In this article, I share insights from the conversations I have enjoyed with my father GC Harcourt on gender, social justice, and economic policy in the last years of his long and fruitful life. Our conversations reflected our overlapping but at times divergent responses to the disruptions caused by environmental, climate, health, economic, and political crises. The article reflects on our conversations around population, alternatives, the pervasiveness of racism in Australia, and the recurring questions of how to bring about change and how to continue despite political disappointments. The article teases out in a gentle way how my perspective, as a feminist political ecologist, diverged from GC Harcourt’s views, and what our conversations together suggest as important challenges to overcome as we confront the current crises of modern capitalism.

The ‘Wellbeing Budget’ presented to the New Zealand Parliament in 2019 was widely described as a world-first. This article explores the possibility of a distinctive Australasian contribution to our understanding of wellbeing economics in public policy. The introduction section presents an analytical wellbeing framework showing how human actions draw on services provided by the country’s capital stocks to create and sustain personal and communal wellbeing. The second section chronicles some landmark policy initiatives in Australia and New Zealand for understanding and monitoring wellbeing, culminating in the Wellbeing Budget. The third section highlights four areas for further development: (1) the role of family wellbeing in intergenerational wellbeing, (2) the role of cultural capital in providing foundations for future wellbeing, (3) the role of Indigenous worldviews in enriching understandings of wellbeing and (4) the role of market enterprise in expanding capabilities for wellbeing. These are all areas where Australasian researchers have demonstrated expertise.

This study applies a methodology used by De Henau and Himmelweit (2013) to study resource allocation in Australian mixed-sex couple households. Using 18 waves of data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey and by means of fixed effects estimations, the study identifies how men’s and women’s contributions via paid and unpaid work influences their satisfaction with the financial situation (SWFS) within households. Employment status is used to proxy each partner’s contribution to household resources. The results reveal that paid contributions through full-time employment have a strong role in determining SWFS. This is a source of gender difference because Australian men are much more likely to be engaged in full-time employment than women. Most often, for both men and women, unpaid contributions to household resources (proxied by less than full-time employment) has a detrimental effect on their own SWFS, but smaller effects on their partner’s SWFS. These results imply that gender asymmetry in paid and unpaid contributions to household resources contributes to the reproduction of gender inequalities within Australian households. The results add external validity to the relevance of De Henau and Himmelweit’s (2013) analysis of these issues.

The gender pay gap, the difference in earnings of men and women, has remained remarkably resilient over the past two decades in Australia and a number of other countries, despite a range of legislative and policy initiatives aimed at narrowing this difference. Drawing upon industry-wide data and an organisational case, this analysis of professional business services examines the nature of pay equity within and beyond organisational boundaries. We conclude that ‘success’ in gender and pay equity terms has been constrained by minimum government compliance requirements and limited attention to the role labour markets play in contributing to gendered patterns of pay.