Kerre Woodham Mornings Podcast

Well, what a to-do. The image of Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters slumped in the House, head in his hands, summed it up really. Brooke van Velden dropped the C-bomb in the house, quoting a Stuff article whose author used the word in criticising the government's decision to amend the pay equity legislation. The coalition's female MPs are angry that Labour MPs, particularly the female MPs, have not condemned the journalist’s use of the word, which was used as a derogatory in the article.   Judith Collins, head of the Privileges Committee, was on with Mike Hosking this morning, ostensibly to talk about the suspension of three Te Pati Māori MPs for their haka in the House, but during the chat she deplored the decline of standards in the House.   “There's a lack of civility now and it's not acceptable, and I feel that the comments of the print journalist in the Sunday Star Times this last Sunday was one of the lowest points I think I've seen in 23 years. That and what happened on the 14th of November in Parliament. It's just the sort of behaviour towards each other that is despicable. So I'd say to Brooke, you know I wouldn't use the word myself, but I did feel that she at least stood up for herself and for all the rest of us, and I am waiting for someone of the left persuasion in our Parliament, one MP, just one, to come out and say it's not okay to attack people just because you don't agree with what they do.”  I think she'll be waiting a while. Karen Chhour has been consistently attacked by Labour MPs and Te Pati Māori MPs, really for just for being a Māori woman who has the temerity to be an ACT Party MP. And to be fair, when Jacinda Ardern and her preschool daughter were receiving violent threats —violent sexual threats, some of them very real and credible threats— there wasn't a universal condemnation of the abuse from National and ACT. Certainly Judith Collins, when she was the opposition leader, said she did not want to see Jacinda Ardern threatened when she visited Auckland in 2021 after the three-month lockdown. She said I don't want to see anything happen to the Prime Minister or have her threatened in any way. I think it's not good for our democracy and also it is not right for people to do that to each other, which is true, and good on her for saying that. But at the same time, it's hardly a universal, strident condemnation of the threats that the Prime Minister of the time was getting.   We were discussing this before the show, one of our colleagues said politicians need to be better otherwise people will just give up. They'll look at the carry on, they'll read the stories and think I'm not going to vote. I argued that there are House of Representatives – they are us, to borrow a phrase. Abuse of MPs on every level increased in 2022, 98% of them reported receiving some kind of harassment. Women were considerably more likely to face abuse on most counts than male politicians. Abuse increased across 11 of the 12 different mediums, with social media overtaking emails, faxes and letters as the most prominent. That came from us. That's men and women, normally erstwhile, law-abiding, God-fearing people who suddenly became more strident.   It was a result of societal factors, of lockdowns, of decisions made that had an enormous impact on people's lives and livelihoods and families. And there will be people who will never forget what happened. It can't be undone. But that all resulted in extremes, in the use of language and the vehemence of our opinions and our tribalism. I had a public Facebook page for years. I think in the in the seven or eight years I had it before Covid, I blocked two people. Once Covid started, I just got rid of it because it's why would you be a sitting duck? When I first heard about the death threats against Jacinda Ardern, I thought, well, who hasn't had them? You know that is not normal. That's not a normal response. The days of Socratic discourse are long gone.  So does that mean we have to give up, my colleague asked, that we have no expectations of our MPs? No. But I think before we ask anything of our MPs, we look at ourselves. I was thinking about that this morning. Can I call out the Principles Federation representative and say before you start looking at the government, how about you call out the poor parents who send their kids to school unable to hold a pen and not toilet trained? Whose fault is that? That is the parents. Can I say that? Absolutely I can. Should I mimic her voice while I'm saying that? No, I shouldn't. Talkback’s a robust forum. It's a bit like Parliament, people get heat up. We're allowed to have opinions. We should have differing opinions, but before I'm going to ask anything of our MPs, before I ask anything of my fellow journalists, I'll have a look in the mirror and check myself out. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this spirit of taking the good news where we find it, I was absolutely delighted to see the results of Inland Revenue going after student loan defaulters. At the end of April, there were 113,733 people with student loans believed to be based overseas. If you're based overseas, you don't get the student loan automatically taken out of your pay packet. Overseas, it's up to you to make repayments, and more than 70% of those are in default on their loans – so it’s up to them to make the repayments.  