This week the economic news was the GST, with the announcement of the removal of the GST from tampons and other sanitary products, and the government pushing ahead with its plan to rejig the way the GST is carved up among the states. Both policies look significant upon first glance but in reality are symbolic acts designed to make it look like things are being done, rather than actually solving the underlining issues.

To axe the GST on tampons will cost around $30m a year in revenue – or less than 0.5% of the total amount of GST raised each year. It’s such a small amount that you do have to wonder what took everyone so long.

One problem is that the GST is a bit of a dog’s breakfast of a tax. It is supposed to be an efficient tax, but it has so many exemptions – some of which make little sense – that it is rather complex to administer. In reality, consumption taxes around the world all have exemptions in place, such as on fresh food, because the tax is inherently regressive and thus governments invariably have to do deals to get them put in place.

In Australia the big exemptions are on fresh food, education and healthcare. These all seem to be nice and progressive exemptions – taxing education, for example, seems to be a very retrograde thing to do. And yet it means that private school fees are exempt, and thus it actually removes one of the few areas of the tax where richer people spend more of their income than those on low incomes.

But right from the get-go tampons were taxed – not because, as has been suggested in some outlets, they were considered luxuries (many necessities such as toilet paper are taxed), but because they were not considered an area of healthcare.

So long has the campaign been around to have the tax removed that the transcript of a report on the issue from the ABC website from 2000 refers to an “E-mail” petition in tones that suggest it is some new-fangled way of doing things.

And yet it took till now for it to be removed, despite the fact that once it was done all sides were clamouring to take credit. The Greens, ALP, the government, and even the Liberal Democrat Senator David Leyonhjelm, wanted the credit. That a policy shift which is so universally supported took so long to come to fruition says a bit about how tough it is to achieve changes to the GST – even symbolic ones such as this.

Because the reality is the change is mostly symbolic – and indeed that was part of the problem. It didn’t really solve an issue but it needed to be paid for, and until now no one was prepared to come up with a way to pay for the $30m drop in revenue. The argument was that it was just one more exemption that would decrease the GST’s already shrinking base.

I’m not too concerned about that – it is a very small cut – but it would be nice if such a move would actually achieve something worthwhile.

But as Eleanor Robertson noted back in 2015, removing the GST on tampons won’t do much to help the cause of gender equality. The issue is that all women – especially those on low income – unlike men, have to pay for sanitary products, not that they have to pay 10% extra.

A more real solution to the problem would be, for example, to keep the tax and use the $30m to provide free tampons and sanitary products to women earning below a certain level of income.

Symbolism, however, invariably trumps doing something substantial, especially when it comes with easy credit points.

The same can be said for the government’s plan to rejig how the GST is split up.

The prime minister, Scott Morrison, was in Perth this week because Western Australia is the reason the carve-up of the GST is such a hot political issue.

While other states get more, or slightly less, than their per capita share of the GST, Western Australia – due to its mammoth mining royalties – receives much less. In 2017-18 it received just 34% relative to what it would have received on a per capita basis – around $4.4bn less.

The government punted the problem to the Productivity Commission, and hearing the treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, this week, you would think the government had listened to the commission and taken on its recommendations.

Frydenberg told reporters after his meeting with state treasurers that they had had “a very good discussion around the GST, including the GST on feminine hygiene products, the distribution of the GST, following the Productivity Commission’s recommendations”.

Except the Productivity Commission did not recommend at all what the government is doing.

The government is bringing in a 70% floor on any state’s per capita share. The commission, however, said such a policy “represents a Band-aid solution, as it is not well targeted to broader efficiency and fairness problems”.

The government is also putting more money into the GST pool to ensure (or at least try to ensure) that no state is worse off because of the 70% floor. The commission, however, said of such a plan that “top-up funding would always be subject to the vagaries of the commonwealth budget. It should only be considered in the context of broader reform to federal financial relations that generate compensating benefits.”

And of course, none of these broader reforms – such as replacing stamp duty with land taxes – are occurring.

So the government has taken the option that has always been open to governments – throwing money at the problem and claiming it as a significant reform. Previous governments have avoided doing that because that money has to come from somewhere, and it just means the states end up fighting over more money.

The prime minister this week boasted that the government was supplying more money into the pool “from outside the GST resources”. That is a cute way of saying from other taxes – $9bn over 10 years worth of other taxes.

It doesn’t fix any problems – already the NSW and Victorian governments are pointing to the flaw in policy – namely that if the government’s projections are wrong it will cost more money than anticipated to keep Western Australia above the 70% floor – money that presumably would come from others states’ share of the GST.

And so we have once again the usual interstate and state-federal bunfight over the GST. And it will ever be the case while symbolism and the quick fix is the preferred option.