Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Reform No. 1) Bill 2026, Income Tax Rates Amendment (Tax Reform No. 1) Bill 2026
Senator GALLAGHER (Australian Capital Territory—Minister for Finance, Minister for the Public Service, Minister for Women, Minister for Government Services and Manager of Government Business in the Senate) (12:09): As the Minister for Women, I get a range of information on the measures through the budget process, as you would understand. We publish the Women's Budget Statement, which actually does have, from my recollection—I don't have that book in front of me—a section that relates to tax reform and the impact on women.
But, as the general gender analysis will show when we look at matters around tax—you can see it in the Tax Expenditure and Insights Statement, which now reports on gender as well and breaks it down—overwhelmingly, overall, more than a majority of tax concessions, when they apply, benefit men, because women tend to have fewer assets and less income. The way that the tax system works and that tax concession works is that, overall, men tend to do better out of tax concessions than women for those reasons—lower income and lower assets.
In terms of whether some gender analysis was done on the tax reform, I can confirm that there was, and, in general—not that we usually release specific or individual analysis, because they remain cabinet documents—the reforms put forward would improve gender equality by reducing the relative generosity of the current concessions which primarily benefit older and higher income taxpayers, and men are overrepresented at the higher income levels and report a larger share of net capital gains.
Just going back to that—thank you to those that found the information for me—the Tax Expenditure and Insights Statement in 2022-23, by gender, reported 420,000 men and 410,000 women used the CGT discount. Men received 58 per cent of the benefit from the discount. By gender, it was equal on taxpayers who claimed rental reductions—1.2 million men and 1.2 million women—but men received 57 per cent of the benefit from those deductions.
When we look at other elements of the package in relation to the working Australian tax offset and the instant deduction by gender—obviously, 13.3 million taxpayers will receive a tax cut of up to $250 in 2027-28 from the working Australian tax offset, including 6.3 million women, which constitutes 48 per cent of those who benefit, and 47 per cent of the WATO benefit is expected to go to women.
On the instant tax deduction, 3.3 million beneficiaries of that, or 54 per cent of that, for the 2026-27 income year, are expected to be women, with 52 per cent of the instant tax deduction benefit as expected to go to women. Although more women than men are expected to benefit—this goes back to the earlier point—the average benefit for men is higher than for women so that is men in receiving the order of $215 through the instant tax deduction and women around $200.
That is driven, really, by the underlying distribution of taxable incomes. Men have higher average taxable incomes than women and are subject to higher marginal tax rates on average. The Women's Budget Statement includes information on the gender impacts of various tax policies, including the combined impact of the government's tax cuts and tax deduction, and, for an average Australian female worker on $68,343, the combined benefit of those tax cuts and the instant tax deduction could be up to $2,494 per year from 2027-28, relative to 2023-24 tax settings.
On average, an average Australian female worker earning that income, all things being equal, would benefit almost $2½ thousand per year compared to the 2023-24 tax settings. I'm not sure there's more I need to provide there, but, yes, we do consider these and assess them. In fact, the Tax Expenditures and Insights Statement—I thank the Treasury and the Treasurer for this—now reports against those by gender.