Liberal Senator Jane Hume, the shadow minister for finance, gave a rather interesting speech at the Sydney Institute on Tuesday night. While Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s criticisms of the 2030 emissions targets last weekend were said to have reignited the so-called climate wars ahead of the next federal election, Hume’s comments were arguably aimed at reigniting the gender wars.
Given the contents of Hume’s speech, and the absolute hammering that women voters gave the Coalition last election, I am not sure that was a good idea.
First, a brief recap of the Liberal Party’s dire position with women voters. The 2022 Australian Election Study, the leading barometer of political attitudes and behaviour for 25 years, asked the following question: to what extent are claims that women cost the Coalition the election supported by the evidence?
The answer: gender differences in the voting habits of men and women played a role. While 38% of men gave their first preference vote in the House of Representatives to the Liberal-National Coalition, just 32% of women did. For Labor, the trend was the opposite, with candidates attracting 36% of women’s votes, compared with 32% of men.
Hume’s speech, which was trailed in The Australian, was pitched as the start of a Liberal Party fightback for the women’s vote. But it was just the same, slightly warmed up, “I choose my choice” liberal feminism that has dominated years of primarily federal Coalition leadership, which saw Australia tumble in the global World Economic Forum global gender gap rankings from 15th in 2006 to 50th in 2021 (as of 2023, we’re 26th). At the end of more than a decade of Coalition leadership, Australian women were demonstrably poorer and less healthy.
Firstly, Hume grossly misrepresented the Albanese government’s recent women’s budget statement, describing all the measures directed at the structural drivers of gender inequality as “welfare”.
“If Labor’s women’s budget statement is to be believed, equality is only to be achieved through welfare policy,” said Hume. “It is patronising in the extreme to insist that women need to be compensated for their gender.”
Just let that sink in. Hume, who had the great privilege and responsibility of serving as Australia’s first (and really only) dedicated minister for women’s economic security in the Morrison government, described measures to tackle the cost of early-years education and care, the undervaluing of women’s paid and unpaid care work, and super on paid parental leave and more, as “welfare”.
If anyone conducted an opinion poll among women voters, they would find precious few who would find these very welcome attempts to tackle the structural drivers of gender inequality as “patronising”. Nor would they find many who would describe them as “welfare”. It’s alarming that Senator Hume does.
Hume then erroneously misrepresented “the problem” in terms of women’s economic security as women’s lack of “financial literacy”. “In Australia, women trail men in financial literacy,” she said.
A few years ago, when a rather unwise Hume media advisor asked me if I wanted an advance copy of a speech the senator was meant to give on this very topic at the Women in Super Summit, I penned this fact-check of her claims in Guardian Australia.
Essentially, Hume engaged in a giant “hey look over here” exercise, blaming women’s lack of economic security on their supposed lack of “financial literacy”.
The problem for Hume then, and now, is that the extent to which women’s financial illiteracy is “a” problem or “the” problem that needs “fixing” is highly debatable, according to experts. Some I spoke to at the time accused Hume of some pretty serious data cherry-picking to paint a picture of women as financially incompetent, which was unfair… even insulting.
I find it dispiriting, and dare I say women voters might find it — what’s the word I’m looking for — how about patronising, that four years later Hume is still playing the same game.
And finally, there is the language of “aspiration”, with Hume saying the Liberal Party wishes to target “aspirational” women voters. Combined with the negative language about “welfare”, there is no escaping the senator’s implication that women fleeing domestic violence — whom research has found are faced with an intolerable “choice” between their safety and poverty — simply lack “aspiration”.
Ahead of the recent budget, more than 200 prominent women signed an open letter highlighting the inextricable link between women’s economic security and safety, which increased social welfare payments including JobSeeker could do much to assist.
On this, Hume and the Liberal Party are just on the wrong side of history, and at a time when the female intimate partner homicide rate has increased by 28% in a year. That was the biggest shocker of them all in Tuesday’s speech. There’s a word I’m now searching for… I’ll leave it at insulting.
Like nuclear reactors or scrapping climate targets, none of this is going to fly with the women voters who abandoned the Liberal Party in droves — for good reason. And on top of Dutton reigniting the climate wars, the teals will be loving another easy target.
