy that matters is the selection of the best applicants and the creation of the very best fire brigade for saving lives and property. As citizens and taxpayers, we should be concerned that public safety in NSW is being compromised for the sake of radical gender theory. Incredibly, this is happening under a Liberal and National Party state government.

Mike Baird sent them down the path of social engineering and under Gladys Berejiklian nothing has changed. When it comes to implementing the dangerous theories of the elites, the Coalition is no different to Labor and the Greens.