Estimates Debate — Vote Women’s Affairs

I have waited for 2 years for a request from Labour members to ask me to appear in front of the Government Administration Committee in relation to women’s affairs, but the call has never come. All I can find in the estimates report is that the committee has nothing to report and just recommends that the vote for the Ministry of Women’s Affairs be accepted. What a disappointment!

I started to reflect that maybe there was a reason why I was not called. The Labour spokeswoman on women’s affairs kept on challenging me as Minister to close the pay gap between men and women. But there is a problem: she did not know what the source of the pay gap was. She actually filed a written question to the Minister asking what the source of the pay gap was. Well, that was established long before we came into power. That measurement was established by Labour way back. It is the gap between the median-income hourly earnings of men and women. The gap had been static since 2001 under the previous Labour Government. Guess what? The good news is that after 18 months of National in Government the pay gap has decreased to 11.3 percent. But this Minister and this Government are very ambitious for our New Zealand women.

We will not stop there. For a very long time no additional funding was allocated to the Ministry of Women’s Affairs. Then in the last Budget $2 million was allocated over 4 years for us to undertake a work stream to look at the pay gap issue. Women, who make up 51 percent of the New Zealand population, have much to contribute. We cannot afford underutilisation of our women in the workforce, and the work stream will encourage more women into non-traditional areas for women. We have established the Women in Trades Network, and we have looked at successful examples in the accounting profession of flexible work practices. A fantastic accounting firm in Taranaki has demonstrated that flexible work practices are good for both men and women. They increase the bottom line, and we will champion that, along with the New Zealand Institute of Chartered Accountants.

We will also look at new graduates because we want to identify why it is that 1 year after graduation there is a pay gap between young men and young women of up to 6 to 8 percent. We will conduct workshops to enable that to be examined and improved. I am also very proud to say that we are so ambitious for New Zealand women that we will challenge the low percentage of women directors of listed companies. In the top 100 New Zealand companies the number of woman directors amounts to only 8.6 percent. Our Prime Minister, the Hon John Key, is ambitious for women, so last May we launched Women on Boards to tackle this issue. There are lots of competent women directors out there and we want to see them contributing in the boardroom.

I close by paying a compliment to the Hon Simon Power and the Hon Tariana Turia, who championed two task forces on the elimination of sexual violence against women and on the elimination of family violence. This Government is ambitious for women, and it wants women to be in safe homes. I am privileged to be the Minister of Women’s Affairs and to stand up for women.

Vote agreed to.

Vote Immigration