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But nothing we have seen before can quite compare to the course the Liberals have embarked upon: an explicit 50-50 gender quota. This is not an objective or a target; not a balancing of merit and other considerations. It is a fixed rule, to be adhered to come what may. It is one, moreover, imposed without reference to the numbers of MPs of either sex from which cabinet is to be drawn. Women make up just over a quarter of the Liberal caucus, yet they will make up precisely half of cabinet. Your chances of getting into cabinet as a woman are as such roughly three times that of a man: 30 per cent, in a 28-member cabinet, versus 10 per cent.

The issue here, God knows, is not fairness to male MPs. They knew what they were getting into when they signed up for this. And in any event, you may be of the view that this is a sort of cosmic payback, an evening of the scales for past discrimination against female MPs. The problem is that the country has to be governed in the here and now. So far as we are putting representationalism before ability, we are also asking the country’s interests to take a back seat.

That is obviously — this should not need to be said — not because women are any less fit to govern than men. Quite the contrary: it is not the critics of quotas who assert a contradiction between fairness to women and hiring on merit. It is their advocates. The radical, unspeakable alternative to quotas is: just hire the best person for the job. If it’s a man, fine; if it’s a woman, fine. If the result is a cabinet with more men than women, or more women than men, fine either way.