Prospect of a gender gap a ticking time bomb for the Morrison government

This week, you could almost hear Morrison deliver the subliminal message out loud, that there are no votes in it for him if he keeps talking about the nation’s rape crisis. He just wants to move on.

He was asked on the Seven Network’s Sunrise program on Thursday if the position of Higgins’ former employer, Defence Minister Linda Reynolds, who is now on extended sick leave, had become untenable. The whiplash answer was telling. No, he said, the minister should be allowed to recuperate in peace like any other Australian.

“In the meantime, Marise Payne, a former defence minister herself, [is acting in her position],” he said. “We’re not skipping a beat in any of these areas. We are just getting on with the job and our job is pretty straightforward. Lead Australia out of the COVID-19 recession, ensure we are leading Australia out of the global COVID-19 health crisis around the world.”

The polls do in fact suggest that Morrison’s women’s problem disappears when the subject is his handling of the pandemic. He had eliminated the gender gap by the end of last year with men and women both giving him rock star ratings.

But what happens if a new gender gap emerges in the recovery? Women, as is well known, bore the brunt of retrenchments during the lockdown. They accounted for 55 per cent of the almost 880,000 jobs lost across the country between February and May last year. By January this year, the economy had restored around 815,000 of those jobs. Of the 65,000 jobs still to be recovered, almost nine in 10, or 55,000 belong to women.

The Grattan Institute this week revealed two important details to this macro picture. First, university educated men have more jobs now than they did before the pandemic, while university educated women are still behind where they were a year ago. Second, the same divide occurs between couple families with children compared to sole parents. Couple families never really had a recession last year, while sole parents are still in the middle of it. Eight out of 10 of the nation’s 1 million sole parents are women.

Sole parents are traditionally a strong constituency for Labor. But Coalition governments underestimate them at their peril. In 2004, they swung to Howard when the opposition was led by Mark Latham. They swung back to Labor in 2007, driven by a perfect storm of hip pocket issues from WorkChoices, the cost of living and the government’s changes to the family maintenance system. Going into the 2007 campaign, the Coalition held eight of the top 20 electorates for sole parents. They lost six of those eight, including the bellwether of Lindsay in Sydney’s west.

The Grattan report also confirmed everyone’s suspicion that women bore a disproportionate share of the unpaid work burden during lockdown, including remote learning with their children. “They took on an extra hour each day more than men, on top of their existing heavier load,” the report says. “And they were less likely to get government support – JobKeeper excluded short-term casuals, who in the hardest-hit industries are mostly women.”

Morrison may want to make the cold-hearted calculation that while the recovery favours men, he is favoured to pick up blue-collar Labor seats at the next election.

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But there is another danger lurking for him in safe Liberal and National party seats. Independent conservative women have already demonstrated their electoral power in both the city and the bush. Remember Abbott lost his safe seat of Warringah to Zali Steggall?

When Julia Gillard and Abbott were negotiating with independent MPs for the right to form minority government after the 2010 election, all six crossbenchers were male. In 2019, three of the six on the cross bench were female.

If the examples of Tame, Higgins and Contos inspire more women to run for Parliament, they may decide who runs the country regardless of what Morrison wishes to talk about.