Party quota issue merits a rethink

The obvious difficulty with this formulation is that “merit” in these matters is determined not by angels from on high but by party committees, but that’s not the entire problem. Whatever it means, “merit” is supposed to be an objective quality that can be objectively assessed – a measure that when properly understood would be agreed to be a fair way of distinguishing between candidates.

And how does one determine what’s fair? Well, you could sort out preselections by tossing a coin. It may sound silly, but the Athenians and the Florentines, for example, used to do it more or less that way, and whatever its practical defects it couldn’t be said to be unfair. Everyone had an equal crack.

An equal crack, that is, if it was a fair coin. And the way you’d work out whether it was a fair coin was by tossing it a number of times and seeing whether it came up anomalously heads or tails. If it wasn’t pretty even, then you’d set it aside, however impeccable the king’s head and the platypus looked.

If the current seat selection system was fair, you’d expect it to produce a 50-50 men-women balance. And as the Liberal Party has now produced a weighting of 22 men out of 28 MPs in the federal parliament, that’s surely evidence that something is badly out of balance – that appeals to “merit” are somehow defective as a guide to conduct.

I may be missing the point here. Certainly, this isn’t an argument that anybody in the Liberal Party has made. And it’s worth noting that the people who say they believe in “merit” are prepared to make real sacrifices in its name. It may have cost them government, after all. A lot of Liberal men were turfed out by women. You may think them misogynistic, but they’re entitled to the credit of standing by their principles.

They’re not necessarily entitled to be believed as to what those principles are. The word “merit”, by itself, might seem to have links to the concepts of “capacity”, or “effectiveness”, or “talent”, or “worth”, all matters which on any objective scale are hard to observe in the way political parties arrange themselves. In its effects, though, “merit” would seem to be best described by the other half of the Abbott formulation – “the heart of our party”.

In its most successful times – under Menzies, under Fraser, under Howard – the party was overwhelmingly male. Any male candidate had automatically scored in the top 50 per cent of the distribution; any male candidate from a private school was already on the short list.

Conservatives believe there is a natural – a God-given – hierarchy. People should know their place.

“The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate,
God made them high and lowly, and ordered their estate…”

as the Victorian hymn has it.

Rich, powerful and influential people are that way because they deserve it; that’s just common sense. If you want to let women into the Melbourne Club, find yourself another party.