Equal Pay Amendment Bill

I move, That the Equal Pay Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

The Equal Pay Amendment Bill improves the process for raising and resolving a pay equity claim and provides a better framework for assessing whether there is sex-based undervaluation and remuneration in female-dominated occupations. Pay equity is about women and men receiving the same pay for doing work that is different but of equal value. Pay inequity is caused by systemic sex-based discrimination leading to the undervaluation in the remuneration of work that is predominantly performed by women.

The Equal Pay Act provides a process for raising and resolving pay equity claims. The fundamental principles of the Act will remain the same once this bill is in force. If an employee or a union considers that their work is subject to systemic sex-based undervaluation, they can raise a claim directly with their employer. Their employer has to consider whether the claim meets the requirements for raising a claim and, if the employer decides it does, the parties proceed to bargaining. The parties then work through the pay equity bargaining process, including undertaking an assessment of the work of the claimant and the work of the appropriate comparator. If a pay equity issue is identified, parties will then bargain to determine a settlement that does not differentiate on the basis of sex. The agreement is recorded in a pay equity settlement. This process is supported by a disputes resolution process, including mediation or facilitation, and the ability to take disputes to the Employment Relations Authority and Employment Court.

While the fundamental principles remain the same, the bill amends legislative settings that are too permissive and have resulted in the pay equity framework not working as intended. The bill will: increase the threshold for raising a pay equity claim, including by requiring claims to have merit; provide employers with the tools they need to ensure an appropriate scope of claims; introduce a hierarchy of comparators and add more prescription to comparison methodology; remove the ability for a settlement to include a review clause and limit when claims can be re-raised; provide for phasing of pay equity settlements, changes to when and how the authority can fix remuneration; and remove the provision for the authority to award back-pay.

These amendments maintain the fundamental principles of the pay equity regime while ensuring there is a robust process for raising claims, clarity on the appropriateness of comparators to assess sex-based undervaluation, sustainability for employers to meet their obligations, and the right incentives to encourage parties to resolve their pay equity claims. These amendments will achieve a better regulatory framework for parties to a pay equity claim to assess whether there is sex-based undervaluation and ensure that the pay equity regime is workable and sustainable. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m having to have some calm-down time because I’m still incredibly angry about what we are doing in this House today. This is a bad lawmaking process. Nothing is worse than taking away people’s democratic rights to have their say on a bill that is going to take away their ability to be able to get their pay equity claims through, as they were able to do under the amendment Act that came through in 2020.

At that time, we had a number of groups around the country that had their say around what they thought that law should look like, and that was followed through. And now we’re taking that away and we’re creating a much more difficult process, and we’re going to see, we know, less pay equity claims coming through. And if people on the other side of the House don’t think that is reality, go back and have a look at just how many pay equity claims were successful before the amendment bill was passed in 2020. Go back and have a look, because the reality is that we had a process that wasn’t working. It absolutely wasn’t working. And what we’re doing is we’re going back to the future, today.

We are taking this country backwards. We are taking women’s rights backwards—no, not we; you are taking women’s rights backwards.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Not me.

Hon JAN TINETTI: Not you, Madam Speaker. I should point to them over there. I would hate to put that on you, Madam Speaker.

As I’ve said, this is bad lawmaking. It is unfair to thousands of women nationwide. Normally what we would be doing at this point in a second reading speech is we would be going through and prosecuting what happened at the select committee process.

Tangi Utikere: But where’s that?

Hon JAN TINETTI: But where is that? There is no process to go through because we are here in urgency passing through something that as David Seymour has said today in the media, “Minister Van Velden has saved the Budget for the Government.” Taking credit, even though the Prime Minister today said, “Well, it’s not about the Budget.”, the soon-to-be Deputy Prime Minister is saying that the Minister has saved the Budget for the Government. So who is right?

Well, we on this side of the House know that this is all about making that Budget work and that Budget square up. And as I said in my first reading speech—and so did many others—once again, women are having to pay the price. Women are having to pay the price in this country for bad fiscal management, and enough is enough. We saw that today out the front of this Parliament. We saw people say, “Enough is enough.” We have been waiting far too long for women to get what they are due, for women to be valued in their roles, for work that has been traditionally seen as women’s work to be valued. And only when we do value that work, at that point, will we see that it won’t solely be women’s work, that we will see other people, other genders, men going into that work as well.

