Machineries of government - 2019

• When Government policies and programs are developed and managed in the absence of an informed and evidence-based gender analysis, they are at risk of delivering poor service, as is the case with effective marginal tax rates, or actual harm as is the case with ParentsNext.

• Effective marginal tax rates have a significantly greater impact on women than on men, affecting both women’s workforce participation and the design of tax transfers. Gender insensitive tax policy cannot be simply written off with one-liners such as: “You don’t fill out pink forms and blue forms on your tax return.” (The Guardian, 8 June 2018)

• The Office for Women (OfW) in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) has responsibility for advising the Prime Minister and working with all government agencies to enhance the gender equality in their policy and program development and review, including the preparation and review of Budget initiatives.

• Budget outcomes suggest that OfW requires reach and influence underpinned by high level political and bureaucratic backing. The economic expertise of OFW has been allowed to run down (NFAW’s Gender Lens of the Budget 2017, pp. 4-5). Since 2014 there has been no Women’s Budget Statement. Its publications mainly present gender-blind policies as policies for women.

• Evidence-based policy cannot be developed without gender-disaggregated data. To NFAW’s knowledge, agencies have not invested in extending their datasets to include gender, or often even using the gender-disaggregated data that they have –with the honourable exception of the data being collected by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA). There has been no Time Use Survey to inform community service and employment policy since 2006.