I think the major impact initially was to just genuinely raise awareness that there were differential gender impacts across the policy spectrum, and people took that up in various ways. We did have impacts like debates around the dependent spouse rebate, where a tax rebate was paid primarily to men for having a dependent spouse. We got Treasury to admit to the gender defects of that, and at the end of that period it was abolished and paid out as children's benefits.
We were able to reinforce the point that if you pay payments to the primary caregiver, which is usually the woman, it's more likely to be spent on the children, so we were successful in building that into the general policy apparatus.
Each year these budget documents published a whole raft of new expenditure initiatives for women and girls, so it gave us some sort of tracking mechanism. We were able to improve the quality of our data. You can't do gender budget analysis without improving your data, and that had ramifications for other things.
Having said all that, it is not just the focus on the budget in whatever constructed form that brings about the results. It has to be very broad based. It's not just about saying to Treasury, you do that and things will be fixed. They won't.
It has to be integral to every policy debate and the work of government and NGOs and so on.