When we have people that are standing up outside and saying that they feel like their legs were cut off today, feeling like their breath was knocked out of them because they had no idea that all the work that they had put into working through their pay equity claims would be all for nothing—and not only that; standing outside today and saying we’re not even having the opportunity to speak about it, to come and put our case forward.

So that is what we are here, on this side of the House, to do: to put their cases for them today so that they know that we are hearing them and valuing their work and valuing the work that they have done to ensure that their work is valued overall by society. And one of the most important ways that we can do that is by paying them appropriately.

One of the aspects that was always very frustrating to me in the pay equity space when this Government came into power was that they got rid of the Pay Equity Taskforce. Now, the reason that they got rid of the Pay Equity Taskforce, in their own words, was that they said the pay equity claim process was working really well and so there was no reason to keep the Pay Equity Taskforce. At the time, I was very sceptical of that fact. I thought that perhaps it was more about saving the cost of what the Pay Equity Taskforce cost to run. But now we see what the real reality is. It is all about cost saving, because if their words were true back when they first came into power and got rid of that Pay Equity Taskforce, why now is the pay equity claim process apparently not working?

They can’t have it both ways. It either was working really, really well, which I know to be true because we had a large number of successful claims with the help of the Pay Equity Taskforce, or it’s not. But then I go back to say that the real reason is about saving money, and the real reason is about making a Budget work that, again, is seeing women paying the price for bad fiscal management. Women are paying the price in this country for tax cuts and tax breaks for landlords. That is the absolute bottom line of what is happening here. And I go back to saying that all those women who would have come and all those—it’s not just women; it would have been men too. All those people who would have come into a select committee process to submit on this particular bill would have said, “Leave that alone because we are getting claims through. We are getting the work done, and we are seeing the work being valued.”

It appals me, and I listened to the first reading speeches from the other side of the House. It absolutely appals me, the weak reasons that they have given for passing this through. It is smoke and mirrors when you say that it is about putting a better framework in place. Improve the framework if that’s the case; don’t get rid of it. Don’t get rid of it so that there’s nothing there at all. Start from that base and add to it.

Hon Casey Costello: We’re not getting rid of it.

Hon JAN TINETTI: If that member over there is saying, “We’re not getting rid of it.”, go and read the bill, because that’s exactly what the bill says. And it also says in that bill that that side of the House is stopping all current claims. That’s 33 claims that are being stopped with this introduction of this bill here today. Some of those claims have been in process for four to five years. How do those people and how do those sectors suddenly feel that their work is being valued? I can tell you right now that they are feeling really angry.

So if that side of the House thinks that this is going to quietly go away, I really feel that they need to think again and hang your heads in shame or stand up and do something about it. That side of the House still has time to put this right. Just because that side cannot make their Budget work, women should not have to pay the price for that. They have been paying the price in history for far too long, and this should end now.

Again, I go back to my first reading speech, and I shall end with this. This should not be something that becomes political. Women should not be used as a pawn to actually work their Budgets out for them. We should be working this through together. And you know what? In 2020, we did. We came together for women in this House.

Carl Bates: Until you put an AP through.

Hon JAN TINETTI: What a shame, Mr Bates, that you can’t, now, support women, and that you would rather put politics first than support women to get a fairer wage, a fairer pay for their work. I absolutely condemn this bill.

Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. This is really about what we value—what we value as a society. It’s very clear that the coalition Government does not value the people doing some of the most important and difficult work in our entire society. Look, to be fair, it’s been centuries of this, and so it’s really just perpetuating the status quo.

But there is a reason why we needed to put in place the process that we did in 2020, as part of the Equal Pay Act, in order to close the gender pay gap, which was not closing. The gender pay gap can be because of individual discrimination or unconscious bias in individual workplaces, but the wide sector-based discrimination, which has meant that the work that was predominantly done by women was undervalued, is based in evidence, and that’s why the process that was put in place in 2020 was evidence-based and supported by Nicola Willis of the National Party, and Erica Stanford. Nicola Willis said she’s “proud to stand in [the] House tonight and say that National will support [the] final reading of the Equal Pay Amendment Bill.”, proud of the contribution, and that they do think that if there are reasonable grounds to believe that work has been historically undervalued based on their gender and that they have been underpaid because of that, they should be able to make a pay equity claim. That is the fundamental fairness-based principle under which we had cross-party agreement on the bill.

