Metsola’s premature assessment

Roberta Metsola gave her assessment of the gender corrective mechanism employed for the first time in the last election and declared it a failure. 

She has always been against such artificial measures to help boost the number of women MPs so her assessment should come as no surprise. Nonetheless, her declaration that it has failed is a very premature and superficial assessment indeed. 

Metsola argued that any reform to boost the number of women MPs should be “rooted in the principle that parliamentary seats should reflect the will of the electorate”. 

This is a principle that should underpin parliamentary democracy and yet the electoral system crafted by the two major parties has been awarding parliamentary seats to unelected individuals since 1987. 

The various constitutional amendments introduced since 1987 have sought to create proportionality between votes obtained and parliamentary seats through a post-count corrective mechanism. In this way, we have had several candidates at almost every election fished out of the pond to ‘correct’ the result and ensure the number of parliamentary seats reflects the outcome of the vote. Rather than perform a wholesale reform of the electoral system to ensure that the actual result as delivered in the ballot box is immediately and automatically reflected in the number of seats, political parties have found it comfortable to adopt a post-result corrective mechanism. 

We wonder what Metsola has to say about this system and the legitimacy of having MPs ‘elected’ to parliament even though the electorate would have left them aground. 

It beggars belief that a system that has been in use since 1987 suddenly becomes a failure because a souped up version of it is used to boost the number of women MPs. 

The gender corrective mechanism like the post-election proportionality mechanism is not ideal. But while the former is by law a temporary mechanism – the law was enacted with a sunset clause of 20 years – the latter remains ingrained in the Constitution forever with no political will to change it. 

The proportionality mechanism can easily be scrapped with a change in the electoral system that automatically allows a political party’s nationwide result to be reflected in the number of seats it elects. Such a change will also benefit political parties who may have nationwide appeal but are not strong enough in individual districts. And yet we have not heard Metsola speak about the need to change this mechanism because it obviously suits her party fine. 

As for the gender corrective mechanism; this is a pragmatic choice underpinned by the belief that to correct decades of imbalance requires a temporary artificial boost. But it has always been obvious that the mechanism alone will not work miracles. 

Unfortunately, the two major political parties have done little to make fruitful use of the increased number of women MPs in this legislature. There has been no attempt to change the parliamentary system so that MPs can be assured decent incomes and proper backup staff to carry out meaningful research. In these circumstances, it becomes an even more uphill battle for women MPs. 

But even if the changes prospected above are too much at this stage, other questions pop up that require answers. 

Indeed, why hasn’t a cross-party committee, even of an informal nature, not been set up between women MPs to advance the practical issues of concern to them? It would have been a good way of pushing for meaningful change so that the need for a corrective mechanism gradually diminishes. 

But do the political parties have the political will to involve elected women in a meaningful way or have they been relegated to asking puerile parliamentary questions simply to fill time? This is the feeling that one gets when following parliament. 

This leader does not believe the mechanism is wrong. What is wrong is that the parties believe that on its own it is enough to change attitudes. It won’t but before declaring it a failure we prefer to see MPs correcting the systemic imperfections that have kept women outside of politics and parliament.