Gender equity was largely ignored in most responses to the 2026-27 Federal Budget.
Yet it remains critical to apply a gender lens to the budget, particularly given the Albanese Government’s own commitment to gender equity.
In theory, the Women’s Budget Statement (WBS) provided as part of Budget papers should provide this gender lens.
It is certainly a positive that the statement is produced at all; following its annual delivery from 1984 to 2013, it was scrapped from 2014 to 2021, and only reinstated in 2022.
However, while the WBS outlined the Government’s investments into its five priority areas for gender equality, it failed to properly assess the Budget’s gendered impact with distributional analysis of its biggest reforms.
Priority areas in Working for Women:
- A Strategy for Gender Equality and the WBS
- Gender-based Violence
- Unpaid & Paid Care
- Economic Equality & Security
The two most significant announcements in the Budget, changes to how capital is taxed and reforms to the NDIS, are likely to have distinct impacts on men, women and gender diverse people, but this was not made clear in the WBS:
• Reduced tax concessions through changes to negative gearing, capital gains and trusts, are not gender neutral, as argued by Nicki Hutley and Leonora Risse in the Financy Women’s Index report.
Another important part of this conversation is how the tax and transfer system supports, or fails to support, Australians struggling to make ends meet.
While the Government claimed that the Working Australians Tax Offset (WATO) would particularly benefit part-time and lower income earners, including women, income support recipients were ignored despite repeated calls for Jobseeker and other allowances to be substantially raised to lift recipients above the poverty line.
Women disproportionately rely on income support, such as the Parenting Payment for single parents – 83% of one-parent families are single mother families.
• The overhaul of the NDIS may be appropriate to improve fiscal sustainability, but the reform is just another example of social change that depends on the invisible work of women carers.
Removing 160,000 people from the scheme and cutting budgets, using an unclear transition scheme that relies on state-funded community supports, will trade women’s paid care for unpaid care – contributing to persistent gender inequities in economic and financial outcomes, not to mention wellbeing costs for people with disabilities and their carers.
This is not to detract from the significant strides in gender equality made under this Government, including records for gender balance in leadership, a First Nations-led national strategy to end violence and wage increases for workers in female-dominated industries.
But the WBS could be significantly bolstered by comprehensive and transparent gender analysis of the economic and gendered trade-offs underpinning the Budget’s most meaningful measures.
