This time next week, the Liberals will be settling into the swanky surrounds of Sydney’s Hilton hotel for their 60th federal council. The party will use the occasion to launch a book with a reboot of the values articulated by Robert Menzies in his “forgotten people” speech and essays.



A bunch of high flyers from inside and outside the party have contributed essays to Menzies 2.0 – Malcolm Turnbull (naturally), former prime minister Tony Abbott and other Canberra types both established and up-and-coming, a mix of men and women, and the federal crew versus people in the states.

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The editor of the compilation did issue one instruction: Labor and the Greens were banned words. The objective was simple: this exercise was about expressing Menzian liberalism in a contemporary political context.

It wasn’t about producing yet more talking points, or the cage fights that power the 24/7 news cycle, but numb and alienate the voters. This was about ideas and enduring values.

I’m interested to see the results. It’s reassuring to me that people in the Liberal party are engaged in an articulation of what the political movement stands for 76 years on from Menzies and his famous speech, because one of their weaknesses during this period in government is that it hasn’t always been obvious.

Also not always obvious is whether or not senior players grasp that winning government means communicating to a broad constituency. One episode from the political week tells a story.

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The treasurer, Scott Morrison, on Wednesday held the press conference treasurers always hold when the Australian Bureau of Statistics releases an update of the national accounts.

This week’s news was good, if you don’t mind the mildly disconcerting feeling that the Australian economy at the moment is being powered by mining exports and the national disability insurance scheme. Setting that minor oddity to one side, economic growth crept back over 3%.

In an effort to communicate the various trends in the economy, Morrison touched down with an anecdote about utes. Having grown up in the bush, I obviously have no objection to utes at all. I learned to drive in one – an old three-on-the-tree bush basher, in my best friend’s paddock.

I’m also on board with treasurers trying to find modes of communication that reduce complex ideas to simple cut-through concepts. Morrison prides himself on speaking the language of the tabloids when it comes to his portfolio, and I don’t criticise him for it. If you want to get things done in government,best find a means of being able to explain your ideas to a mass audience buffeted by the chronic oversaturation created by our highly connected universe.

So good one, Scott. Bring on the utes.

If you cut people’s taxes, men will do better than women. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s just good information to have

Except the ute anecdote persisted. Utes on the streets, cranes in the sky – these were concrete metrics of economic recovery. This was the story Morrison wanted to tell about the Australian economy in June 2018. Watching on, I wondered how this story related to me. To put it simply, it didn’t.

I should add at this point I wasn’t physically at the press conference, because it was a busy morning. I’d just filed a news story. So I watched in my office.

If I’d been in the room I would have been in adversarial mode, focused on trying to tease out a news line – I wouldn’t have consumed the press conference in the more distant way voters do. So I was watching like a voter. “Too much of the utes, Scott,” I thought to myself, feeling myself mired dispiritingly in a seriously blokey episode of death by anecdote.

Then we got to women. The treasurer was cranky (as he sometimes is) when information is presented to him that he regards as disruptive to his flow. We got to women because Labor had asked the parliamentary budget office to crunch some numbers about the distributional effects of the income tax cut on male and female taxpayers. In a not terribly surprising development, the analysis showed men benefitted more from the tax cuts than women, particularly from the higher-end tax cuts.

The reason for this is simple. Men earn more than women. There is a gender pay gap. There are also more men in the workforce, particularly at the higher end of the nation’s pay scales. So if you cut people’s taxes, men will do better than women. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s just good information to have.

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The reason you do distributional analysis is to try and work out if the sum of your policies might have implications you haven’t thought through.

This is a government that wants to maximise participation in the labour market. They say it often. But one of the drags on female participation in the labour market, for example, is women, (often secondary earners), being hit with higher effective marginal tax rates (which is a loss you calculate when you put together income tax and the withdrawal of some other government benefit).

If you are tinkering with tax policy and you care about participation, this is something that’s good to bear in mind. Understanding how the tax cuts flow between the genders could be a building block in a broader exercise of understanding.

Here’s one example of putting various pieces together. A recent report from KPMG called Ending Workplace Discrimination Against Women looked at the impact of tax and the childcare subsidy on a hypothetical professional women working part time and earning $100,000. When they crunched the numbers to work out whether it was worth this woman returning to full-time work, they discovered the woman would be a grand total of $26 a week better off if she worked five days after childcare expenses were factored in.



Adding to the ute-led recovery was the gratuitous smackdown on pink forms and blue forms

So getting into the weeds: wondering how the benefits flow – and what might be the distributional consequences of various measures – isn’t a thoughtcrime. As practice goes, it’s actually optimal. Without this kind of thinking, as a government, you are flying blind.

If you do an analysis identifying that the benefits flow to men at a ratio of almost three to one by the time the Coalition’s tax cut plan reaches stage three – you might think about being more generous at the low and middle-incomes end, where the benefits flow to women and men almost equally, just on a principle of fairness.

If you didn’t care about fairness, if you only cared about boosting labour market participation and maximising the output of the economy, you might briefly countenance whether you might be better off targeting your tax relief at people who might respond to the policy signal.

But Morrison was outraged to find people were asking questions about gender distribution in his GDP press conference.

There was a tart rebuttal, followed by an observation that journalists were silly to be giving this material the time of day. “The tax system does not discriminate on gender. You don’t get pink forms and blue forms to fill out your tax return. That’s not how it works,” the treasurer said.

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“They’re one colour, they assess one thing – what you earn – and you pay tax on what you earn. So it’s just a nonsense of an argument. I’m sorry, I reject it and I’m surprised people are giving it this much credibility. I would have thought you would have seen through that.”

Bizarrely, some of my male journalistic colleagues appeared duly chastened by this manufactured outrage.

If you were watching on as a woman, however, you might have felt something else. Annoyed might be a polite way of putting it. Excluded might be another feeling.

First, your story of economic participation didn’t really feature in the treasurer’s telling of what’s happening in the economy – unless you happened to have bought a ute recently.

Adding to the ute-led recovery was the gratuitous smackdown on pink forms and blue forms. I mean, really? Seriously? How patronising can you get?

I’m not sure about whether communicating to women who might be inclined to vote Liberal will be part of next week’s Menzies 2.0 reboot. One can only hope.