Via Ross Gittins today, one of the few doing a good job on the Depressionberg Unstimulus:
I’m sorry to have to agree, but Grattan Institute boss Danielle Wood is right to say this is a “blokey” budget. As are those who add it’s a blokey budget from a blokey government.
…The first place a bias in favour of men is hidden is the division we make between the production of “goods” (by the agriculture, mining, manufacturing, utilities and construction industries) and the production of “services” by every other industry.
…Would it surprise you to learn that 79 per cent of the jobs in the goods sector are held by men whereas, in the almost four-times bigger services sector, 54 per cent of the jobs are held by women?
…But there’s where the budget aims its stimulus and where it doesn’t. No economic modelling should be taken as gospel truth, but modelling by Matt Grudnoff, of the Australia Institute, finds that bringing forward stage two of the government’s tax plan will create only between 13,400 and 23,300 jobs – depending on how much of the cut is saved or is spent on imports.
By contrast, Grudnoff estimates that splitting the same $13 billion evenly between service industries – universities, childcare, healthcare, aged care and the creative arts – would create almost 162,000 jobs.
As we know, more men have lost work than women in the depression:
There are further issues with this pointless gender warfare. The first is that the reason why manufacturing received a paltry $1.5bn in stimulus is because the pandemic and Chinese decoupling have shown that we need an industrial base after all. That the sector employs more men than women is irrelevant. The move benefits all Australians.
The same argument applies to the paltry amount put into infrastructure which is usually a good spend of public money to the collective benefit.
It is certainly true that we needed to put a lot more of the budget into demand stimulus. But, again, that’s not gendered. There just wasn’t anywhere near enough of it for men or women.
I can tell you right now that putting $13bn into playing tiddlywinks would create a lot of jobs but that doesn’t make it a good idea.
That said, I agree that women did suffer more than men in one way during the pandemic. They largely got shouldered with teaching the kids, a near sanity-breaking exercise that deserves some kind of thankyou. Labor did a good job of that in its budget reply with the childcare initiatives that also boost participation and so are also a useful use of public funds.
But, again, not doing that is not necessarily blokey. I’d suggest it has more to do with the Morrison Government’s ethos of self-sufficiency.
The problem with the budget is that its yawning demand hole is going to gut incomes, sink wages and lose the jobs for many Australians.
It was made by blokes, sure, but it is not blokey unless all blokes are insane.
