If you ever need to argue against political gender quotas, you need only point to the roster of high-profile Labor women who would almost certainly never have risen above the level of HR Karen, were it not for Labor’s gender quotas. I’ve long cited Kristina Keneally as the prime example of a Labor Quota Queen whose most significant achievement was her record of being booted by voters every time she was parachuted into a cushy political sinecure.
Anthony Albanese’s Finance Minister Katy Gallagher was, along with Keneally, a member of Labor’s notorious ‘Mean Girls’ triumvirate. Gallagher achieved notoriety for her embarrassing performance at a Senate Estimates hearing where she consistently failed to understand the difference between net debt and savings.
But if there is anyone iconic of the disastrous failure of Labor’s gender quota obsession, it’s Julia Gillard.
Australia’s first female PM was also one of our worst. Gillard’s brief tenure – she only avoided being dumped by voters at her first election by the connivance of two renegade ‘conservative’ MPs – is conspicuous for the litany of disasters she left in her wake. Her carbon tax, swiftly introduced despite a firm promise the very day before the election not to, caused small business chaos and brought Tasmania to the brink of economic and ecological disaster. Her signature brainchild, the NDIS, is a byword for corruption and waste, and has already become the single greatest debt monster on the government’s books.
And this so-called ‘feminist’ single-handedly enabled predatory cross-dressers to intrude into women’s spaces, earning her the sobriquet of “destroyer of women’s rights”.
Former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard has rowed back on her government’s controversial changes to the Australian Sex Discrimination Act in 2013, telling an audience at Manchester University: “It was a different time.”
That is the same excuse trotted out by defenders of paedophile writer Dorothy Hewett. As feminist Helen Garner acidly replied: “They weren’t that bloody different.”
Gillard’s claim that the issue wouldn’t interest a British audience is even weaker. Britain’s own courts have grappled with this exact question, with rulings that directly contradict the legal vandalism Gillard inflicted on Australian women. Her long record of refusing to even address the matter suggests she knows full well how badly she screwed up women’s rights to appease the Alphabet People.
For many years Ms Gillard has declined to answer “what is a woman?”, instead claiming it was a “gotcha question”. In 2023 this prompted criticism in the Senate by Senator Claire Chandler who said Ms Gillard’s dodging of the question “was no game”.
This raises serious questions about whether someone so determined to erase biological reality is fit to chair the Wellcome Trust, which hands out hundreds of millions in research funding.
The 2013 changes under Gillard removed explicit biological definitions of man and woman from the act. The predictable result? Courts interpreting it to prioritise gender identity over sex. The Tickle v Giggle case is the grotesque endpoint: a women’s app designed for females is ruled to have discriminated against a man identifying as a woman. Single-sex spaces, women’s sports, even basic safety – all sacrificed on the altar of fashionable ideology.
Gillard’s defenders insist no one raised concerns at the time. That’s the beauty of radical change sold in small, deniable steps. The public was assured it was merely about ‘anti-discrimination’. What it delivered was the legal erasure of women as a sex-based class. Lesbians barred from holding female-only events and services for vulnerable women forced to admit men. Prisons, change rooms and refuges: all compromised.
This is the enduring legacy of quota queens like Gillard. Elevated not by merit but by diktat, they deliver policy disasters dressed up as progress. The carbon tax. The NDIS black hole. And the quiet destruction of women’s hard-won rights.
British protesters are right to call her out. Australian women have paid the price for Labor’s obsession with identity over reality.
