This submission is being made by The National Foundation for Australian Women (NFAW).

NFAW is dedicated to promoting and protecting the interests of Australian women, including intellectual, cultural, political, social, economic, legal, industrial and domestic spheres, and ensuring that the aims and ideals of the women’s movement and its collective wisdom are handed on to new generations of women. NFAW is a feminist organisation, independent of party politics and working in partnership with other women’s organisations.

Gender-based analysis defines the ways in which public policies affect women and men differently. It does so through the systematic use of data to better tailor the development of government programs. The Commonwealth government stopped production of its Women’s Budget Statement, part of the official Budget papers in 2014, after 40 years of production.

Unsurprisingly, NFAW and a number of other commentators noted the conspicuous absence of gender-based budgeting in the August Budget. The areas targeted in the Budget– construction, energy, transport and manufacturing–were all male dominated. They received a combined $27billion. However, prior to COVID-19 it was the service sectors that dominated employment growth rather than those traditional male sectors.

We believe the 2020 Budget was a lost opportunity to maximise employment growth, to invest in social infrastructure with the greatest multiplier effects and to address the structural problems in female dominated areas that COVID-19 has exposed.

The 2021 Budget offers scope to address the deficiencies of the 2020 Budget. NFAW has commissioned independent modelling to assess the impacts on GDP that would flow from an increase in government-funded provision of services in the child care, residential aged care and residential disabled care and other social assistance over four years from 2021-22 onwards.

Under our hypothesised scenario, an increase in government-funded service delivery in the child care, aged care and disability care sectors beginning in 2021 would generate an increase GDP as soon as it was introduced. By 2030, GDP is estimated to be 1.64 per cent higher than it would be in the absence of this investment.

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