Lack of debate fans pay equity fury

The opposition, unions and media have all been accused of scaremongering on the pay equity legislation. But the issue's been clouded by the government's actions, which left no time for debate.

Dumping 33 pay equity claims and telling underpaid workers to start again was always going to cause fury from those who stood to benefit from the claims - mostly women.

But the government's shock and awe approach to changing the legislation has fanned the flames of anger.

In a whirlwind 48 hours the law changed - no select committee, public meetings, opportunities for submissions or the usual processes laws go through.

It is far from the first time a government has used urgency - but this was fast even by usual urgent standards.

The Prime Minister has suggested the opposition, unions and the media have all been scaremongering on the issue.

But there has been no time for debate on it, which Newsroom senior political reporter Marc Daalder said did not give people time to discuss its merits.

"I don't think anyone was looking at this as an area for major reform, certainly not immediate reform," he said.

"It's something that the government hadn't really spent very much time talking about. We know that the [workplace relationships] minister, Brooke van Velden, has been doing a lot of workplace reform and a lot of that has been forecast in the coalition agreements and in public statements that she's made. And she now says this pay equity issue is something that right when she got the job, at the very start in late 2023, she told the Prime Minister she was interested in working on it.

"But it's not something the rest of us, or the public, had really known was on their radar."

The changes to the Equal Pay Amendment Act made last week tighten up parameters for claims, introduce more restrictions and give employers more ways to ignore them.

Van Velden said in her announcement that all ministers have been asked to save money, and that is what the move would do. They are substantial savings - billions - and Act leader David Seymour said van Velden had saved the Budget. National has played that aspect down, but it will get a lot of liability off the government books.

That has paved the way for commentary that the savings have been made off the backs of women and made it harder for them to access economic justice.

No one has lost any money - wages are not being slashed. But the fairness that many women were hoping for has just become that much further away.

Daalder says Act and National MPs have now expressed concerns that many of the claims now cancelled were "basically bogus".

"Nicola Willis called it [a Trojan horse for] a billion dollar grievance industry by the unions... that yes there are some situations where particular lines of work that are dominated by women have been systemically undervalued due to sexism and misogyny, as compared to types of work dominated by men that require similar skills, qualifications, and levels of work and so forth.

"But that many of the claims that were currently being considered were not that. That they represented pay differentials for reasons other than sexism and misogyny. That's the heart of the argument from the government now ... the system was too loose, it was letting people make disingenuous comparisons between professions, and that there are professions that are paid less well not because they are dominated by women but for other reasons."

Also on The Detail on Thursday, Helen Roberts, who is a professor of finance at the University of Otago, talks about the differences between equal pay, pay equity and the gender gap.

She said we need to up our game on data gathering from employers so the situation is more transparent - and she uses the Australian example, the statutory body WGEA (Workplace Gender Equality Agency) as an example of what could be done here.

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