The National Foundation for Australian Women 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, including the national women’s alliances Equality Rights Alliance and Economic Security 4 Women. These organisations include those committed to increasing support for women in Australia as well as those with a special interest in women’s history.

NFAW and the Equality Rights Alliance submit that tax reform must be examined through a gendered lens to identify any impact that reform may have on women. Specifically, the economic impact on women are often the result of gender blindness that does not recognise the different effect that policies have on women because of the circumstances of women’s lives.

In particular, women are overrepresented among lower paid, casual workers and they are more likely than men to experience interruptions to their working career as a result of caring responsibilities to children and other family members. Therefore policies that impact negatively on lower income earners, or that allow higher tax benefits to wealthier members of the community, are more likely to disproportionately affect women.

As noted in the discussion paper, women are often the secondary income earner in Australian households, and female workforce participation rates are highly responsive to effective marginal tax rates. NFAW has a serious concern that the role of the transfer system has not been addressed in this discussion paper. The transfer system has a redistributive function, protecting those in need against poverty. Women are more likely to rely on income support though transfer payments, whether in the form of the age pension, through parenting payments or the Family Tax Benefit. The transfer system cannot provide effective support if the taxation system does not raise sufficient revenue to provide adequate benefits to support those in most need.

For this reason we believe that the primary focus of tax reform should be to safeguard the integrity of the tax system, and to ensure that the tax-transfer system, taken as a whole, is progressive. Lower taxes should be an outcome of the reform process, not the main driver.

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