Despite the extraordinarily expensive tertiary education they receive, they don't seem to understand what a loan is. They owe $2.3 billion, of which more than $1 billion is penalties and interest. Even if you wiped the penalties that is still $1 billion, owing to the taxpayer. We paid for the lion's share of the education, around 70% of the true cost of the education, they took out a loan which was paid for by the taxpayer, and $1 billion is owing to us. For about 24,000 of these overseas based borrowers, the debt is more than 15 years old.   Inland Revenue has collected more than $207 million in repayments since July last year from student loan borrowers living overseas, and that's 43% up on the same period the previous year. And the reason for the sudden flurry of productivity and getting the money back? Inland Revenue was given the money, student loan compliance funding, to go after the little thieves, so they finally had the resource to be able to do it.   According to Inland Revenue, they've contacted more than 12,000 borrowers – 1,320 of them have entered repayment plans, 960 have fully repaid their overdue amounts. Inland Revenue has seen a collective repayment of $9 million once they took an interest. Thank God. The department is also looking at borrowers who own property in New Zealand – there are just over 300 of them. And ever since “hello, it's Inland Revenue on the phone. We understand you owe us money. We also understand you have property in New Zealand”, shockingly, these people are suddenly able to find the money to repay the New Zealand taxpayer. So they've paid up $1.7 million.   Any defaulters within the group who have refused to engage and resolve their defaults, says Inland Revenue, will see further legal enforcement taken, which may include New Zealand based bankruptcy or charging orders over their properties. They're doing the same for student loan defaulters who have investments or bank accounts receiving interest income in this country. Just watch these people suddenly come up with the money they owe once they realise Inland Revenue will be able to go sniffing around in their accounts. And as a last resort there'll be arrests at the border.   This is so overdue. In the past there seems to have been a reluctance to go after overseas based student loan defaulters. What about when they all flocked back to New Zealand during the Covid times? That was the perfect time to collect the money owed. It is a kindness to the borrowers to keep that student loan debt at the front of their minds. If you can forget about a big debt, if there are other people screaming at you for money who are up in your grills, you'll park it and put it to one side and think I'll do that when I get a bonus at work, or I'll do that one day, and then it gets so big that it becomes terrifying and you just don't think about it. You will remain in blissful and wilful ignorance of the monies owed, and then the penalties and interest that blow out that original loan. Keep it at the forefront of their minds.   There are all sorts of arguments that have been put up by student loan thieves over the years. We're the best and the brightest. If you come after us, we won't come home. We'll keep our enormous intellects overseas. Well, you can't be that bloody bright if you don't understand what a loan is, can you? It's not a gift. It was a loan. You have to pay it back. Another argument is, “it's all right for you, your generation got free university education we had to pay for it”. Well, it was really the generation before that received free education. But back then, they really did only take the best and the brightest, numpties need not apply. Total enrolments at all universities in New Zealand was 16,524 in 1960. Today there are 177,000 university students in New Zealand. I'm quite happy to have a discussion about making unit centres of academic excellence and restricting access once again to only the very best and the brightest and pay for that education, absolutely. If we reduce it down from 177,000 to 16,000, we can afford that. Happy to have a chat about means testing but not until you do what most of us manage to do, even the most lowly qualified of us ... pay your bills and pay what you owe.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

