Women are no better off under Labor

This International Women’s Day, the Labor government has tried to reassure Australian women that things are moving in the right direction by pointing to all the ways it has supposedly made life better for us since 2022.

“This Government has achieved many firsts”, federal Minister for Women Katy Gallagher said in a press release on 3 March, “including the lowest gender pay gap, 11.5 percent, and a Federal Parliament with over 52 per cent women”. Similarly, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese reminded women at an IWD breakfast that Labor had changed the single parent payment to help single mothers get by.

Awkwardly for Gallagher, the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) reported that the gender pay gap in 2023-24 was actually 21.8 percent on average. The WGEA calculation includes base salary, overtime, bonuses and additional payments. It also accounts for part-time and casual work—categories in which women are disproportionately represented. According to its report, “this offers a more complete picture of the real remuneration differences between women and men in Australia”.

Gallagher appears to have quoted the pay gap calculated by the Bureau of Statistics, which reports only base salaries for full-time employees, a much more limited statistic. But hey, why let accuracy get in the way of some election spin?

Single parents can now access support payments until their youngest child turns 14, up from 8. This is a welcome change given the cost-of-living crisis affecting many single mothers. However, let’s not forget that it was former Labor (and first woman) Prime Minister Julia Gillard who lowered it from age 16 in 2012. That the Labor party hasn’t even expanded the scheme back to 2012 levels doesn’t exactly make it an anti-sexist hero.

In New South Wales, public sector nurses have been campaigning for a 15 percent pay rise, taking strike action against the Labor state government. This overwhelmingly female-dominated workforce is among the lowest paid in the country. The union is specifically highlighting this fact in its fight with the government, linking the struggle to raise wages in the sector with addressing pay disparities between female- and male-dominated industries.

Premier Chris Minns has so far refused to meet the pay demand, claiming there is not enough money in the budget to raise nurses’ salaries. However, Minns somehow found a few extra million down the back of the couch to raise police salaries by up to 40 percent. But don’t despair, ladies, this doesn’t mean that Minns isn’t absolutely dedicated to gender equality; for the first time ever, 50 percent of the NSW cabinet is made up of women! Slay.

If Labor was serious about increasing the standard of living for women in Australia, implementing measures to ease the housing crisis would make a huge difference. The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute highlighted in a brief last year that lower weekly earnings translate into single women taking longer to save for a deposit on a home, being less likely to find an affordable rental, having less superannuation to pay for housing in retirement and facing a higher increased risk of homelessness than men.

Labor has refused to cap or freeze rents, or abolish regressive tax concessions for wealthy investors. Its centrepiece housing policy, the Housing Australia Future Fund, involves a limited spend on social housing in partnership with private investors who are guaranteed to make a profit out of renting to low-income people, instead of directly investing in new, publicly owned affordable housing.

And finally, the Labor government has refused to stand up to, or even blandly criticise, the new Trump administration, which is decked out with misogynists who are determined to claw women’s rights back to the 1950s.

Gallagher, Albanese and Minns would have us believe that a vote for Labor is a vote for women’s equality. But don’t be fooled. Labor governments, like their Liberal counterparts, are nothing but bad news for women.