Guess what? They didn't mean it!
By Kath Gelber
@column = Even Labor Party women are starting to criticise their party for not taking seriously the goal of filling 35% of winnable seats with women candidates by the year 2000. The ALP launched its 35% quota with fanfare last year, amid claims that this proved the ALP was better able to meet both the needs and the electoral expectations of Australian women.
@column = A quota system to achieve equity for women can play an important part in an overall campaign to combat the historical effects of sexism. When used in conjunction with education about the historical and social disadvantages faced by women, quotas can help start to reverse the effects of historical discrimination by allowing women to play roles in society otherwise denied to them.
@column = However, the campaign must be serious. The ALP's quota system appears to have been little more than an election stunt.
@column = Last week's nomination by ACTU president Martin Ferguson for preselection in the Victorian safe Labor seat of Batman highlighted the lack of seriousness with which the ALP is tackling the quota targets. Internal factional manoeuvring has ensured that a number of unions have come out in support of Ferguson, including the CFMEU and the Australian Services Union. Simon Crean has lent cabinet support to his ACTU successor, who is likely to step straight onto the front bench, as Crean himself did when he made the step into the federal parliamentary arena.
@column = The woman candidate who previously had the support of the Pledge group of unions, Jenny Mikakos, can kiss her safe parliamentary career goodbye.
@column = The trade-off is ACTU assistant secretary Jennie George's nomination to the top job at the ACTU. She will be the first woman president in that organisation's history. Her record in implementing ALP restructuring policies and the enterprise bargaining agenda — to the detriment of workers' wages and conditions — makes her a worthy successor to Ferguson.
@column = The ALP is showing few signs of taking its own quotas any more seriously than is necessary to ensure the public veneer is maintained, and women's votes are won. The backlash against the ALP evidenced in recent Queensland and ACT elections will worry the federal ALP enough to make the Jennie George trade-off a virtual certainty.
@column = The real result for women? Yet another half-baked campaign which achieves more in public relations for the Labor Party than in real gains for women — whether in the ALP or not.