School principals say they’re grappling with growing numbers of new entrants with behaviour and oral communication issues - and believe the Covid-19 pandemic is to blame. They’re calling for more investment in learning support to help address the problem. Kerre Woodham believes the problem lies not with the education system, but rather with parents who fail to prepare their kids to enter it. "How about principals, instead of moaning and grumbling and demanding more of the taxpayers' money to shore up the gaps and poor parenting, actually call the bloody parents to account." LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Inland Revenue says attitudes are shifting among student loan holders living overseas.   More than $200 million has been collected from overseas borrowers since July last year – a big annual increase.  More than 24,000 people are thought to be overseas, collectively owing $1.3 billion on loans going back more than 15 years.  IRD's Jane Elley told Kerre Woodham since they received additional funding they’ve been able to ramp up their workforce, enabling them to be a lot more targeted when chasing debt.   Her advice to anyone struggling with their loan is to get in contact with the IRD – ignoring the problem only makes it bigger.  LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This particular pre-Budget announcement should be music to the ears of parents who are currently working every hour God sends to pay for extra maths coaching for their children. You might have heard them on this show before – parents who really can't afford it, but say to themselves they can't afford not to, pay for the sort of tuition that teachers are unable to give in school, that one-on-one coaching to fix the gaps in literacy and in maths. Core subjects that teachers should be able to teach and should have time to provide extra support for those children who needed a little bit of a catch up, but in the modern-day classroom environment, it appears they cannot.   Next week's Budget will include nearly $100 million in funding over four years for students who are underachieving in maths, including $56 million for the equivalent of 143 “maths intervention teachers” in primary schools. I didn't know we had a “maths intervention” tree, but it will be fantastic to pick 143 teachers off there and pop them in the classrooms. Perhaps they'll come out of the after-school tuition programmes.  From next year, all students will have their maths ability checked in their first two years of schooling, which is fantastic. You have to know where you're coming from, you have to have a base from which you can start. Education Minister Erica Stanford said the maths check scheme would cost $4 million and aims to identify students who need more support, similar to the literacy phonics check unveiled last year, which is going, by all accounts, great guns. So that's $100 million that we've got, that's $56 million spent on the maths intervention teachers, $4 million for the maths check scheme, and according to my maths, that leaves us $40 million that will fund small group maths tutoring for up to 34,000 year  7 & 8 students each year, from next year. Hell-ay-jolly-lujah!    As I say, parents are trying to shore up the gaps in their children's maths education by enrolling them and after school tuition at considerable expense will be absolutely delighted. Are the teachers? Thank you for asking. According to Upper Hutt Principals Association president Robyn Brown on Early Edition this morning, not so much.  “Unfortunately our problem doesn't sit in maths. We are desperate for learning support and if we want to improve achievement, we need to put every cent we have into learning support rather than ring fencing it just for maths. We know that that's not going to make a huge difference. At the moment we have inadequate PLD or professional development for teachers. On a curriculum that they've only had two terms to teach so far, it's not been implemented with ability, we have no way of even assessing it yet.”  It would be great if you could say $100 million investment in our classrooms is fantastic, but I guess you're not going to get that from Principal Associations and education ministries. They have been saying for some time, since Labour was in power, that they need more professional development. They need more time and there have been many, many changes within the schools around the curriculum, and I don't blame them for wanting to catch a breath, catch up with what this iteration of the curriculum looks like. But when she says math isn't the problem, that is the problem.   In 2023, New Zealand students recorded their worst ever results in the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment. The average student dropped up to 15 points in maths, one of the worst performing. It's not a one-off. New Zealand's “achievement” in maths has plateaued for the past two decades. And then you had all this nonsense back in 2022, saying they get maths anxiety before tests, they're very anxious. They're actually brilliant at maths, they just get very anxious before exams. What tosh, absolute nonsense. They don't know the answers – that's where the anxiety comes from. They're not prepared; they don't know how to do it. Parents know this. They will welcome this investment even if the teachers don't, or the teachers' unions and representatives don't.   