Peter Martin recently argued that the government’s budget is their true statement of values. As we have watched the Federal Government trying to get onto the front foot to address their ‘woman problem’ over recent weeks, an insight into their values would be helpful. In today’s analysis, Helen Dalley-Fisher of the Equality Rights Alliance (@EraAustralia) explains how the Federal budget is the key document to provide forensic evidence that they mean business.

The government is talking about women

Were you one of the thousands of people who turned up to the #March4justice rally on 15 March? Were you one of the many more thousands of women who wanted to be there but couldn’t make it? Do you have even a passing interest in gender equality?

Then you really need to be paying attention to the Federal budget next week.

The budget is the first real test for the Government in the wake of the Parliamentary sex abuse scandals. In the initial fallout from Brittany Higgin’s revelations, we saw the PM initially struggle to understand the importance of violence against women as a workplace issue, followed by a flurry of activity as understanding appeared to dawn. Two new Ministers and an Assistant Minister were appointed. A cabinet taskforce was established. Lots of language about ‘women’s safety’ and ‘women’s economic security’ was deployed. But next week’s budget will be our first chance to judge exactly how deep the government’s commitment to gender equality runs.

The early signs are positive. The childcare announcement suggests that Government is listening to women – the lack of spending on childcare attracted significant criticism at the last budget. It’s always good to see Government reacting constructively to criticism. There are also early suggestions that steps might be taken to address the causes of women retiring with significantly less superannuation than men, which leads to retirement poverty and growing levels of homelessness among older women. Action on job creation aimed at women is also rumoured. These would all be positive steps.

But there are deeper, structural issues in Government and in the budget itself which will need to be addressed if we’re to ever achieve gender equality.

The proof’s in the budget

It’s important to note that in all the flurry of ‘women positive’ language from Government, the phrase ‘gender equality’ is seldom heard. That’s a worry, because one of the key problems we face as women is the deep-rooted sense among policy makers and thought leaders that women are somehow ‘other’; a special interest group to be dealt with through siloed policy initiatives. While specific policy initiatives are a useful way of dealing with isolated issues, they are an inadequate means to achieve gender equality. You can’t treat 51% of the population as a special case or a marginal group.

Yes, women use roads… But they often don’t use them in the same way that men do. Photo by Alexis Reyna on Unsplash

When a policy maker sits down to write a specialist policy aimed at women, they are thinking ‘women’. But when a policy maker writes policy about trade, or infrastructure, or health, they are thinking ‘people’. The catch is that more than two thousand years of patriarchy has ensured that when we think ‘people’ we are unconsciously thinking ‘men’. Men are people, women are the deviation from that standard. The result is a structural inability to know how policy is differentially affecting women.

When the Government was challenged in October last year on the relevance of its budget to the lives of women, the PM responded by arguing that women use roads and other infrastructure too. But how do women use roads and infrastructure? Are we building roads that meet the needs of men (more likely to be full time employees travelling in rush hour) or women (more likely to be part time or casual employees, driving off main routes to pick up the kids, or driving during the working day while caring for kids and aging parents)? Is affordable public transport a better investment for women (who are more likely to be on low incomes) than roads? The budget doesn’t know and, at the moment, the budget doesn’t care.

This unconscious bias issue is not new and, frustratingly, we used to address it really well. Australia was the world leader in using its budget to promote gender equality in the 1980s. In 1984, the Federal Government implemented the world’s first Gender-Responsive Budgeting (GRB) initiative, the Women’s Budget Programme, which used the budget to systematically identify opportunities to advance gender equality through expenditures, allocations and taxations. For almost ten years, the Federal Government used gender-disaggregated data to work out exactly how its spending was going to affect women and it published the information for all to see. It was revolutionary, clever, and genuinely useful, but interest in the project petered out during the 1990s.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world has caught up. GRB is now considered best practice with half of OECD countries currently using some form of GRB. UN Women recommends Gender-Responsive Budgeting (GRB) as a key element of gender mainstreaming. Commitments to GRB featured in the Beijing Declaration and Platform Action in 1995, Australia regularly commits to implement GRB in the annual Agreed Conclusions from the UN Commission on the Status of Women.

As GRB grows internationally, Australia is increasingly out of step with its international promises to build gender equality – and this is especially critical as we recover from a pandemic that disproportionately disadvantaged women. It’s time to gender the Federal budget to ensure that the Government is working for us all.

This post is part of the Women's Policy Action Tank initiative to analyse government policy using a gendered lens. View our other policy analysis pieces here.

Posted by @SusanMaury

Is the Coalition solving their ‘woman problem’? The Federal budget tells the true story