October 3, 2013 12:00pm by David Farrar

Aust Labor proposed a gay MP quota!

Labor leadership candidate Bill Shorten wants to introduce quotas to boost the number of gay and lesbian politicians in Parliament.

Mr Shorten is continuing his pitch to the party membership, sending out a manifesto that calls for the introduction of quotas for politicians representing minority groups.

He says the party should consider quotas for Indigenous Australians and the lesbian, gay, bixsexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) community.

NZ Labour are introducing a gender quota, and I don’t see how you can argue for a gender quota yet argue against a gay quota. Once you start down the quota route, it is hard to stop.

Also having a gay quota will be challenging also. Do you have a quota for LGBTI generally or individual quotas for each subset? Lesbians won’t accept a gay man as necessarily representing their interests, so you may need a separate quota for gay men, lesbian women, bisexual men, bisexual women, pre-op transsexuals, post-op transsexuals and intersex persons.

Or you could of course just not have quotas at all on the basis they are demeaning and they judge a person on just one aspect of what makes them up.

There is nothing wrong with having a commitment to diversity. But quotas are a very harmful way of achieving diversity.