Now, if the Government really believed that there were just some technical improvement processes and a slightly better framework that would result in something that was more fair and reasonable, why are they doing this under urgency? Why not send it to select committee? Why is there a rushed process where the bill is literally introduced today and going through all stages of the House? It’s because this isn’t about fairness. It’s not about making the process better; it’s about saving money in the short term, which will cost us more in the long term. I guess that is a hallmark of this coalition Government: seeming to save money by doing things that will actually increase the costs to everyone in society over the long term. That’s the fundamental problem.

But what do we value? Do we value the work of early childhood education teachers? Do we value the work of midwives and nurses? Do we value the work of teachers? Do we value the work of aged-care and support workers, those looking after people with disabilities, those looking after our elderly in their final stages of life? Do we not value that? How can we as a society say that those people do not deserve to be paid properly for their work? Isn’t it shocking? Isn’t it a surprise that we have a hard time recruiting teachers, that we have a shortage of early childhood teachers, that we have a shortage of nurses and midwives, and they can go to Australia and get paid so much more? That’s because of decisions made by subsequent Governments but particularly this coalition Government, which is looking at those people doing this important, caring work that supports everyone in our society to thrive, viewing them as a fiscal liability rather than an investment in our society. An investment in early childhood education and midwives and nurses is an investment in a future, a more equitable society, one where people actually have what they need to survive and thrive, and then we’re all better off as a society. But instead they just look at it as a short-term cost.

The thing that really kills me about this is that there is no limit to the amount of money that these people will spend on a road. There is literally no limit to the amount of money they will spend on a road, as if some tarmac somehow magically creates economic growth—

Grant McCallum: Absolutely, yes, it does. It invests in people.

Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: —but investing in people doesn’t. If the member opposite knew or understood anything at all about economics, he’d be able to look at the cost-benefit analysis and see, “Oh, actually, that road costs more than it benefits us.” It does. It costs more than it benefits. That’s what the official economic evidence says, and multiple economists have come out and, basically, slammed the case for the Northland road in particular, because we already have a road to Northland. The issue is we’re not maintaining it and improving it, and we’re not reducing the amount of fuel that we need to use.

It’s disgusting to me. There’s always jobs for the boys and jobs for the machines, and billions and billions of dollars for a bit of tarmac, but they do not fundamentally understand that the thing that actually supports our society to be able to do things is investing in our people, our children—our children—investing in early childhood education and teachers. But it is a product of an economic system and a way of valuing things that does not understand that people are an asset that we can invest in. We invest in concrete and tarmac as if we could sell it on the open market, which is not true, by the way. We cannot sell those things for money. But we don’t look at investing in people and their work and making sure that their livelihoods enable them to pay for rent, pay the bills, pay the electricity.

Actually go out and talk to some aged-care and support workers. I challenge every member of this Government to go out with the aged-care and support workers, like Kristine Bartlett. See what their day is like and tell me that they are not worth more than what they are paid. Go to the retirement villages—

Carl Bates: We did. On Wednesday, the Prime Minister was with me in Whanganui. We did. I’ll show you the photo.

Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: —and talk to the people who are working and tell me that they don’t deserve to earn more money.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Greg O’Connor): Mr Bates, I see you’re on the speaking list later on, that might be a good time.

Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: This decision, which is being rushed through in urgency with no opportunity for a select committee to process and for people to show up and actually debate the issue and understand the proposed changes, is being pushed through because the Government is trying to find short-term cost savings because they have promised more than they can actually deliver. The fundamental trade-off they’re making is going to hurt the lowest-paid women and all those working in female-dominated industries. It’s going to make it harder for them to make ends meet. It’s going to make it harder for us—and I say “us”, like, through our public services, we need nurses, midwives, teachers, care and support workers, disabled-care workers, admin and clerical support. We need all of those people. We need them to function as a society, and it’s harder and harder to recruit them, because they don’t have a pathway to fair pay.

All of this is because of historic gender-based discrimination, which Ministers in this Government, like Erica Stanford and Nicola Willis, at the time when the bill was passed, professed a great passion for in support for the idea that we should actually rectify that historic gender-based discrimination. They did support it, but now in Government: “Too hard, too hard. Let’s just make it easier to underpay people and ignore the fact that that’s going to create more problems for us down the road.”

