Labour MP Ramona Attard must have thought she had landed a solid blow on the Opposition Leader when she pounced on his explanation for appointing Sabine Agius Cabourdin as the Nationalist Party's CEO. But in her eagerness to score political points, Attard forgot one inconvenient truth: her own party wrote the rulebook for what she herself calls a "tick the box" exercise.

Attard's Facebook broadside was clear enough. Women, she said, should be appointed "because of their competence, not as a tick the box exercise." Competence, not quotas. Merit, not tokenism. It's a noble-sounding argument, until you remember that 12 of her parliamentary colleagues (and probably future Cabinet colleagues) are sitting in Parliament today precisely because of the Labour-engineered gender corrective mechanism. These women did not reach the electoral quota. They were handed a seat courtesy of a mechanism that literally exists to "tick the box" of gender representation.

It was a formula in the electoral law, passed by a Labour government and backed by the Opposition, which parachuted them into Parliament. That's not a smear - it's a fact.

And here's where Attard really stumbles. By attacking the Opposition Leader's reasoning, she ends up attacking her own side's flagship reform. If, as she insists, competence should be the only criterion, then the gender mechanism collapses under its own weight. Those 12 women would never have set foot inside the House.

Worse still, by her own logic, her co-option into Parliament - after Randolph Debattista's resignation - could also be painted as anything but a triumph of pure competence. After all, she wasn't elected either. She did not even contest the election. She was handpicked by Prime Minister Robert Abela in the same way that the PN leader picked his CEO.

The irony is almost too rich. Attard accuses the PN of box-ticking while standing firmly on the platform of the biggest box-ticking exercise Maltese politics has ever seen.

So here's the question: Is Ramona Attard willing to say, right from now, that if in the next election she does not make it via the national vote, she will renounce being elected through the gender-corrective mechanism? Or is she ready to accept a tick the box exercise only when it suits her?

The gender mechanism is, by design, a corrective measure. It exists because both major parties recognised that women were being underrepresented in Parliament, and they took action. Whether you agree with it or not, at least it's honest about its purpose. What it is not is a guarantee that every woman entering Parliament through the scheme is doing so solely on the basis of "competence". If competence were the only test, the scheme would be unnecessary.

So why did Attard decide to pick this particular fight? Perhaps she thought she could expose the PN as opportunistic, as treating women like decorative accessories rather than equals. But the problem with throwing stones in politics is that you should first check whether you're standing in a glass house. Attard's post has not only bounced back but has shattered the very credibility of her party's reform.

Ramona Attard may have wanted to show she's a defender of women's worth. Instead, she's shown herself to be the latest victim of political foot-in-mouth disease. Her comment wasn't just a slip - it was a tripwire that blew up her own party's showcase policy. Sometimes, when you try to mock your opponent for ticking boxes, you end up ticking one yourself: the one labelled "self-inflicted blunder".