NSW Premier Chris Minns is marking Worldwide Ladies’s Day with a visit to the microwave oven — to reheat a tasty little deal with for 9 Leisure.
On IWD 2023, Minns — then in the midst of what can be a profitable election marketing campaign — introduced Labor can be offering $5.8 million to the Future Ladies Jobs Academy, a coaching outfit co-owned by 9 Leisure and publishing veteran Helen McCabe. 9, in fact, fortunately carried the announcement.
Scroll ahead a 12 months and the way does Minns mark IWD 2024? By, erm, reannouncing the $5.8 million handout. Lest folks discover the cut-and-paste, Minns and NSW Ladies’s Minister Jodie Harrison rigorously famous, “This dedication was initially made previous to the election, one 12 months in the past as we speak on Worldwide Ladies’s Day 2023.”
Reannouncements of handouts are a staple of all governments, although when NSW Labor was final in energy, the microwave ovens buzzed lengthy into the night time in a authorities the place applications would usually be introduced a number of instances. However often it’s a second- or third-term phenomenon — it appears relatively early for the Minns authorities to be heating up outdated bulletins. Maybe it senses it might solely be a one-term outfit.
Tarla Lambert, editor-in-chief of Ladies’s Agenda, instructed Crikey that the press launch “is a reasonably embarrassing and feeble try to avoid wasting IWD face. When different governments this week have confirmed up with robust reforms — together with the Queensland authorities’s vital funding into girls’s well being and the federal authorities’s announcement of superannuation being paid on high of paid parental depart — it’s irritating to see the NSW authorities floundering in what they create to the desk for NSW girls.”
The $5.8 million is meant to “help 1,000 girls to entry the free, digital service, delivering one to 2 hours of actions per week to members to construct their confidence, capabilities and connections wanted to start their job search, safe employment pathways and thrive at work”.
Future Ladies’s jobs program has obtained loads of taxpayer largesse. In 2022 Crikey reported it had obtained almost $9 million from the federal authorities. By final 12 months, the handouts had reached $17 million regardless of the lack of any unbiased evaluation of the effectiveness of its applications. Future Ladies finally appointed an unbiased auditor to vet its applications, although the outcomes of the audit are usually not clearly obtainable on its web site.
Curiously, it’s the Coalition, not Labor, that has the bragging rights in relation to feminine employment: whereas in energy federally (throughout all of which, the Coalition was additionally in energy in NSW), feminine unemployment fell nationally from 5.7% in 2013 to three.7% in 2022, and feminine participation rose 3.5 share factors. Beneath the NSW Coalition issues had been higher nonetheless — feminine unemployment fell from 5.8% in 2011 to three.4% final 12 months and participation rose greater than 5 share factors.
Since Minns was elected, feminine unemployment has risen above 4% and participation has fallen in NSW, although we will put that all the way down to the Reserve Financial institution’s rate of interest hikes. However perhaps reheating outdated bulletins about digital job providers isn’t fairly sufficient?