Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me.
I'm going to speak to you today as somebody who's been involved in gender-responsive budgeting since its inception in Australia in the mid-1980s. It's been a journey of some 22 years. I just wanted to talk to you about some of the insights I've gained along the way.
First, I think it's worth noting that for the majority of countries, the government budget is the major source of finance for gender equality and women's empowerment, so we're left in a position that if we're serious about promoting women's empowerment and gender equality, we can't ignore the impact of the government budget.
That having been said, though, there is no clear pathway to how we can make sure the government budget does deliver those objectives. It's not so much a technical problem of not knowing; although there are technical problems and we need increasingly better data--particularly gender-desegregated data and analysis--the problem is a political one.
I'm probably not saying anything new to a group such as yours that at the heart of the budget process is a political process and it requires contestation. Commitment at very high levels is required as well if things are going to change in the area of gender equality.
I'd like to endorse the comments of the previous speaker. It's interesting sitting here, because in Australia we're following a similar policy path in giving enormous emphasis these days to tax cuts as a policy instrument. Tax cuts and tax expenditures, or what I call tax concessions, have enormous gender impacts and go through the budgetary process almost without question as being a good thing for everybody. They're not a good thing for everybody.
The other point I'd like to make is that it is unlikely that any developed country has not, at some time, sought to make government budgets more responsive to gender equity and equality. So what I'm saying is this process of gender-responsive budgeting is not entirely new.
I was reading the other day a very good publication from the Canadian office of the Status of Women. It was talking about the particular impact of tax expenditures in relation to women's retirement income. This is an example of a plank in gender budgeting--that is, gender analysis of the impacts of budgets.
What we're moving into increasingly I think since the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action recommendation that government budgets should be scrutinized for their gender impacts is an era in which we're asking how we can explicitly and systematically scrutinize the budget and engage in actions and processes that will bring about change. There have probably been elements of gender budgeting in developed countries since we developed plans for gender equality and women's empowerment, but it's the issue of the explicit and systematic link to the budget process that's been lacking in the past.
I think another understanding I've come to is that naming something is political. If we put it up in lights that we're doing a gender budget initiative, it sometimes sets us up. I'd like to see more and more gender budgeting as just the normal everyday work of politicians, NGOs, and the bureaucracy--and also, importantly, of ministries of finance or treasury.
In Australia, we did go down the track of sort of saying we are doing “women's budgets”, as we called them, in the mid-1990s. So it ultimately gets constructed as a project rather than the normal everyday work.
When I talked to my New Zealand colleagues, they said to me, “We're not doing gender budgeting.” I said, “That's interesting, for a developed country that has a very strong women's policy.” So I started to deconstruct the process by asking the question of what they do to implement their women's policy. It very soon became apparent that they're engaged at a number of significant levels, particularly with the finance ministry, in making sure that there is a flow of resources to support the projects that are needed to implement their plan and that there's scrutiny of new projects that go up to cabinet from a gender perspective. But they would say, “We're not doing gender budgeting”, and I would say they're engaged in the politics, particularly under—not so much now but in the recent past—a very strong neo-liberal framework for operating that made it difficult to name gender and women's equality as a priority.
Some of the key lessons I've learned over my 22 years of involvement I'll just put to you as a series of points.
The first one is that specifically targeted allocations to women and girls or men and boys are important, there's no doubt about that. But we must keep remembering they're minuscule in terms of the total budget. Every assessment of this—and I've done one myself for my state here in South Australia—shows them always to be less than 1% of the total budget. So it's important that when we talk about gender budgeting, we're genuinely looking at the other 99% of government expenditures that are not gender specific but have important gender impacts, like retirement income policies; family policies; infrastructure policies, even; tax cuts; whatever. They're not designed, we're often told, for women or for men, but the issue here is to work out what their impacts are and change them if we don't like them.
Some countries are still persisting with focusing on gender-specific targeted allocations. I don't want to undermine those claims. I'm just saying we need to be clear that they're just one element of gender budgeting and not the most important in terms of the total dollars or impacts.
Another observation that certainly came home to me here in Australia, but in every country in the world I've worked in, is that the wider economic and political context in particular, the macro-economic strategy that's in place, and the discourses about the role of government do play a fundamental role in shaping what can be achieved I think in relation to gender equality, but just as importantly, they're going to shape the design of any gender-responsive budgeting exercise that you may wish to implement.