When it comes to the learning difficulties, that surely is a separate matter entirely. Neurodiverse kids, kids who are behind the eight-ball from the time they were born because of the damage done in the womb, that is complex, it is difficult, but surely it's a completely separate issue. I'm not sure it should be conflated with your average school kid needing to do better in core subjects – children who are able to learn from a standard curriculum, who want to do better, who deserve better, who should be doing better. I'm sure there's a shopping list a mile long that any teacher or principal has when it comes to doing the best for the kids that turn up in their classroom. Too often your ordinary, everyday children are getting left behind and forgotten. They deserve the best. They deserve to be supported and encouraged and just see how far they can go, not have all the money spent on trying to deal with incredibly complex and difficult situations with families and children. How about a little support for these kids whose parents are doing the best by them, whose teachers are trying to do the best by them but they're getting dragged in so many different directions and situations?   I'm all for this this. It’s fantastic. Have the base check, know which children are going to need the extra support, target it to them and hopefully, hopefully in a few years we won't have children leaving primary school who are illiterate and innumerate, because that has been a crying shame for the past two decades and that is only going to benefit New Zealand to have a better educated populace. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The government sent a strong signal to boy racers that their days of running amok on the roads are over. Car crushing is not new, it's been announced before - Judith Collins was police minister in 2009 when car crashing legislation was introduced for recidivist boy racer offenders, hence her sobriquet, Crusher. In fact, only three cars were crushed and Judith Collins wasn't the police minister by the time it happened, because he needed three strikes before a car was crushed.   Anne Tolley was the police minister when the first of the three cars was crushed. But despite the fact only three ended up in the jaws of the hydraulic crashes, Judith Collins said the legislation worked as a deterrent. Vehicle offences lowered by 15% in the first year of the legislation and she said police had seen a massive drop off in the number of complaints about boy racers. At the time, Collins wanted to see the legislation extended to cover those who fled police. Now, a decade and a half later, it’s happening. Chris Bishop and Mark Mitchell have announced a suite of legislation aimed at dangerous drivers. According to Chris Bishop, Kiwi’s are sick of seeing idiot drivers putting everyone around them at risk, so the governments going to take action through a range of much tougher penalties. And they are: Establishing a presumptive sentence of vehicle destruction or forfeiture for those that flee police, street racers and intimidating convoys and owners who fail toidentify offending drivers. Giving police more powers to manage illegal vehicle gatherings by closing roads or public areas and issuing infringements. And increasing the infringement fee for making excessive noise from or within a vehicle from $50 to $300. The changes will be introduced in new legislation and in mid-2025 and Chris Bishop says convicted fleeing drivers, boy racers and people participating in intimidating convoys will have their vehicles destroyed or forfeited. No three strikes. When you commit an offence that comes under this legislation your car will be gone. But I owe $30K on it! Tough. You'll keep paying it off to the finance company, but you won't have a car. Is this sort of heavy-handed legislation necessary? Well, yes according to the Police Association President Chris Cahill. The one conviction, rather than having to have three convictions under the current law, should make a difference. Look, we've got to do something. These things are out of control and they're not just anti-social boy racing. These things have got to the point where they deliberately antagonising police when they turn up – They're getting bottled, they're getting their cars rammed and the public had gutsful of it when it's in their neighbourhood, so I think it's worth a try. Worth a try? Well, yes, it worked before apparently according to Judith Collins, and she had the stats to support it. When it was introduced critics said, well, only three cars were crushed. Precisely, she said, because people changed their behaviour. She said clearly these boy racers aren't idiots. They don't want to lose their cars, so therefore they won't commit offences that mean their cars will be seized and destroyed and if it works as a deterrent, so much the better. I'm glad to see that they're going to extend the legislation to those who flee police. That can only make the roads safer. I’m all for it.   Ever since I began doing talkback, which is going back a very long time, there have been problems with young people, men and women, and not so young, those who are old enough to know better getting together and deciding that parts of the roads belong to them and are going to be their private racetrack. And there's a school of thought that says, oh, they're just kids, they're just having fun, this is how they learn to drive. There's nothing for them to do, this is their passion. Well, no, there are plenty of places where these young men and women can go on race legally if they want to prove themselves. And don't come at with me with the ‘it's expensive’. You choose to spend money in all sorts of ways. Your cars are expensive. You take pride in them. Pay the money. Go to a racetrack where you can really prove yourself. It's not harmless fun. Not when people have been killed, maimed and injured. And not when it's costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Not when you’re filthy little oiks leaving your rubbish everywhere. Not when you're abusive. Enough. You won't get your car seized if you don't break the law  - really easy. You won't get your car seized if you stop for police when they tell you to do so. You won't get your motorbike seized when you and your dodgy mates don't get together in a convoy and break the law and stick two fingers at the police and at us. It's really simple. Nobody's coming after you. If your car is seized, you've gone looking for trouble. Bring it on.