In his budget reply speech on Thursday evening, Peter Dutton declared that “every election is important, but this election does matter more than others in recent history. It is a sliding doors moment for our nation.”

If that’s true, what the opposition leader said next matters greatly.

Peter Dutton says he will prioritise male-dominated industries. Credit: James Brickwood

“My intention is to make Australia a mining, agriculture, construction and manufacturing powerhouse again,” Dutton said.

Two things are curious about this, and neither were said aloud.

The first is that these sectors are all dominated by men. Roughly two-thirds of the 298,000 Australians working in agriculture are men, while in manufacturing the gender divide of the 881,500 workers skews 70 per cent male to 30 per cent female. In mining, this increases to 80 per cent of the total 325,700 workforce being male, while the largest sector – construction – reports almost nine out of every 10 of their 1.3 million workers are male.

The second point of note is that combined, these sectors only account for around 20 per cent of our national workforce.

What, then, are the opposition leader’s intentions for industries such as healthcare, whose 2.3 million employees account for 14 per cent of the national workforce and are 74 per cent female? Or education, which is 71.9 per cent female and employs 1.2 million Australians?

Simple: “The revenue generated from these........

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