Antiseptic,

I am not trying to convince you of anything in regard to the MPs I did not mention. I am just correcting your assumption that my not commenting on them means I agree with you. I thought you were being unfair to Lynne Kosky and Jenny Macklin, so I commented. I do not know how able Tanya Plibersek, Kristine Kenneally and Kate Ellis are. I think Anna Bligh is able, but I have no motivation to convince you of that view. I agree that Julia Gillard is able and that Julie Bishop is a poor deputy to Tony Abbott. I don’t know who Karen Struthers is.

I have never said that you “never have a good word to say about women”. You must be confusing me with someone else.

ChrisC, my apologies, the final comment was actually meant to go above my reply to you; it was addressed to Pelican. sorry for the confusion.

Thanks also for your reply. I post to stimulate responses and I always hope that someone will disagree, since from such "conflict" comes much to think on. It's the scientific "hypothesise and test" method applied to discussion, at the risk of sounding pompous.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Ellis

I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions about her capacity and how much of her career she owes to her gender.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanya_Plibersek

Ditto.

TBH, I may have been a little harsh on Keneally. she's green and she got the job because of her gender, but she may yet be competent. The debacle she made of Planning was largely created by Sartor, her predecessor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Bligh
Bligh is a very able practitioner of Feminist politics. As a Premier, she'd make a good streetsweeper.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Struthers
Wikipaedia doesn't know anything about her either.

http://www.queenslandlabor.org/01_cms/details.asp?ID=403
Here's her ALP page. Once again, draw your own conclusions. I'll just add that as Minister for Office of Women, she was severely castigated last year by the Estimates committee because out of an office budget of nearly $4 million she spent more than $3.3million on administrative overhead. Her response: "I suppose we could have done a bit better". She was given Community Services and Housing only a couple of months later... I guess being a grrrlfriend of nAnna's helps.
There were questions raised recently about why some Government schools funds were diverted to her electorate at the expense of poorer schools in other seats.

Antispectic
Do you you believe there are any untalented men among Labor or are they alright by you by virtue of being male?

The problem is, and if you cannot see it there seems little hope, that you are very quick to pick up any faults no matter how small with some of the women in politics but what about the bevy of untalented men who made it by virtue of the safety net of the boys club and political positioning? Why do none of these rate a mention?

That is perhaps the real elephant in the room.