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There's bad news, really, and it's been coming and I think I've had my head in the sand for some time. I've been wanting things to get better quickly. I've wanted things to move out from grindy-ness, and a lack of fun, and excess, and nonsense. It's just been for four years of long, slow grind, it seems.   Well, Matthew Hooton's opinion piece in the New Zealand Herald has laid it out starkly, unequivocally, in no uncertain terms. The grindy times are here for a long time, as he says. Brooke van Velden’s constitutionally dubious and deeply unpopular legislation to amend the Equal Pay Act and more bold moves like it, are now unavoidable, whether they take the form of massive spending cuts, much higher taxes, or most likely, he says both. And the reason? Successive governments have been on a massive jolly, and now we, and successive generations have to pay for it.   As Hooton reminds us, Treasury began formerly warning in 2006, about the looming fiscal challenges after 2030. It expected future governments would follow the responsible fiscal management of the Bolger, Shipley, and Clark governments, that they would maintain surpluses, pay back debt, put aside cash for a rainy day. Had we heeded the advice and followed the blueprint, we would be 15% of GDP in the black this year. Instead, the Key-English and Ardern-Hipkins Governments went on a 15-year spending spree, putting us 23% of GDP in the red, despite the Super Fund's returns on investments exceeding expectations.   You can say what about the Canterbury quake, the GFC, and Covid? You can say all of that. But he's quite right. Successive governments have had to recover from crises, but they've also used that time to have a spend up, to push through expensive legislation and policies, of their choosing, of their ideology, while at the same time having to fork out billions in damage recovery. So, the four years of grindy times are going to be nothing in comparison to what we are going to see. There's more with this came from. Thanks to the Key-English and Ardern-Hipkins legacy, we're nearly 40% of GDP, or more than $170 billion, behind where Helen Clark, Winston Peters, and Sir Michael Cullen planned back in 2006, just as baby boomers retire and health costs start to explode. He says and argues without radical policy change, there is no plausible scenario that doesn't lead to eventual financial and social collapse.   I urge you to read it and have a look and see what you think. That is why Labour's well-intentioned and accurately costed ill thought-out legislation is being scrapped. That is why superannuation and healthcare costs will be put under the microscope as costs balloon. And that is why I would argue, National and Labour need to work together to get us out of this mess. Treasury warned of the fiscal challenges in 2006. They warned of them again in a 2012 post-election briefing to John Key, the papers stressed again as baby boomers move into retirement, New Zealand's 65 and over population is projected to grow nearly four times more quickly than the total population, and consequently there'll be a rapid rise in health, aged care, and New Zealand super costs. Treasury said the fiscal challenge is considerable. There is no way to avoid making trade-offs. Given the potential economic and social instability that could result from any uncertainty about these trade-offs, we think it's crucial that effort be made to build broad public consensus on the way forward.   And that's where we are today. The trade-offs are starting but there's no consensus, because it's just been sprung on us. Well, it hasn't been sprung on us. Treasury have been warning of this for some time, and we have ignored it as voters and the parties have ignored it. Both National and Labour are at fault, but we voters are to blame as well. We can't just stand there saying, “oh, we're victims we didn't know”. Would we have elected any party to government that laid out the grim prognosis for New Zealand Inc. and spelled out the tough measures we would need to take to recover? If Christopher Luxon had stood there in 2023 and said, we're in a real mess and it goes way beyond Hipkins and Robertson, Ardern and Robertson. It goes back a lot further than that and we are going to have to cut the equal pay amendment legislation, we're going to have to raise the age of superannuation, as every other western country we measure ourselves against has done, we're going to have to look long and hard at healthcare, we’re have to look long and hard at welfare payments, and we're probably going to have to scrap some of them because we're in a deep, deep fiscal hole. Would we have said thank you so much for spelling it out. We're going to vote National back in to do these austere and tough measures that we need to recover so that we've got a country for our grandchildren. I doubt it.   