One thing you can count on with far too many of our politicians: they will keep coming up with really idiotic ideas. They would likely never try such foolishness out in the home, or the workplace, but they seem to think the political world is open slather for such moonbattery.
One of the more idiotic ideas which our social engineers in the Labor Party have come up with is a quota system for homosexuals in Parliament. I kid you not. At least that is what Bill Shorten wants to do if he gets his way. As one news report puts it:
“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.”
So just how dumb is this idea? Well let me count the ways. First of all, quotas are never a good idea. Whether used for women, Blacks, or now homosexuals, it is a lousy idea and does not work. It is of course part of affirmative action programs which are meant to help various minority groups, but never actually do.
Black American economist Thomas Sowell has spent much of his life examining affirmative action programs and quotas. Indeed, he has written dozens of books on these and related topics. Simply mastering his important 2004 volume, Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study would do us a great deal of good.
He finds that not only do they not produce what they were meant to, but they are often counter-productive. As he wrote elsewhere, “At the heart of the affirmative action approach is the notion that statistical disparities show discrimination. No dogma has taken a deeper hold with less evidence — or in the face of more massive evidence to the contrary.”
All quotas do is bring in people to positions they may not at all be qualified for, forcing out others, and filling positions not on merit but on numerical quotas. That is not how we would run a business, and it is not how we should fill political offices. Those who are fully qualified and those whom the electorate want in office should be there, not those who meet some arbitrary quota system.
And Shorten’s proposal is ludicrous. We of course already have homosexual politicians. If they are there, it is presumably because they were voted into office. There is no reason in the world to seek to have more in politics simply because somebody wants to push the homosexual agenda. They should be there only because they are good politicians who are properly serving their own electorate.
Parliament is not meant to be a place for social engineering and radical diversity policies. To simply say the makeup of Parliament should reflect the rest of society may sound nice, but on closer inspection it is foolish in the extreme. If we really wanted Parliament to fully reflect society at large, then we should also demand a quota system for all sorts of other minority groups.
To truly represent the electorate at large, let’s make sure we have quotas for all sorts of groups, including:
-cross-dressers
-arsonists
-polygamists
-adulterers
-bigamists
-bank robbers
-brothel owners
-cigarette smokers
-cocaine dealers
-red heads
-firemen
-cake makers
-tuba players
-factory workers
-dishwasher machine repair men
-non-English speaking tax collectors
-left-handed auto mechanics
-male breast milk providers
-pygmy basketball players
-Australian sumo wrestlers
-blind saxophonists
-60-year-old football players
-one-armed accordion players
The list is of course endless. Every conceivable lifestyle and activity could be promoted by means of a quota system. Just how many polyamorists do we have in Parliament after all? None as far as I am aware, yet surely they are found throughout our society. Why are they being so under-represented in Parliament?
So let’s take Shorten’s idea and extend it to its logical conclusion. Then we can have prostitutes in Parliament, along with dentists, snake handlers, pipe-smokers, wiccans and Baha’is. It sure is long overdue to get these poor under-represented folks into Parliament. So come on Labor Party, get your act together.
Stop being so exclusive and discriminatory and start getting those quotas going for all the other poor marginalised groups in Australian society. They have waited long enough, and now it is high time to bring them into the fold as well.
Indeed, according to the last national census, over 60 per cent of Australians claimed to be Christian, so by Shorten’s own reasoning, we also need a quota system here, with over 60 per cent of Parliament needing to be made up of Christians.
But there is actually one group I would support having a quota system for: politicians with common sense, brains, a moral centre, and a hatred of all things PC. At the moment it seems this is the most under-represented group in all of Parliament.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-28/shorten-wants-quotas-to-boost-number-of-gay-politicians/4987276
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