08:24

Here’s an interesting little piece of information from senate estimates today.

Treasury secretary John Fraser admitted Treasury has not modelled the financial impact of the government’s income tax plan on men and women separately.



Labor senator Jenny McAllister sent a note to Treasury before today’s hearings asking if it could provide a breakdown of the tax plan’s impact on taxpayers by gender and by electorate.



Fraser said Treasury didn’t have access to electorate data so it could not show how the tax cuts affected different electorates.



“[And] it wasn’t done by gender [because] the tax cuts are gender neutral in terms of ... the impact on the person,” he said.



Liberal senator Mathias Cormann jumped in, wanting to know why McAllister was interested in the tax plan’s likely impact on different electorates, suggesting it wasn’t relevant.



McAllister said it wasn’t up to him to approve her questions, and then asked Fraser to clarify his answer about the gender impact.



“In relation to the impacts by gender and the number of men and women who would relatively benefit and by how much, that analysis wasn’t done by Treasury?” she asked.



Fraser was unequivocal: “No.”



It’s an interesting point because the National Foundation for Australian Women has been pushing for years for Treasury to think more deeply about how budget measures affect men and women differently.”

In modelling last year, it found the combined impact of the government’s 2017-18 budget would see women earning below-average wages hit with effective marginal tax rates of 100%.



Treasury officials were then asked about that modelling in senate estimates, and they admitted they hadn’t modelled the impact of the budget on men and women separately.



Michael Brennan, the deputy secretary of Treasury’s fiscal group, told senators during senate estimates last year: “It is something we do look at from time to time, looking through the income scale with particular household cameos, where effective marginal tax rates might be particularly high, but I’m not aware that we’ve done anything for this particular budget.”

