Nationwide protests and a wave of critical commentary have followed the government’s sudden overhaul of pay equity legislation, writes Catherine McGregor in today’s extract from The Bulletin.
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Anger spills into the streets
Hundreds of people turned out across the country on Friday, and again on Saturday, to protest the government’s fast-tracked changes to pay equity laws. Outside Brooke van Velden’s Auckland electorate office, demonstrators chanted “Shame on you, Brooke”, while similar scenes played out in centres from Tauranga to Invercargill. Many protesters expressed outrage not just at the substance of the legislation but its speed – introduced on Tuesday morning, passed by Wednesday night. More protests are planned for this week, the Herald reports.
‘Kate Sheppard is rolling in her grave’
The backlash has spread beyond the streets and into a wave of column inches. Commentators have been lining up to denounce the rollback, with Stuff’s Verity Johnson declaring that “Kate Sheppard [is] rolling in her grave” over a policy that “[kicks] the hardest working, most systemically undervalued women in society in the teeth”.
If you thought that was vitriolic, just wait. In the Sunday Star-Times (paywalled), an incandescent Andrea Vance flung the c word at the government: “Turns out you can have it all. So long as you’re prepared to be a c… to the women who birth your kids, school your offspring and wipe the arse of your elderly parents while you stand on their shoulders to earn your six-figure, taxpayer-funded pay packet.”
Vance’s colleague Vernon Small (paywalled) called it “grotesquely bad politics” and criticised the bill’s absence of consultation and regulatory analysis. In the Herald on Sunday (paywalled), Shane Te Pou wrote that the billions saved by cancelling claims “come directly out of the pay packets of teachers, care and support workers”.
“Sometimes, governments have to make hard trade-offs,” Te Pou continued. “This isn’t one of those times. The Government chose to go deeper into debt with irresponsible tax cuts and it’s now choosing to make women pay the price, rather than reverse those tax cuts.”
A political misstep with long legs
Political commentators are already forecasting long-term damage for National, particularly with women voters. In The Post (paywalled), Janet Wilson described the move as a “dead political rat” that Nicola Willis had to swallow to salvage her budget. But, Wilson warned, it will further alienate the “grafters and battlers” who once enthusiastically backed the party of John Key. Last week’s Roy Morgan poll confirmed the trend of women under 50 abandoning National in droves; this week’s events will only accelerate the exodus, Wilson said.
Vernon Small noted that the impact of the decision is likely to reverberate far beyond those directly affected, much like the impact (in the other direction) of Labour’s 2005 interest-free student loan policy. The women whose claims have been extinguished “are also partners, sisters, daughters and friends – and their income affects whole households”. For Wilson, it was an act of utter “stupidity” on National’s part. “How else to explain [a decision] which fully advantages one coalition partner – Act, which has no female support to worry about, at the expense of another – National, whose female support is historically rock bottom and about to fall further because of its handling of the pay equity issue?”
The pay equity matrix: too complex or necessarily comprehensive?
Underlying many of the criticisms is a sense that the government has junked a system that, while complex, had started to deliver long-overdue justice. As The Post’s Kelly Dennett reported (paywalled), the old model used a detailed 14-factor matrix to compare jobs like librarian or social worker to male-dominated roles such as customs officer or land surveyor. These “comparators” were chosen not for their superficial similarity, but because they required equivalent skills, responsibilities and effort – metrics designed to expose gender-based undervaluation. The process was too slow and, many believed, too complicated. The PSA’s Fleur Fitzsimons told Dennett the union had been “open to discussing improvements” to speed it up, “but the Government never opened up that conversation”.
- What have the women of the coalition said about pay equity? (The Spinoff)
- Urgency under scrutiny as pay equity changes rushed through (Q+A via 1News)
- The ‘muddy waters’ of pay equity (The Spinoff)