We are just as much to blame. The party is well and truly over, and it has been for some time. We've just borrowed to keep it going and buried our heads in the sand, turned up the music so we don't hear the creaking and the groaning of the economy as it struggles to keep the party going. It's time we all grew up. And it's time both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition worked together to try and keep the country together while we work our way out of this mess.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Warnings to be careful after a string of fires was linked to lithium-ion batteries.   Scrap metal company Sims Metal has been fined $30 thousand over a 2023 fire that released toxic smoke near Ōtāhuhu.  A massive blaze at a recycling plant near Glenfield last month was also linked to lithium-ion batteries, as well as a number of fires breaking out in rubbish trucks across the city.  Fire and Emergency New Zealand's Community Education Manager Tom Ronaldson told Kerre Woodham that lithium-ion batteries are perfectly safe, as long as they’re used correctly.  He says you should only be charging devices while you’re awake, and unplugged as soon as they’re fully charged.  LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Long serving Labour MP and former Minister David Parker gave his valedictory speech in Parliament last night, where he gave his colleagues across the House a list of things to do, among his thank yous and goodbyes.   Chief among them was closing the gap between the very wealthy and the middle class. It could be done, he said, with a tax on capital income, a wealth tax, some form of interest deductibility ban with rules for deductions to avoid double taxation. He said this would pay for a tax-free threshold for income earners up to $10,000 with the next 10,000 subject to lower tax rates.   Another was that he hoped freshwater standards would endure in some form, and called on future Ministers for the Environment not to become Ministers for Pollution. Looking at you, Shane Jones. Parker also suggested a way of future proofing New Zealand against future disasters by getting the Reserve Bank to use a quantitative easing scheme to purchase a long dated bond in the event the Alpine fault ruptures, which is not a bad idea because that would spread the cost of the disaster over generations, rather than have one generation deal with it. He wanted to see the government take on the tech giants with a proposal to make their social platforms liable for harmful content shared on their platforms. And he called out MPP as a political system that is becoming worse over time, that is fuelling culture war politics.   “Under First Past the Post, New Zealand became amongst the best country in the world, but MMP was meant to be better. Perhaps Doctor Hooten is right and MMP gets worse over time. It's the people's system, not ours. As things polarise and the hard issues don't get fixed, we should allow the people to again make their choice. I'd vote STV. All 120 of us would have to serve in a seat - that drives behavioural change. I'd add in a small upper house, 30 people appointed as in Canada, or voted in STV and limited to two terms each.”  That was David Parker last night in Parliament talking about the New Zealand he would have liked to have seen when he left politics. The thing is, the public have had their say and they have chosen and then reaffirmed MMP. My conscience is clear. Like David Parker, I preferred STV – that's what I voted for back in the 90s and I still think it's a better system today. I think he's right when he says that MPs need to have electorates to which they are accountable. And I think STV would be a fairer, less divisive system.   First Pass the Post was undemocratic. There were times when New Zealand elected a government that only had around 38 - 40% of the vote, and 100% of the decision making, and that's not particularly fair. Some form of proportional representation is more representative, it's more democratic. If we're going to live in a democracy, we might as well behave as though we're living in a democracy and vote and get results as if we're living in a democracy.   So from his to-do list, which would you like to see MPs pick up on? And specifically, when it comes to the voting system, I don't think we've got it right yet. There will be some of you who vote, who have grown up with the MMP and that's all you have known. As someone who knows First Past the Post and MMP, I think MMP is better than FPP and producing a more democratic and fairer result. Is it perfect? Nowhere near it. I think we need to keep refining it just because we've voted for it once, reaffirmed it once, doesn't mean we have to be stuck with it forever. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.