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When I read the headline on The Spinoff “All these new queer MPs are fantastic news. But where are their disabled peers?” I felt like it was the punchline to a joke. I have often commented that ‘positive discrimination’ activists will not be happy until every possible type of so-called “diversity” is present. A black lesbian little person or a gay man of colour in a wheelchair would clearly fit the bill but it seems that truth is stranger than politically incorrect jokes.
Spinoff guest writer Henrietta Bollinger wants MPs to be disabled as well as gay because it seems that activists can never be truly happy unless they have yet another victim group to advocate for. As BFD writer Lushington D Brady has often said, a problem solved is an existential crisis for an activist.
Screenshot The Spinoff
Our back-patting about electing the most inclusive parliament in history has one glaring omission, writes Henrietta Bollinger.
Hmm I wonder what our inclusive parliament is missing? Short people? Left handers? Colour blind people? Devil worshippers?
In a sea of red votes, Aotearoa New Zealand looks to have elected the most rainbow parliament in the world. As a queer constituent, I have to believe this means something.
What it means is that anyone regardless of skills, experience or talent can get themselves a very high salary simply by being included on a party list.
The presence of so many out rainbow community members in parliament is on one level an individual achievement on each member’s part. But it also shows that we are beginning to create the conditions in which people of diverse sexualities (though not yet across the gender spectrum) can take part in public life with the assurance of relative safety.
Safety? What on earth is she talking about? No one cares in New Zealand these days about a person’s sexuality. They only care if they have the skills and experience to do the job.
New Green list MP Elizabeth Kerekere is takataapui Maori, bringing with her strong connections and mana in both communities. Explaining why she felt it was so important that people like her are in parliament, she said that “everybody must be at the table to have those conversations”. I have to agree with her on this. A parliament you see yourself in is one you might believe is looking out for your interests.
This is nuts! I don’t need to see an MP who is half Lebanese and 1/4 German and 1/4 English and a 52-year-old married mother of two in parliament to feel that my interests are being represented. If there was a black man in a wheelchair who shared my political views then I would choose him over a clone of myself who was all for abortion on demand until birth and Hate Speech laws. It is infantile and nonsensical to want MPs who look like us or who fancy the same sex as us as our representatives. It is their political views that are relevant and nothing else.
[…] we are yet to reach a place of abundant representation, the disabled community is no longer tokenised.
Diversity quotas are what create tokenism. Selecting people based on their merit not the colour of their skin or their choice of sex partners or their disability are the only antidote to tokenism.
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