Katie Gallagher

If we could solve that like everyone would love to, I think that would dramatically improve not only gender equality but economic empowerment of women.

And that's why we're trying to come at it –

We're trying to deal with that, obviously, lots of funding going into women's safety, but also come at it from the other way, which is to make sure women are getting paid properly, to look at how we're providing housing, to the women's health initiatives that are rolling through.

We are really trying to come at driving economic independence through every lever available to us, whether it's investments in early childcare or

Women's wages, really important, like in the women's budget statement, it shows that we've invested about $21 billion into aged care and early education care workers, predominantly women workforce, overwhelmingly.

That's making a huge difference.

And how do you think the budget is nailing that this year?

So I guess, well, I guess partly the budget is, you have to see the budget in a series of investments.

So, you know, some of the things that we did in women's health, for example, they've only been there short term, they will continue to build over the forward estimate.

So it's

It's incremental and it's staged.

So the benefits continue to grow.

And we know already how successful the menopause and contraceptive listing on the PBS has been.

We know hundreds of thousands of women are using those now, the benefit of that.

So I would say there's a bit of that in that we've made these investments in previous years.

They continue to flow through.

The big focus we've got in this budget, not only tax, I mean, women will be the beneficiary of some of those changes we've made, whether it be about in the low income super tax offset, the Medicare tax offset, all of those, because women tend to be earning

you know, lower amounts.

And so they become the majority beneficiary there, but also the Waito and those will help.

And then we've got our big focus on how we stop designing systems in government that hurt women.