‘Now, Jill, what would you like to be when you grow up?’

‘I’d like to be an equal opportunity commissioner.’

‘What a lovely idea. And you, Jack?’

‘Yes. I’d like to be an equal opportunity commissioner too.’

‘Oh I am sorry, but I’m afraid that’s not really a career for boys.’

Poor Jack. He’s too young to know that in the world of equal opportunity one place you won’t find equal opportunity is in commissions for equal opportunity. Particularly is this so in Victoria, or as the ABC would call the state, Dodji-Dan, a ‘traditional’ name of recent invention of the sort leftists are trying to impose across the nation to replace those bestowed by ‘colonialists’. Etymologically, Dodji-Dan proudly honours the legacy of Victoria’s great tribal chieftain, so sorely missed by lockdown enthusiasts everywhere.

No other Australian state can touch Dodji-Dan for the inequality of its equality apparatus, lavishly paid for by the taxpayer and devoted, as are its counterparts in other states, to sowing envy between different sections of the community – sorry, I should have said, opposing social injustice wherever it encounters it.

An essential component of equality which, with diversity and inclusion, forms a kind of Holy Trinity in the contemporary cult of making sure that no one has any ‘unfair’ advantage, through birth or even hard work, over anyone else, is parity ‘in the workplace’ between men and women. The Victorian Equal Opportunities and Human Rights Commission is most insistent on this, and has a horror of ‘discrimination’, the most frequently used word on its website, or so it seems. It also thinks that women have been especially discriminated against. ‘Everyone deserves fair treatment,’ the website intones, ‘but women often face unfair treatment because of their sex and assumptions about their abilities due to outdated gender stereotypes.’ It doesn’t explain what those outdated stereotypes are, but you can bet that among them is the one ordained by nature of giving birth to and caring for their families.

Well, there’s no unfair treatment at the Dodji-Dan Equal Opportunities Commission – except of men. Men are superfluous to the functioning of this sententious body, which has the nerve to pontificate on ‘equal opportunity in the workplace’ while taking care it doesn’t offer equal opportunity in its own workplace.

The commission is a female fiefdom. It doesn’t even pretend to practise what it preaches. All seven members of the ‘executive team’ are female – not one man among them – and female also, or so one supposes, is the Commissioner, one Ro Allen, although, being nothing if not up-to-date in modish gay and lesbian gobbledygook, instead of by correct English third-person pronouns she likes to be referred to as ‘them’ and ‘they’. This can lead to confusion over verbs, and hence meaning, as when we are informed by Moana Weir, the (female, naturally) ‘chair’ of the commission, that ‘Ro has worked to lift up communities and make Victoria a safer, more respectful place to live, work and study,’ the auxiliary verb relating to Ro’s sterling efforts to regulate life in Victoria is in the singular. ‘They has?’

Ro’s pronominal preferences inspired gibberish of this sort from the Melbourne Age: ‘Ro Allen survived four men trying to “exorcise” their queerness at 16. Now, as Victoria’s Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commissioner, they have an opportunity to protect others.’ On the face of the grammar a linguistic purist might ask what was wrong with four men trying to exorcise their queerness and how the teenaged Ro can be said to have ‘survived’ something that was none of her business anyway. It might further be pointed out that, on this reading, the four men are now protecting others, which surely deserves commendation.

But I am wandering from the point. We all know leftists can be dumb, but so dumb that they haven’t spotted the irony of an all-female establishment presuming to enforce what they would call ‘gender balance’? Or are they cynically aware of it, and by ‘equal’ mean discriminatory against men? Is this a kind of reparation for past centuries of – according to feminist theory if not according to fact – prejudice against, indeed enslavement of, women by a toxic male establishment? Is it payback?

New South Wales is no slouch at entrenching inequality in its equality commission, with four women running the show and no men. Other states are less glaringly unequal. ‘Equal Opportunity Tasmania’ has a female commissioner, as does its South Australian counterpart. Western Australia is coy about its commission, with nothing about male or female staff that I could find on its website. Queensland, in contrast to all the others, is a bastion of patriarchal oppression, with a sole male human rights commissioner. One hopes that the equality enforcers in other states will use their fraternal, oops, sororal influence on the new Queensland government to rectify that injustice as a first priority.

Even so, the lady equalists should make hay while the sun shines. With the left in power in Canberra and in four states, and with the left in thrall to ‘gender politics’, there will be increasing pressure to include artificial women in the equality hierarchies. Not to do so will provoke shrieks of ‘terfdom’ from the ever more strident ‘trans’ movement, accusations that the anti-discriminators are themselves discriminators. Where then will be the moral superiority they quietly attribute to themselves?

By the way, it seems odd that no masculine voices have been raised against this distaff hegemony. Is it that most men don’t care, that unlike young Jack they have no aspirations to a career in equal opportunities, or that, with that chivalry so detested by feminists, they are happy to indulge the girls and let them have their fun?