Labor’s absurd gender agenda
ON Thursday, Labor vowed to introduce gender impact assessments on cabinet submissions and new policy proposals to assess how public spending would impact women and gender equality objectives.
Generally, we must wait until after an election before these batcrazy 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.
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 nongender-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 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.
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
VIKKI CAMPION
THINGS DON’T AUGUR WELL FOR REGULATION REDUCTION. RED, GREEN AND BLACK TAPE – AND NEXT, WE WILL HAVE PINK TAPE.
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.