The Labour Party is set to introduce a new rule under which electorates will be able to prevent men from seeking selection as a candidate by restricting it to women only.
A copy of the draft rules were leaked to blogger Whaleoil and include a provision: "An LEC [Labour Electorate Committee] may request that NZ Council determine that only women may nominate for the position of Labour candidate for their electorate."
This seems perfectly reasonable. Labour is publicly committed to gender equality, but its actual performance lags behind that commitment. It consistently fails to select women in winnable electorates: only 8 of Labour's 22 electorate MPs are women. While the list provides scope for correcting this imbalance, doing so in 2011 would have required a list whose lower spots were made up almost entirely of women.
All-woman shortlists are a way of making up for that failure. By reducing the imbalance in the electorates at source, they will be able to pursue a balanced list - and hopefully gain a balanced caucus. The practice is consistent with the Human Rights Act and in common use overseas. It will bring about substantive rather than merely formal equality.
How political parties select their candidates is, provided they adhere to the Human Rights act, up to them. Those who oppose progressive selection policies to bring about equality have a simple solution: don't vote for such parties. Those of us who support equality will be doing the same to those parties like National which continue to practice sexism.
(Their use of an alternating list, interleaving male and female candidates, is one of the reasons I support the Greens).