Jones and Little would have been goners
A the last election Labour got 34 MPs. 22 were male and 12 female. Under Labour’s proposed quota, the bottom five men on the list would have to have been placed below the next five women. So who would have been the lucky five women to have got in:
- Carol Beaumont
- Carmel Sepuloni
- Deborah Mahuta-Coyle
- Steve Chadwick
- Kate Sutton
The next after that is Josie Pagani and Lynette Stewart.
More interesting is who are the five men who would have been dumped:
- Raymond Huo
- Rajen Prasad
- Shane Jones
- Andrew Little
- Charles Chauvel
Next on the list to be dumped would be Clayton Cosgrove and David Parker!
This shows well the problems of quotas. You’d get gender equality, yet knock out a Maori, two Asians and a Pacific Islander which means less diversity in other areas. Diversity is important (well to me anyway), but you need to balance up many competing factors. A quota removes discretion and is a vote of no confidence in a party to be fair to women.
This may explain why David Shearer has said he against the quota and the man ban (it took him a day to decide though!)
Labour leader David Shearer has come out against proposed party rule changes that would ensure half of all its MPs were women by 2017 and would allow “women-only” candidate selections in some seats.
The proposed rule changes, to be decided at the party’s annual conference in November, would force the party’s list selection committee to ensure women would make up 45 per cent of the party’s caucus in 2014 and 50 per cent by 2017.
However, Shearer said targets, not quotas, was a better way to go.
Absolutely, which is National’s position also.
However just because Shearer and some MPs are against, does not mean it will fail. Quite the contrary. The Party President is a strong supporter of it, and they have been agreed to by the party’s ruling NZ Council – which Shearer is on. Activists could well vote to humiliate Shearer by voting for them in November.
One has to wonder did Shearer vote against them at the NZ Council meeting? If so, then he must have got rolled. If not, he has flip-flopped. Either way a leader not in great control of his party.