Demands for Liberal gender quotas are an insult

GRASSROOTS party members don’t buy tokenism, and quotas are damaging for women who achieve on merit. Since when have conservatives kowtowed to identity politics madness, asks Miranda Devine.

SINCE when do conservatives demand equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity? That’s the province of socialists, and yet this madness has gripped the Liberal party, with open talk of gender quotas to increase female representation in Parliament.

As if Scott Morrison doesn’t have enough problems already.

The Liberal grassroots don’t buy such tokenism, in any case, as shown by the preselection of Dave Sharma in Wentworth, in defiance of the new PM’s expressed desire for a woman in the seat.

We see here that kowtowing to identity politics has delivered Morrison his first real setback as PM.

It also embarrassed the women who put themselves up for preselection. Even before the vote they had become damaged goods, regarded as token women, mere “quota girls”.

If one had won, the label would have dogged her. As it happened, the female frontrunner, Mary Lou Jarvis, Vice President of the NSW Liberal Party, managed just 29 votes out of 202 (or 201, depending on who was counting) in the first round. And when ScoMo’s choice, Katherine O’Regan, dropped out in the third round, just 5 of her 21 votes found their way to Jarvis, who ended up with 30 votes compared with Sharma’s eventual count of 119 at 1.30am on Friday.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Dave Sharma visit Bronte Beach in Sydney after Sharma was preselected as the Liberal Party candidate for Wentworth. (Pic: Joel Carrett/AAP)

Half the preselectors in Wentworth are women. Chances are that their hackles were raised by the suggestion they should vote on chromosome rather than merit. Women hate being patronised.

Gender quotas damage every woman who has achieved her role on merit. They are an insult to any woman who enters parliament. And they are a sure-fire recipe for electoral oblivion, more so on the conservative side of politics because they are antithetical to Liberal beliefs.

As the great free market economists Milton and Rose Friedman put it: “A society that puts … equality of outcome ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.”

We see where equality of outcome leads in an inane speech last week by Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins to the National Press Club in which she advised the Liberal Party to boost female numbers by enforcing “Special measures … to try to rectify past discrimination [and] targets with teeth that are public and people are accountable for.”

Hilariously, Jenkins cited “the work I did with Victoria police” as an example of the success of “targets with teeth”. Oh yes. Victoria Police has embraced gender equality with 50 per cent recruitment and promotion targets.

Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins advised the Liberal Party to use “special measures” to boost female numbers. (Pic: Mick Tsikas/AAP)

But when it comes to fighting crime, it is incapable of preventing violent home invasions, carjackings and “youth” riots unheard of in any other Australian city.

Great work, Kate!

The bottom line is that fewer women than men view federal politics as a desirable career. Otherwise, more than 24 per cent of federal Liberal MPs would be women and the Labor Party wouldn’t have to force 50 per cent representation through mandatory quotas.

If most women don’t want to become federal politicians, how do you force them into a career they don’t want?

Most women have children, which is actually necessary for the survival of our species, not an optional extra. And most women don’t want to outsource their mothering to strangers, as shown by ABS statistics that almost four in ten Australian women who are in the workforce choose to work part-time compared to five per cent of men, and one in five women work at home. Women take 95 per cent of primary parental leave used by non-public sector employees.

Most mothers want to raise their own children because they feel it’s the most worthwhile thing they will ever do. Raising good citizens is better for your community than being a backbencher for thirty years, or even a prime minister.

The other little secret about motherhood is that it’s enjoyable. Like everything worthwhile it entails hard work and sacrifice. But most women choose to be the primary caregivers, because that’s what they want and that’s what they’re good at.

That’s why more women than men choose not to go into high-powered, highly-paid, high-reward, high-prestige jobs that require 16-hour days, weekends on call and holidays interrupted.

Most women make that choice fairly easily because we don’t prize that sort of status as highly as do men.

For the Liberal party to achieve “equality of outcome” in gender, they will either have to force mothers to make different choices or promote from a smaller pool of childless women.

Perhaps, if they start their families early enough, women can enter parliament when their children are grown. Having a family is done and dusted in less than 20 years, maybe a third of a career.

Family-friendly policies, such as income splitting and removing housing taxes, which encourage women to have children earlier would enlarge the pool of available women.

In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban has fostered a pro-family culture with tax deductions for families with children and subsidies for families buying houses. Not only are Hungarian women more likely to get married than their Western European counterparts but they’re marrying younger.

Strengthening families is a surer path to success at the ballot box for Liberals than mimicking Labor’s gender quotas.