Author Archives: Richard Gadsden

There was a constitutional amendment on the agenda for the recent York conference (item F15 on the agenda) that sought to amend the rules for ensuring gender diversity on the party’s committees (clause 2.5 of the constitution). The part of the amendment that has attracted most attention was the removal of non-binary people from the text, but the other proposed change was much more concerning from a practical point of view as a returning officer. This was the removal of the words “self-identification” as the means of determining whether a candidate is a man or a woman.

I’ve conducted internal elections within the party for more than twenty years for a variety of bodies – affiliated organisations, state parties, local parties. I’ve never conducted federal elections, but the vast majority of bodies within the party incorporate the federal rules on diversity into their own elections so I’m very familiar with how these rules are operated in practice.

On the most basic practical level, each candidate submits a nomination form, either on paper or online, and there are tick boxes on the form for each of the four diversity criteria, that is sex/gender, ethnicity, disability and LGBT+. The way that the sex/gender rules are implemented in practice is that there are three boxes, “man”, “woman” and “non-binary”. If you tick one then you are treated as being in that category for the purposes of applying the rules in clause 2.5. If you don’t tick any or you tick more than one, then, rather than invalidating your nomination, you are treated as being of a fourth category (ie of unspecified gender), where you would always be disadvantaged by the application of the rules. That is: there must be 40% women/non-binary, and 40% men/non-binary; you would have to get into the other 20% if you didn’t validly designate yourself.