This issue was discussed recently in the post Men’s Concerns Gaining Traction

The issue “portrayed’ as a man-ban might have not have gained traction but it would be naive to think it doesn’t still exist in another form; that is exactly what this article says – the intent is still there, we’ll find another way to achieve this. (It turns up as number one hot potato in the leader’s debate. It has hardly gone away from within the party)

What if the Labour Party conference turned up a policy of such genius that it totally electrified the country and we all forgot about the price of power?

Labour’s gender quota gets go-ahead

Labour has approved a gender quota that will ensure 45 per cent of its MPs are women after the next election and at least 50 per cent are women in 2017.

It would be unlikely that you could manipulate any election to the extent that an MMP result would provide a 50/50 split of male and female. It would have to be accepted that a result could swing either way to a male or female majority, but there is undoubtedly a faction in the Labour Party that would be ‘enthusiastically engineering’ a female dominate result. This debate goes further and the process is not yet complete, even within the conference.

Delegates are yet to vote on other constitutional remits that would require candidate selections to consider a range of factors including age, sexual orientation, ethnicity and geographical spread.

This is a political party that is infatuated with this glorious academic obsession of identity politics. It is MMP off the rails – politics from another planet, trundled out by a party of middle-class mad-haters riding on the coattails of a proud tradition of representation of the working class. Labour has often been a party open to invasion from various sectors, but none that will be as destructive as this departure from political sanity.

We have seen too often already, how irrelevant, issues pertaining to New Zealand men have become in our recent parliaments; we can only expect to see ourselves pushed even further down the scale of significance when a political construction of this type will concern itself with matters of personal inconvenience or preference.

These are policies best left in Rome, along with the other regrettable political distractions that occupied their politics.