Kerre Woodham: This Government has a problem with optics

Just when I thought the issue of pay parity couldn't get any more confusing, the Government has made it so. Yesterday, the coalition government moved under urgency in Parliament to raise the threshold for proving work has been historically undervalued when making a pay equity claim. Under the new legislation, any current claims would be stopped and need to restart under the new higher threshold to show genuine gender discrimination and make sure the comparator settings were right. So 33 current claims will be stopped as a result. ACT’s deputy leader and Minister for Workplace Relations Brooke Van Velden, the architect of the bill, said she supported pay equity, but the legislation introduced back in 2020 was problematic.  

“At the moment, people can choose a comparator for sex-based discrimination across the entire workforce. We're saying let's start firstly at home. If you can find people within your own employer, that would be a good starting point. If that comparison can't be made with a similar employer, that comparison's not there within your industry, if you can't find one there you've got to stop.” 

Which all sounds perfectly reasonable, because I've always thought how on earth do you compare completely different occupations? As van Velden told Parliament, Health New Zealand admin and clerical staff, as an example, have been compared to mechanical engineers. Health New Zealand librarians have been compared to transport engineers and Oranga Tamariki's social workers have been compared to air traffic controllers. I can't get my head around that at all. Equally, van Velden makes an interesting case about how wide-ranging and unwieldy claims can be drawing in vast numbers of employers.  

But the Government is moving or has moved so quickly, there's no Select Committee on the bill and as Thomas Coughlan points out in the Herald, officials didn't have time to write up a regulatory impact statement – which is an irony considering the changes were made by Brooke van Velden who is responsible for creating the regulatory impact statement. So before MPs vote on a bill they can have a look at the regulatory impact statement. How much is it going to cost? What are the effects? What are the wide-ranging impacts of introducing this legislation? They don't have that, and didn't have that when they went to vote last night. And as Thomas Coughlan concludes in his piece in the Herald, if the government cannot publish official papers that explain why this is a good idea, the public can be forgiven for concluding this is because it isn't one.  

It's the optics for me. Absolute optics. How can National champion pay parity in 2020 and champion the very legislation that they're now amending, and then say no, it's unworkable, unsustainable? They actually thought it was a jolly good idea in 2017. National began the process of amending the equal pay legislation in 2016. There's excerpts from speeches to Parliament back in 2020 when the equal pay legislation was introduced doing the rounds on Facebook, and quotes Nicola Willis saying this was a process National kicked off in the last government. “A bill was drafted, things were ready to go, and then there was a change of government – that's when Labour and New Zealand First formed the coalition. So my colleague Denise Lee, who believes very passionately in the concept of equal pay and pay equity, took a member's bill to this Parliament to progress pay equity in the absence of the new government where National had left off.”  

So she's taken credit for legislation that she now says is unsustainable and un-workable. How can you do that? Well, you can do that when you’ve got a bloody great hole in your budget, can't you? Yesterday, she said what this is about is ensuring we're clear, transparent and fair to ensure that where those claims are made, they relate to gender based discrimination and that other issues to do with pay and working conditions are raised during the normal employment relations process.  

So either the bill that that she worked so assiduously on and took credit for in 2020 was drafted poorly, or she's completely changed her mind about its workability. Or they didn't see through what the implications might be? And again, when you pass bills under urgency, which that was in 2020 and which this is now, you get those gaps because you don't have time to look at the far-reaching consequences – remember, there's no regulatory impact statement. So it was passed under urgency in 2020. Maggie Barry, at the time a National MP, harrumphed about it and said, for heaven's sake with Covid going on, we're passing this under urgency, this is a nonsense. But she still voted for it, as did National. And now they're saying it's unsustainable and unworkable.  

What this looks like is National stepping back from legislation they worked on, recommended and pushed through the House, and in fact took credit for it when it passed, so they can balance their books. It gives their critics all sorts of opportunities to lambast the government for stealing from the poorest paid workers to give rebates to wealthy landlords and tax cuts to the wealthy pricks. I actually happen to agree with the restrictions that Brooke van Velden is imposing, I think that they make sense. But it's a unique gift that this government has to make something right look so very, very wrong. 

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