Vikki Campion: ALP’s plans for gender impact assessments a waste of time and money

A plan for a unit to look at the impact on women sounds lovely, but it shows Labor does not have an economic infrastructure building agenda; it has a social engineering agenda, writes Vikki Campion.

On Thursday, Labor vowed to introduce gender impact assessments on cabinet submissions and new policy proposals to assess how public spending will impact women and gender equality objectives.

Generally, we must wait until after an election before these bat-crazy ideas permeate. Not this time.

It promised to deliver “an annual Women’s Budget Statement to assess the impact new budget measures have on women and examine how the allocation of public resources affects gender equality”.

In a fortnight where Australia has been shocked by the movement of Xi Jinping, and his negotiations for a naval base 2000km from our shores, the distance from Adelaide to Brisbane, where Ukraine’s president delivered a historic address to our parliament, Labor’s premier process of dealing with the global threat is a gender statement.

“The choices governments make about taxes, and spending are not gender-neutral, especially at this time,” the 2022 Federal Labor Women’s Budget Statement said.

Labor leader Anthony Albanese delivered his budget reply speech to the parliament last week. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Gary Ramage

Imagine if the cabinet decided to give Ukraine more armaments and coal, with Prime Minister Albanese calling Volodymyr Zelensky and saying: “We are just waiting for the gender impact statement before we can tick it off.”

At a guess there’d be between 10 to 20 submissions in any cabinet bag nearly every week, where Labor wants every department involved to make a gender impact statement.

The Women Budget Statement was such a seminal document that it didn’t even make Anthony Albanese’s budget-in-reply speech mere hours after it was launched, which suggests his speechwriter believed reference to it would be laughed out of the building.

Victoria’s public spending can already be submitted for a “gender impact assessment”.

Bass Coast Shire Council undertook a gender impact assessment on its public place names “to address the gender imbalance of place naming”.

It found that the overwhelming majority of the 60 localities, 1521 road names, and 111 features were “non-gender-specific”.

Of the roads, 1246 were non-gender-specific, 182 male and 93 female. They are now advocating for the Naming Rules for Places in Victoria Review to ensure “gender equality will have greater consideration in future legislation”.

These case studies in the public domain make Labor’s gender plan even worse. They know what the consequence is, and they are pursuing it anyway. Are transport departments dealing with billions of dollars of new roads needed to reduce congestion and move freight going to be held up for a bureaucratic gender review to ensure they are named after women?

Perth, Darwin, Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne are all named after men. Only Adelaide was a woman.

Columnist Vikki Campion. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Gary Ramage

Is this an issue to be immediately dealt with? Should we change the name of the Bruce Highway to Penelope Way? There are policy areas where we have been bereft at looking after women, such as domestic violence laws applied by the states, but to suggest every new policy proposal should be examined for its gender objectives is bureaucratic, not strategic.

Things don’t augur well for regulation reduction. Red, green, and black tape – and next, we will have pink tape.

Far-left leaning bureaucrats can weaponise those to torpedo any project that offends their political views — at the same time, providing them with compendiums of further useless bureaucratic busywork, employing further bureaucrats that could substantively assist the country to deal with the issues before us now.

On the surface, a plan for a unit to look at the impact on women sounds lovely, but it shows Labor does not have an economic infrastructure building agenda; it has a social engineering agenda. The more case studies you read on gender impact statements, the more you realise how unnecessary they are because men and women are not affected so differently by public infrastructure.

Assessing Kingston City Council’s “gender-specific needs related to urban cooling education” found both men and women were “time-poor”.

Assessing the gendered nature of a mountain bike track in the City of Geelong, Victoria’s Commission for Gender Equality found “boys and girls participate equally in mountain biking activities and competitions up to the age of approximately 13” before female use drops off due to “social and structural gender stereotypes.”

Okay. So we are time-poor and like to ride bikes. How much time was invested in these landmark findings? People who are looked over in government policy can often include people with a disability, who can’t read or speak English, people with low education, but apparently, all that matters is gender, with this objective to look at all public funding through a gender lens.

How does this apply to their pet subject of climate change? Will it change the naming of cyclones?

It also seeks 50/50 male-female representation in parliament. At its best, it’s virtue signalling. At its worst, it impedes getting the best people, regardless of their gender, into elected office.

Gender balance is no vaccine to bullying behaviour, proven by the recent inquiry into Commonwealth workplaces and allegations of a cantankerous cabal of women tormenting the late Kimberley Kitching. And if everything is on merit, how do you ensure a 50/50 elected representation whilst having a democratic process?

The parliament is blind to whether elected officials are male, female, gay, straight, dark or fair. All it requires is for them to indicate whether they are voting yes or no. I want a treasurer who is good with money, not filling a quota. I don’t care what a road is named, as long as it is sealed and safe.

This is a bureaucratic distraction of a clubbish culture at the expense of honest gendered policy, such as education, women’s finance, specialised women’s health care and birthing.

It shows how lucky and robust this country is that this is what Labor believes is a problem, but pragmatism could be the first casualty of an Albanese government.