Labor’s bid to end male and female ‘dominated’ jobs
Australia’s heavily male or female-dominated industries will be a thing of the past under a new budget approach that considers how every taxpayer dollar spent impacts job take up in sectors like engineering, teaching and health care.
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Australia’s heavily male or female-dominated industries will be a thing of the past under a new budget approach that considers how every taxpayer dollar spent impacts job take up in sectors like engineering, teaching and health care.
Finance and Women’s Minister Katy Gallagher said by the end of this year the federal government will fully roll out a budget process that considers how policies impact gender, ensuring policies do not inadvertently create barriers.
“Australia has one of the worst gender disaggregated labour markets anywhere,” she said.
“There’s no reason we shouldn’t be saying as part of AUKUS that for those job opportunities we’re expecting that women are treated equally and we are actually driving women’s uptake in those STEM industries.”
Ms Gallagher said if the gender analysis of a policy showed women were less likely to benefit that did not mean the idea wouldn’t be funded, simply that the government would have its “eyes open” about the impact.
“You could get that analysis and say so what? It doesn’t matter we still think this is important for all these other reasons,” she said.
“Or you could say right, that’s interesting, how about we go back and see if we should be incentivising women.”
Ms Gallagher said gender analysis of policies and programs meant the government could actively remove barriers that stopped women and girls from pursuing particular skills or careers.
“Rather than just hope the best where you invest in skills and hope women take them up … we can have interventions (to ensure they do),” she said.
The number of female workers in aged care has grown to 96 per cent of the entire sector in recent years, and Ms Gallagher said traditionally male-dominated industries were also going backwards.
Ms Gallagher said older Australian women were currently the majority on Jobseeker, the fastest growing cohort on welfare, more likely to have no assets, no super, be in insecure work or a low paid industry.
“Payments like welfare have been front and centre when talking about women’s economic equality, but it’s more about removing barriers to work that particularly disadvantage women,” she said.
Ahead of the budget Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced Labor would expand access to financial support by raising the youngest child age cut-off for the Parenting Payment (Single) from 8 to 14-years-old.
About 52,000 women are expected to benefit from the additional support, as 90 per cent of the people eligible for the payment are mothers.
Social Services Minister Amanda Rishworth said the change would make things “fairer” for parents doing it tough.
“Single parents carry the world on their backs,” she said.
“They sacrifice so much to give their children a better life.
“This is about giving them the greater security and better support they deserve.”
GALLAGHER PUTS HEAT ON MINISTERS AS BUDGET LOOMS
Labor ministers will have to scour their own departments for savings and existing funds to finance future new ideas and pet projects under a permanent cycle of budget repair to rein in spending and pay down Australia’s trillion-dollar debt.
All programs will be evaluated ahead of every budget in a bid to ensure taxpayers are getting the best bang for their buck, with only a handful of exemptions made for new spending on major flagship reforms, as Labor seeks to balance borrowing costs against cost-of-living pressures.
In an exclusive interview Finance Minister Katy Gallagher told Newscorp she had a “true state of what the books look like” after “flushing out” half-funded or expiring commitments from previous Coalition government, and now her focus would shift to ensuring her own Labor colleagues don’t get carried away with spending.
“Ministers are having to look (at their budgets) and say okay well within this, I can make some changes, and don’t need as much funding from you,” Ms Gallagher said.
The federal budget handed down on Tuesday will include $17.8 billion in savings and reprioritised spending, of which $7.8bn will be reinvested within the Defence Integrated Investment Program as part of the government’s response to the Defence Strategic Review released last month.
Ms Gallagher said she wanted to continually “redeploy” resources and said just because departments had been doing things certain ways for a “long time” that did not mean their approach was a “priority now”.
“Part of that is getting ministers to be more in control and direct about what the government’s priorities are,” she said.
“I think for discretionary kinds of things, ministerial ideas, grant programs, it’s about have a look (at what’s already being spent).”
Ms Gallagher said she believed her colleagues found this approach “useful”.
“They’ve gone and had a chat with their department secretaries and they’ll come back and say, well there’s this program that which you know I can amend,” she said.
“That’s also helped Finance understand where all of the money is in departments.”
Ms Gallagher said she was also looking to “tighten” up departments’ use of “bottom draws” to stash funding in so they could “do projects themselves”.
Despite expectations Labor will deliver a surplus on Tuesday, the budget is in serious structural deficit and requires significant changes to spending and revenue in order to stay in the black long term, which Ms Gallagher said meant the government “can’t do everything” it wants.
“The budget is thousands of decisions to try to find the right balance,” she said.
“And part of that balance is telling the people that you’re managing their money properly.”
Ms Gallagher said in recent years the public had been told the budget could do a “whole range of things … that turned out to not entirely be accurate”.
“We want people to see what kind of structure the budget looks like and be pretty aware upfront about what the challenges are coming forward,” she said.
Ms Gallagher said Anthony Albanese had been “enormously helpful” in helping her and Treasurer Jim Chalmers set the tone for spending among their senior cabinet colleagues, describing the Prime Minister as a “pretty frugal guy”.
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