The Inala by-election, which will decide on a replacement for Annastacia Palaszczuk in Queensland’s Parliament, is scheduled for March 16, which is a little over a week after International Women’s Day (in case you somehow missed it). One suspects this date has been selected in part for political effect. What is certain is that the Labor candidate will be stressing how important it is that she is elected to continue the legacy of the former female Premier.

However, the Palaszczuk legacy is in need of serious reassessment. After all, it should not be assumed that just because someone is a member of a particular identity group, in this case womanhood, they will be good for others in that group. Mao Zedong, while Chinese, was clearly terrible for China and its people. In the same way, Annastacia’s reign was disastrous for Queensland women.

For starters, and perhaps most fundamentally, her government did its best to eliminate the very idea of women. ‘Women’ no longer exist in Queensland, at least in an objective sense. The term has become subjective, untethered from clear criteria or biological reality. ‘Women’ are a temporary frame of mind, a semi-permanent state – akin to an unstable nuclear isotope or some shape-shifting creature from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. ‘Anyone that identifies as a woman is a woman,’ declared Shannon Fentiman, the Minister for Women, rather infamously. What next? A minister for natural resources who doesn’t know the difference between a mineral and a vegetable? A minister for primary industries who doesn’t know the difference between a bull and a cow?

The situation has become so absurd in Queensland that if Annastacia were to decide in her post-Parliamentary career to identify as a man, then her ex-colleagues would probably delete their effusive tweets congratulating ‘Australia’s longest-serving female Premier’ lest they run the risk of having misgendered her.

It is not only the definition of women which has been destroyed. By almost any objective measure, the Queensland Labor government has waged what has amounted to a war on women in the Sunshine State.

Take women’s health, a champion cause for the Labor government. During the Covid era, the Palaszczuk government cruelly persecuted many female doctors, nurses, and other medical workers because they did not agree with the Covid vaccine mandates. Recently, the Queensland Supreme Court held that some of these mandates were unlawful. At the very least, they were appalling and unnecessary actions. A record number of regional maternity wards were also closed during Palaszczuk’s rule, leaving some expectant mums to give birth by the side of the road, placing them and their babies at risk. Desperate pregnant women were denied the ability to cross the state border, not for any legitimate medical reasons, but because secret internal polling showed it would give the Palaszczuk government a short-term political advantage. Labor’s ID Bills are also corrupting health record, putting at risk future research for the treatment of cervical cancer, breast cancer, and uterine cancer as people change their gender on birth certificates making it possible for men to be treated for cervical cancer.

The Labor government’s lax attitude to criminal justice and policing has also been terrible for women. Queenslanders know names like Vyleen White and Emma Lovell, but there are many others who have not attracted the same headlines. The incompetence in managing the forensic laboratory has meant that the alleged murderers of other women, such as Shandee Blackburn, remain at large.

Labor government policies have also risked untold damage to young girls and have promoted dangerous experimental ‘gender affirming’ medical treatments. In London, I met those responsible for taking successful legal action against the notorious Tavistock clinic. Rest assured lawsuits are coming to Queensland too. Not only will the damages bill to taxpayers be enormous, but those responsible, including ministers and department heads, will ultimately be held accountable. At least, we hope.

It does not stop there. The Palaszczuk government has destroyed female sport as a category. This decision is not only inherently unfair to women, forcing them to compete against biological men, but also places them at considerable risk of injury. They changed the law to allow grown men into women’s changing rooms and dangerous biological male offenders to shower in female-only prisons. On and on it goes.

Throughout the motivation of Queensland Labor has been not to seek ways to genuinely advance the position of women in the broadest sense, but rather by a desire to poison relations between the sexes. The focus has been to cultivate for electoral or personal advantage a sex-based culture war and to foster a permanent sense of grievance and victimhood in women. This benefits no one.

There have been plenty of courageous women – many of whom I am proud to call friends – who have made the above points in the past. But their voices have of course been ignored by the Queensland Labor government which only promotes a particular type of women. Ultimately, this bunch care more about ideology than any genuine concern for the fairer sex.

This article, though, is not directed to women – they can speak for themselves. It is addressed to those blokes who, on International Women’s Day, love to don the pink shirt and self-style themselves as ‘male champions of change’. The truth is, if you want to be a real champion of change, if you want to earn your cupcake, you need to demand a change to the crazy laws that the Palaszczuk government enacted. To do otherwise is to abandon women to this weird coalition of thuggish unionists, wimpy Woke corporate leaders, and left-wing ideologues.

Dan Ryan is a director of The Australian Institute for Progress, a Brisbane-based think tank