Nanny state meets the matriarchy

If Liberal leader Sussan Ley is successful in getting more women into parliament Australia will join an exclusive club of six other nations where the number of women in the parliament is greater than 50%.

That's right, Australia will join Rwanda, Nicaragua, Cuba, Mexico, the United Arab Emirates, and Andorra, as the only countries where women will outnumber men in their legislatures. (Legislature might be a loose use of the word in some of those cases.)

That suggests that while Australia in the federal parliament doesn't have a gender problem, perhaps some of the individual parties that make up that parliament do, and not necessarily a female one.

The gender numbers in the federal parliament currently sit at 112 female to 114 male. In percentages that is 49.56% to 50.44%. Shift one from the male column to the female column and it will be a tie, and if you shift 2, then the girls win.

I'm sure Sussan expects to shift more than 2.

Is this a good thing?

Well, I'm not much into gender politics. I have four children – two girls and two boys – and I wish the best for each of them. I've had no interest in preferentially advancing the interests of my two girls and they don't appear to have needed it.

I was brought up in a household with three women and a frequently absent father (at sea, sometimes for months at an end, just to make that clear). There was never any favouritism that I recall, and both my sisters have had significant careers.

Oh, and mum was a Methodist deaconess before resigning to marry Dad, so a working professional woman.

So female empowerment just isn't a particular concern for me. None of the women I have seen up close has needed a quota.

But I do have a theory that things can get out of whack, and they certainly seem to be out of whack now in some of the parties.

The table below clearly shows this.

If the Coalition parties have a women problem, then the Greens, ALP, Independents, Jacqui Lambie Network, Australia's Voice, Centre Alliance, and the Country Liberal Party all have a man problem.

Perhaps Sussan Ley could have pointed this out to her inquisitors at the Press Club? If we are going to vote on the gender composition grounds of each party, then why would men, a minority, but close to 50% of the population, vote for anyone other than the Coalition?

And doesn't this lead inexorably to a draw? The left wants to avoid a culture war, so it says, but wouldn't this institutionalise a gender war with the victor being picked by a few "sex traitors" on either side?

But then, if sex composition is the determinative issue, women ought to bypass the ALP for the Greens, Teals and a slew of minor parties. They don't, for the simple reason that there are a lot of other considerations than sex.

If sex were the only consideration, then we could make a case that being female should be detrimental to a career in public office on the basis of the performance of those parties dominated by women.

Despite their female dominance, the Greens exhibit an ideological rigidity and policy recklessness that undermines the claim that more women necessarily leads to better governance.

The Teals are the most unbalanced by sex, and the most unbalanced. While campaigning for transparency and honesty in government they are a Trojan horse for commercial rent-seeking interests in the "renewables" industry.

Anthony Albanese and the ALP are the least competent federal government in memory. It seems a gender bias also manifests in milquetoast males and mediocre to disastrous leadership.

Of course, the people that advance these arguments based on sex don't really believe them. If they did, then 56% of the ALP ministry would be female. The actual figure is 55% boys in the total ministry - the inverse - although women do have a slight majority in the cabinet at 52%.

This seems a tacit admission that, based on the PM's HR decisions, the quota system has, on average, produced a less qualified type of female, despite the fact that he would leaning over backwards to put women in his ministry.

And why shouldn't we put a proper intersectionality lens on this? Last time I looked Aborigines were actually overrepresented in parliament, and from memory, they were more female than male.

Are there 12 Chinese in parliament, because they are 5.5% of the Australian population and proportionally should have 12.43 members in parliament? And how does Penny Wong count towards this? Maybe she could be the .43% that's rounded down. There should also be 7 Indians in parliament. I don't see them.

What about sexual preference? I think the Coalition might actually have the lead in out and proud members of parliament. Does this mean Labor has an LGBTIQ+ problem?

We should also probably include former work histories. I can't even find statistics for the percentage of the population which is union officials, but there sure are a heck of a lot of former ones in the parliamentary Labor party.

Off with their heads.

In Australia, voters elect representatives in single-member electorates. No party can ensure demographic balance without overriding local preselection autonomy - or worse, displacing competent candidates for the sake of optics.

It is another form of elitism, in this case "Mummy knows best". A representative democracy doesn't mean statistically representative, it means that people get to choose.

Are female majorities good? A brave question you might say, but it is just the reverse of the proposition that male majorities aren't good enough.

Here's something to think about.

It is generally thought that women are more risk averse than men, and more prone to be prescriptive and protective.

Does this creeping dominance by women explain the rise of safetyism, and some of our recent governance debacles, like locking whole populations up so they can avoid catching what turned-out to be a relatively mild, for most of us, airborne virus? Or forcing them to take a vaccine, whether they would or not?

Could it explain the regulations which are choking the life out of our productivity? Or the fragility of children, ring fenced from the risky play with dad and each other which is the foundation of a resilient adulthood?

Could it explain why Anthony Albanese is reluctant to spend any money on defence? Or even the extreme reaction of social and mainstream media to military action, particularly when children are hurt?

And when will we reach peak woman? In France they have seen this problem coming. Perhaps they are more numerate than us.

In 2013 they passed the Sauvadet Law which mandated that no more than 60% of appointments to senior positions in French public institutions could be of any gender.

In 2018 the City of Paris breached this law appointing 69% of women to senior positions and was fined. Rather than obey the law the Mayor decided to pay the fine and double down on her position.

This points to a troubling undercurrent. Female emancipation originally arose as a rebellion against the patriarchy in favour of equality of the sexes, but now it has overreached that position.

For many modern feminists equality is not the end game, dominance is. So we move from patriarchy, to matriarchy, or maybe something even worse. How many of this new breed of dominant woman is a matron? Perhaps this is something even more novel – the rise of the Feminarchy.

Whatever it is, and whatever you call it, it's not in Sussan Ley's interests to play that game. It leads to absurd conclusions and will inevitably lead to an opposite and more than equal reaction.

As a political leader her job is to run to where the ball will be, which means defending merit, standing up to fashionable nonsense, and rebuilding a coalition of voters - men and women alike - who seek competence, not meaningless balance.