But what if, your male columnist with a very strong female side mused on Tuesday morning while simultaneously flower-arranging and listening to radio news and current affairs discussion of women and parliament, a parliament is no place for a woman?

What if, methought, while opting for displays of bright white freesias painstakingly posed in elegant, pale leaf-green vases, our imagined accomplished woman (let us call her Emily) should be aiming for something higher and better than a career in party politics? Should our Emily’s proud sense of self-worth, her poetic nature, be ushering her to something better than a mere man-infested, loud and bullying parliament for a workplace?

Even as I write this (arranging the bright flowers of my ideas in the elegant vase of this column) there are news-reported calls for the Liberal Party to address its “woman problem” by pre-selecting more women for winnable seats. Liberal Craig Laundy is wondering aloud if his party should strive for “quotas” of female candidates.

Meanwhile it emerges that the assassination of sensitive and gentle Malcolm Turnbull (who I suspect of being a secret flower-arranger), had an ugly, blokey, bullying face. This is further stoking thoughts that federal parliament needs its testosteroney ambience diluted by the election of more women.

Alas, all of this chatter stokes some contrary thoughts in my bosom, a bosom often concealed by the pretty floral pinafore I always wear when flower arranging.

Why would Emily, a truly accomplished, conscientious woman, dedicate her intellect, her life, her soul to the Liberal and Labor parties and to something so frivolous and evanescent as politics? Why not dedicate herself instead to, say, science, medicine, the arts, law, sports, scholarship, anything?

And how one wishes those always arguing for a more gynobalanced federal parliament would spell out for us just what they imagine this would achieve.

What do the existing women in federal parliament bring to that parliament that is uniquely womanly? For example do they bring anything gentler, kindlier, more admirably motherly to their manly parties’ brute policies on, say, the cruel treatment of refugees, on the cruelty of the live export of animals?

No, they don’t. And perhaps this is because there is a kind of androgyny about political ambition that in a senseunsexes those unfortunate women driven by it.

In Shakespeare’s Scottish play (I dare not mention its name lest it bring this column bad luck), Lady Macbeth privately pleads “Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe topful
Of direst cruelty!”

Keen to have King Duncan of Scotland assassinated and fearing her husband isn’t going to be manly enough, Tony Abbottesque enough to do the stabbing, she is asking the spirits to strip her of her fair sex’s better qualities. Then, unsexed, she believes she will be manly enough, brutish enough to make sure Duncan is butchered.

Perhaps female members of the Liberal and Labor parties do this, getting themselves emotionally unsexed, before they can follow any political ambitions that possess them, before they can take part in the very male, butcher-or-be-butchered life of parliament. Certainly I know that I would have had to unsex myself (detaching and throwing away the strong female side of me that delights in arranging flowers, in reading dainty poetry, in listening to the shy tone poems of the Scandinavian composers) if ever I had been tormented by any political ambitions.

What if there are so many more men than women in party politics, so many more of the bearded sex than of women in parliaments, because most men in their rough, vulgar, ugly masculinity are more attracted than most women are to the gladiatorial, Darwinian, butcher-or-be-butchered life-career?

Yes, federal parliament is nasty and unseemly, but what if what it needs is not more people of another sex but more people of other types, other natures, irrespective of their gender? If we are to have quotas then, to give the parliament more diversity, more moral and intellectual fibre, why not insist on certain numbers of MPs of experiences and backgrounds suggestive of sensitivity, intelligence and courage? Why not quotas of, say, poets and novelists, trapeze artists, astrobiologists, human cannonballs, astronomers, dog-lovers (for the sensitivity and kindness of dog lovers is legendary), florists and flower arrangers, gardeners and avid readers of novels, the latter now shown by fine scientific research to develop from their reading a special empathy for others?

Some of the clamour for more women in parliament is based on the confused thought that parliamentary party politics is the most noble and important of careers, and so should be something women can aspire to in a civilised society.

What foolishness! Looking on, sceptically, I can think of 100 superior career paths (what an astronaut Julia Gillard would have made! Julie Bishop might have been the next Sarah Bernhardt! The symphonies Penny Wong might be writing if she wasn’t wasting her days being her party’s leader in the sordid Senate!) that would give women more lifelong fulfilment and would do their nation a greater power of good. And all this without their having to unsex themselves.

Aim higher (far higher than parliament), women of Australia!