Monday, December 03, 2012

Truth column November 22

My November 22 Truth column is now on-line:

Delegates at last weekend’s Labour Party conference decided electorate committees should have a 50% female quota.

Electorate committees are the muscle behind the candidate. I chaired one for ACT. Had anyone instructed me to turn away a willing and capable male member because I didn’t have a female counterpart, I would have resigned. It’s loony. But these days, Labour is loony.


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1 comment:

Brendan McNeill said...

Labour has morphed from a workers party, into something that is a coalition of minority sectional interest groups including unions, feminists, gays, pacifica, oh and lets not forget their token Muslim. Mark Styen a political columnist once dryly observed that in the West, "Islam had become the new Gay". I guess that's why he's there.

I used to feel sorry for Phil Goff in the lead up to the most recent election when he would no doubt forlornly scan his caucus looking for MP's that genuinely reflected 'middle New Zealand'. West Coast MP Damian O'conner was really the only one, and he had made himself unpopular with the party by stating what was obvious even to the casual observer, that Labour had become dominated by Gays and Unionists (from memory) and there was no place for a red blooded Kiwi male.

The great irony was that at the election, in pure desperation, Damian was rehabilitated from the outer darkness where he had been cast by the party, and chosen to front their TV campaign opening advertisement. Proving of course that apart from Phil, whom the party had decided was an electoral liability, Damian was the only one who 'looked like us'.

Such deceitfulness deserves to be punished at the polls, and thankfully they were. I cannot think of a less desirable environment to work out a political career, gender equity or no gender equity.