Meritocracy? Looks more like mindless hostility to me, boys | David Penberthy

Australia’s conservatives need to wake up and smell the roses when it comes to the way women are treated, promoted and recognised, writes David Penberthy.

Australia has had 28 governors-general. Of them, just one has been a woman.

But consider yourself warned as a disturbing pattern is emerging.

It was announced this week that a SECOND woman will be filling the role.

A second one!

If this alarming trend continues, Australia might find that by the year 2050, 10 per cent of its chief vice-regal officers have been of the female persuasion.

Oh for the good old days when the closest a lady got to the head office at Yarralumla was when she toddled in holding a tray of Milk Arrowroots before making herself scarce.

Australia’s conservatives need to wake up and smell the roses when it comes to the way women are treated, promoted and recognised.

Their mindless hostility to any suggestion of gender parity is probably the best thing the left of politics has got going for it in an electoral sense right now.

The reason for this is simple – it is seriously offensive to the 50 per cent of voters who have spent centuries being told they’re not smart enough to do the same jobs as men, often by men who are less talented than they are.

Samantha Mostyn has been announced as the next Governor General of Australia - here with partner Simeon Beckett. Picture: PMO

It is actually in the political interests of Labor and the Greens for the conservative side of politics to keep harumphing into their cognacs about the sacrosanct concept of the meritocracy. Theirs is of course a selective adherence to meritocratic principles.

It ignores the ironic fact that many of these men are themselves of limited merit and would not pass a genuine talent-based test for anything.

They have not all got to where they are “through good honest slog”.

They’ve often done so because they were born into wealth, benefit from the undiscerning networks that come with elite schooling and are shielded from real performance-based scrutiny by dint of being cloistered in male-dominated or male-only institutions, at clubs, on boards and in workplaces.

Here, even the dull can prosper, especially when 50 per cent of the population can’t get its foot in the door.

There was a come-in-spinner quality to the outrage generated by the appointment of business executive and gender equality campaigner Sam Mostyn as our next GG.

I have no issue with people criticising Mostyn’s appointment given her historic links to the Labor Party.

It is fair for people to take issue with her advocacy for a Voice and hostility to Australia Day given the majority view clearly swings the other way on those intertwined questions.

She will have to think long and hard before giving Australia anything resembling a free five-year lecture about how she is right, and most people are wrong, on these questions.

People are also within their rights to question her republicanism.

You can say by way of understatement that her new job spec jars somewhat with the concept of severing ties with the monarchy.

But the gender attacks on Mostyn are just plain dumb.

The idea that her appointment is a token gesture ignores her considerable business record. It also ignores the century-plus of complete male domination of the governor-general’s role, not on the basis of talent but connections and allegiance.

We have had many good governors general in the past.

We also had one who was a top hat-wearing drunk who dismissed a democratically elected (if incompetent) government.

Governor-General Sir John Kerr, pictured with Queen Elizabeth II in 1977, did not possess half of the talent of Sam Mostyn. Picture: Getty Images

We had an old Labor mate who got the job largely as a square-up for being robbed of the party’s leadership on the cusp of probable victory.

We also had a doddery priest who famously mused that a female survivor of clergy abuse may have actually initiated the whole thing herself.

To this day many conservatives thinks this man was dealt an unfair hand.

They’re the same harumphers who are now foaming at the mouths about a woman – a woman! – being installed to the role in an act of apparent tokenism.

Sam Mostyn brings more capacity and compassion and likeability to the role than the three afore mentioned blokes combined.

But here’s the thing – she also refreshes and modernises the role, because she looks like and indeed is from that one part of the community that so often is overlooked for positions of authority.

The female part of the community.

One of the most important gender shifts in Australia happened in the late 1980s when the excellent community organisation Rotary decided to let women become members.

There were some clubs at the time that said Rotary would never recover from the change, that men would be reluctant to come because their wives might have suspicions they were consorting with other female members, or that the mere presence of women would be a handbrake on the networking part of being a Rotarian, and limit any ribaldry over drinks once the agenda items had been worked through.

Rotary is going stronger than ever, in large part because it has doubled its potential membership base, bringing in a whole bunch of new people whose talents were previously overlooked.

I have seen Mostyn disparaged as nothing more than a gender crusader in the corporate space.

Being a gender crusader has actually been an important full-time job for her, and for women in general, because none of these stuffy old boys’ clubs were going to give up their monopoly on power unchallenged.

Her role in doing that is comparable to that of Joan Kirner, whose crowning political achievement was to target and dismantle male factional and union domination within the ALP.

If you want to see what that looks like in political reality, my home state provides a good snapshot right now, with an ascendant Labor Government having 15 Lower House female MPs, and the Liberals having, drumroll….two.

The Left should hope that the conservatives don’t budge on these questions and keep attacking the likes of Mostyn.

With seven all-female Teal MPs in Canberra, thrust into power by fed-up, middle-class female voters, it should dawn on the Right that there’s another word which can be used interchangeably with its beloved “meritocracy”.

That word is: “Opposition”.

Originally published as Meritocracy? Looks more like mindless hostility to me, boys | David Penberthy