Australian Politics and Policy - Senior, 2019a

Australian Politics and Policy
have also been proposed. Quotas are rules about the minimum/maximum proportions
of a group who are allowed or required to fill positions – in this case, in
party-endorsed candidacies.
Gender quotas aim to disrupt the taken-for-granted-ness of politicians being
menaswellasprovidesubstantiveredressforthebarriersthatdisproportionately
obstruct women candidates. Quotas can be legislated or applied as rules within
parties. Quotas have contributed to the doubling of women’s representation in
parliaments around the world over the last 20 years. 83
Different views about quotas reveal different beliefs about who is suitable for
and capable of holding office. Opponents of quotas typically argue for selecting ‘on
merit’. 84 Given that current ‘merit-based’ systems have produced such disparities
in representation, this implies that women and other under-represented groups are
inherently less meritorious. Those who support quotas see structural and cultural
barriers as discouraging and excluding people who would be as capable as (perhaps
even more capable than) those who have found it comparatively easy to get their
‘merit’ recognised. In 2016, Vote Compass found that while a majority of Labor
voters were in favour of gender quotas, 60 per cent of Coalition voters were against
them, and men overall were nearly twice as likely as women to oppose quotas. 85
In 1994, as a result of concerted activism by the ALP-aligned group EMILY’s List
and the National Labor Women’s Network, the ALP introduced a quota requiring
at least 35 per cent of winnable seats to have women candidates preselected. This
wasincreasedto40percentin2012andatargetof50percentby2025wasthen
set. 86 The Liberal Party has a target (set in 2016) to preselect women in 50 per cent
of winnable seats by 2025, but calls for binding quotas have been rejected by party
leaders. Instead, the party has established the Enid Lyons Fighting Fund to help close
the gender gap in political finance. 87 WhiletheGreensdonothaveformalquotas,
thepartyhascomparativelystrongrepresentationofwomenandLGBTIQ+people
(leading both the ALP and the Coalition parties in the proportion of candidates and
elected representatives after the election in 2016).
Mechanisms to improve the representation of LGBTIQ+ people are less
developed, but the ALP now has Rainbow Labor, a network operating within the
party that was successful in changing the party’s policy on marriage equality. After
the 2016 federal election, the Queensland State Conference of the ALP adopted the
first LGBTI quota in Australia, requiring at least 5 per cent LGBTI candidates in
winnable Queensland seats for state, federal and local government elections. 88
83 Sawer 2015.
84 Matthewson 2019.
85 Williams and Sawer 2018.
86 https://www.emilyslist.org.au/
87 Gauja, Buckley and Curtin 2018.
88 Williams and Sawer 2018, 646.
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