In a country that still does not have pay parity and where women have been severely affected by the financial downturn brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, a gender lens is not just desirable: it's essential.
We know that, for all its modern advancements, New Zealand's society is still not equitable. New Zealand wahine are still disadvantaged on many levels compared to their male counterparts. That's the whole reason we need to have a Minister for Women.
Treasury made the decision to refuse this gender lens before Covid-19 hit the country. But if anything, the pandemic has only served to show us just how desperately we need to fight for a fairer society for Kiwi men and women.
That "and" in that sentence above makes all the difference. This isn't about being divisive. This isn't a "one or the other" kind of situation. Social fairness is not a chocolate bar and if I get my fair share of it it doesn't mean a man will get less of his.
The reality is that, despite coming from the Minister for Women, the idea of a gender lens wouldn't just benefit women. Any intelligent man knows that gender equality benefits everyone.
The rights of New Zealand citizens are not finite - ensuring they reach all women doesn't mean taking them away from men. It means ensuring they reach everybody. Every citizen. Every taxpayer. Every human.
We still have a society that is severely segregated by factors such as age and gender. Women in New Zealand do the majority of unpaid work, such as caring for others, and are more likely to suffer from financial hardship.
So why is the Government not trying harder to ensure we address gender inequality, especially when it comes to something as important and meaningful as the Budget?
"The Treasury's experience of previous Budgets shows that adding additional analytical requirements to the Budget process likely has little impact on the quality of the bids," the Treasury memo said.
Essentially, we would look into whether this Budget can help half our society but yeah, nah, that sounds too hard.
Is it really hard work? Possibly. I don't know what it would entail, practically, but you don't fix hundreds of years of systemic inequality with a click of a mouse. But we also can't decide we just can't be bothered doing it.
There's also the implication that the outcomes would probably not be much different anyway. Is it not worth double-checking, though?
We are not going to achieve gender equality if we don't put in the hard yards. The budget is the most comprehensive tool the government has at its disposal to measure the real-life tangible impact of its policies on men and women - the men and women it's supposed to be working for.
What the Treasury did was put equality in the "too hard" basket.
This is something that should have been addressed decades ago. It wasn't. We're still here. It's not too late to address it now.
