Overview of findings

A gender lens on the 2017-18 Budget – By Marie Coleman

With ABS data on wages and employment producing disquiet about the growth forecasts underpinning this Budget, there is cause for concern about the overall economic environment. The reports on housing affordability set against the news on incomes equally are causes for apprehension.

NFAW is quite clear in its view that women and girls can only benefit from a strong economy where there are realistic plans for bringing the Budget back into balance over the cycle. We congratulate the Government for recognising that it has a need for both revenue and expenditure measures, and that the Australian population has both an appetite for decent quality public services – education, health, income supports, transport – and a willingness to find the revenue to pay for them.

There are positives for women and girls in the Budget, which we welcome. There are also many concerning measures and also policy vacuums. There is nothing which could be described as a strategy for coordinated action on gender equity or even as a coordinated strategy for finding out how Budget policies affect men and women differently. The dropping of the so-called ‘zombie’ measures from Budget 2014 is welcomed.

NFAW began its annual Gender Lens on the Budget in 2014 in response to the manifest unfairness of that Budget. From the first hastily assembled team of a handful of authors we have grown and expended our coverage, drawing on expertise in former Treasury, Prime Minister and Cabinet, and other Departmental officers, as well as on colleagues in the academic and not for profit sector. We have greatly expanded the portfolios we are now able to analyse. One concerning gap has been in Indigenous Affairs. We are pleased to be able to include in this later edition of the Gender Lens a new overview section that examines the net impact of the Budget on Indigenous women. NFAW is grateful to Professor Lesley Russell for stepping in to advise in this important area.

We have noted the disappearance from the Budget Papers of many of the tables which once allowed careful analysis of historical trends, and of the impacts of measures on individuals and family types. We deplore the consequent increasing lack of transparency in the Budget material.

We know that Treasury has its own in-house microsimulation tool to assess distributional impacts of measures. We are at a loss to understand how measures could have been introduced in different portfolios which come together to produce Effective Marginal Tax Rates of up to 100% or more when the Government continues to emphasise the need for greater productivity and to encourage female workforce attachment.

It is quite clear to us that notwithstanding the elevation of the Office for Women to full divisional status and its re-location in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet that there has not been any effective gender aware analysis in the formation of this Budget.

We draw to attention the statements by Minister Julie Bishop when she held the portfolio in the Howard Government.

 

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