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Chicks to rule: time for fifty per cent quotas in politics

By Mirko Bagaric - posted Tuesday, 7 March 2006


Studies into human well-being show that there is only a modest link between wealth and status and happiness. Far more important to happiness are fit and healthy bodies, realistic goals, self-esteem, optimism, an outgoing personality, a sense of control and a tight knit family.

Thus, paradoxically the people in our community that are best served to lead us are discouraged from doing so because they are smart enough to realise that the path to getting there is so burdensome that it is best not travelled. We need to clear the path for them.

Those of you who have had a “hard-nosed” female boss or remember the days of Margaret Thatcher might still not be convinced that more chicks at the top is the way to go. The explanation for this is that a lot of women who make it to the top understandably feel the need to work within the current dysfunctional hierachical system and therefore adopt and implement strategies identical to those of their male counterparts.

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So the key to securing a better run country is to have more women at the top and ensuring that en route there they are not required to kick and scratch against the blokes. This will make sure that they don’t adopt our misguided motivations and strategies. That’s why we should set aside at least 50 per cent of the positions in all political parties for women.

This will even make us blokes better off. That’s not to say we are the lesser sex. We still have it all over the chicks when it comes to bragging, lifting heavy things and drinking lots of beer. What’s more if we let them get on with running the show we will have lots more time to do all these important things.

Until the quotas get introduced, whenever it comes to voting unless you’re confident that the male candidate is an absolute star, back the odds and give the tick to the chick and hope she hasn’t felt the need to think like a bloke along the way.

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A version of this was first published in the New Zealand Herald on February 22, 2006.



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About the Author

Mirko Bagaric, BA LLB(Hons) LLM PhD (Monash), is a Croatian born Australian based author and lawyer who writes on law and moral and political philosophy. He is dean of law at Swinburne University and author of Australian Human Rights Law.

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