The Green’s policy of co-leaders, one male and one female, and ranking its list to alternate men and women has always seemed unnecessaily contrived to me.
In the 21st centruy choosing people for their skills, abilities and what they can contribute to their party, parliament and the country should come up with a mix of men, women, ethnicities and whatever else was needed to ensure the list was representative and diverse as well as capable.
That theory has been tested by Act which has only one woman in parliament. When the party has such a small caucus, that could be explained as chance, but having no women at all would look like not just bad luck but bad management.
Now that Heather Roy has lost the party’s deputy leadership it’s unlikely that, if she decided to stand again, she’d get a winnable place on Act’s list next time. That leaves Act with the possibility of having no women in its caucus at all.
On present polling the party is unlikely to have more MPs after the next election and it may well have fewer.
If one of those MPs isn’t a woman the party should be looking at its structure, operation and policies. A party which either doesn’t have capable women willing to stand, or has them willing but not represented in the higher positions on its list has a problem.
Alternating men and women on the list looks like artificial equality, having no women in winnable places at all would look like actual inequality.
UPDATE: Toad has pointed out I was wrong about the Greens – they can be flexible with the gender balance in list rankings.
Self destructing I think.
The problem with this hypothesis is that if Heather Roy was to resign the person who would succeed her is Hilary Calvert – a woman.
@andrei, oh well, the one woman quota/cap is fine then!
Alf reckons (and has posted to this effect) that the blokes in Act harbour a bothersome prejudice against blondes. If Hilary Calvert (a) seriously aspires to become an Act MP and (b) is a blonde, she should dye her hair or get a wig. Blondism and its huge socio-economic ramifications has not been as well explored as it should be.
“unnecessaily contrived”
Why?
ACT has nearly always had my second vote because its right wing, but when you look at the notable individuals there.. don’t you see a bunch of Savonarolas?
Where is the place for a calm and rational woman with a wide perspective of NZ society to push a generally conservative view without fanfare and histrionics?
Frankly the party has no coherent “political” leadership but rather a bunch of egos trumpeting individual interests. Thats fine for a ginger group outside Parliament, but inside the place it has to be disciplined enough to be seen as the face of modern conservatism, not a weird mix of the flaky, the libertarian and the witch burner.
Its all quite sad because the Party did very well on the Niwa temperature series and has forced changes there. That sort of thing is genuinely “in the public interest”.
JC
Act won’t be there after the next election, Ele.
Ele, just a wee correction – the Greens don’t alternate men and women on their list. Last election, their ranking was Jeanette Fitzsimons, Russel Norman, Sue Bradford, Metiria Turei, and Sue Kedgely – i.e. 4 out of the top 5 were women.
The Green list ranking rules do allow some tweaking for gender balance, but this wasn’t done last time because 4 of the next 5 candidates were men.
But if the Greens had, like Act, had only 5 candidates elected, it would have been the reverse situation to that of Act.
However, you still have a valid point re Act, because they had only 2 women in their first 10 candidates on their list.
The ACT party appears to be blundering to extinction and requires no help from a stray meteorite to join the dinosaur.
Bringing Sir Rodger back (I support what he did to rebuild the financial foundations of this nation in the 1980s) but with his media inspired negative aura, dumping Lindsay Mitchell to an unwinnable position on their list, losing people of the calibre of Stephen Franks and now further destroying their public profile with the sidelining of Ms Roy and a media just waiting to revel in the circus, shows a side to the organisation that leaves oblivion as the only outcome.
With Nationals obvious move to the center of the political spectrum, ACT had a golden opportunity to consolidate a position on the right flank that may never be offered again and will be in all probability be used by a resurgent odious little dwarf we had hoped was terminal, who will require nothing resembling a party to cause mayhem again, just another coterie of faceless accolytes with a combined IQ to match a margin of error.
In the mid 90s I attended a public meeting in Carterton to hear a very overweight Rodney Hide talk about building on the Rogernomics policies that were such a large part of the founding philosophy of ACT. Looking back I guess it was a residual loyalty, personal and philosophically based, for Derek Quigley, who was a foundation member of the group that founded the lobby group that grew into the political party, and the stand he took against the socialist, interventionist and blind bullying that emerged as the driver of Sir Robert Muldoon and his almost total destruction of the NZ economy, that attracted me.
That vertically challenged, overweight man from Rangiora impressed me but has now lost me as he has morphed into something far less endearing. Now sans the weight, with the tanned look, and his apparent shunning of his moralistic anti waste and troughing stance, Rodney has become another prisoner of the euphoria power gives to all who stay within the realms of the Beehive. Some take longer than others to succumb.
The ACT party will only last until National take the pragmatic decision to put Rodney down, humanely of course.
They are becoming increasingly embarrassing as a charade of a political group to offer hope to those to the right of center politically who although accept the pragmatic tactics of National but hanker for a more self reliant, industrious, prudent and conservative approach to government policy.
Rodney, read the entrails, you are on the road to extinction and there is no I in team.