Disgrace to democracy
In the same way that co-option (a mechanism to replace MPs who die or are incapacitated) has been ‘gamed’ by the Labour and Nationalist parties to get anyone they want into parliament, the just-approved gender-correcting mechanism will also be manipulated.
The two big parties now have an incentive not to put women on their ticket so that they get six extra seats each without effort. The number of MPs with no or few votes from the electorate (already high) will soar. Taxpayers will pay for this monetarily (MPs are expensive) and democratically.
These MPs plucked out of nowhere will not be accountable to a constituency because they won’t have one. Instead, they will be beholden to the party leaders on whose grace and favour their political life depends. Shame that the PN, once a champion of democratic norms, went along with this underhanded power grab. No wonder that civil-rights-minded individuals have switched from supporting the PN to backing NGOs and