So the Green Party is not supporting this bill. We don’t support it going through under urgency. I would really like to say that people watching this outside, people looking at this, should see who these people really are, see who this coalition Government really is. They’re people who went out and made extravagant promises about being able to deliver better public services while delivering tax cuts to the wealthiest people. Yeah, they gave up to 20 bucks a week to some households, but, actually, the lowest-paid people don’t get the full benefit of the tax cut. The lowest-paid people get the least out of the tax cuts. So, once again, a series of decisions that make it easier for the wealthiest, who already own a lot of property, to get richer and richer and richer while those who are doing the most important work—looking after our tamariki, looking after our disabled people, doing the clerical and admin work, going out there and doing the cleaning, delivering the babies and looking after māmās in the middle of the night—those people are going to be forced to carry on not getting access to an evidence-based process that would result in them getting paid what they are due.

It’s shameful. It’s hypocritical. I am not at all surprised, because it was clear before the election that those were their priorities and that the promises they were making about better public services or better pay for nurses and midwives were absolute rubbish. They would never be able to afford to pay for them, but we see when the rubber hits the road, when the really hard decisions have to be made, we see who this coalition Government prioritises and supports, and it is not the hardest-working, most marginalised people who are out there—our essential workers, who deserve fair pay and they deserve not to be forced to have to be underpaid just because of gender-based discrimination.

Unfortunately, I am going to have to repeat some of the things I said in the first reading because clearly the Opposition weren’t listening. So the first thing that I want to confirm is the fact that this piece of legislation is not about saving money. This is about a piece of legislation to ensure that sex-based discrimination cases that have merit, that have claim, are able to progress through the system in a robust, transparent way. The reason it’s being passed under urgency is so that we don’t have claims in different processes under different regimes. So it’s pretty simple. It’s pretty clear. It’s something that Governments do to ensure that the courts aren’t frustrated, but more importantly so that those who want to have a claim are not trying to operate in two different systems.

The other thing that I want to say very clearly is there is no claim that will be blocked. That is another myth that the other side have repeated in their speeches. The other thing in terms of the Government—because the previous speaker, Julie Anne Genter, talked specifically about nurses, about carers, about midwives. I would invite the other side just to reflect on our Government’s record level of investment in health. Who do you think operates the health system if it’s not nurses, midwives, carers? So I would just hold your horses on that side of the House.

When we think about the level of investment, when we think about things like FamilyBoost that ensure more parents get access to support so their children can get access to early childhood education, our focus in education is to ensure that actually teachers can focus on teaching the basics brilliantly. The amount of resources that have been rolled out to teachers to make it easier for them to do their work has been a significant part of the Government’s investment.

The other thing that this bill is not about—this bill is not about an alternative way for workers to negotiate pay rounds. It is a very different conversation from sex-based discrimination.

Hon Carmel Sepuloni: Point of order, Mr Speaker. I don’t think it’s standard practice in this House to stand up and do a speech in the second reading on what this bill is not about. There have been a couple of points made on that line by that member, and I think she should stick to what the bill is about.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Greg O’Connor): We’re in a second reading. Both sides have drifted from the main purpose of a second reading, which of course is to speak about what happened at select committee. There hasn’t been a select committee. That has opened it. It’s why I haven’t redirected any of the comments from the left, but it does give the opportunity to reply to some of them. However, the member has been here. She does know the general rules of second reading. Carry on.

Hon LOUISE UPSTON: Thank you, Mr Speaker. It is also the job in a second reading, in a debate in this House—this is a debating chamber—to put the myths and the incorrect statements that the Opposition are stating to bed. That’s my job as a Government speaker, and I will not refrain from that.

So I will reiterate, this bill is not about—because, unfortunately, what happened under the previous regime, and all of the speeches that I’ve heard so far confuse the two points about when there is union bargaining for pay rounds, that is a very different concept to sex-based discrimination. It would be really helpful if the Opposition could understand the difference between the two. That is actually part of why we are here debating this legislation today, because we want pay equity legislation to be about pay equity. As I said in my previous speech, there are of course many workers across New Zealand—male and female—that don’t earn the levels they would like to earn. That is a separate issue from sex-based discrimination.

The other thing I want to come back to is the comparators, because this is a really important part of the bill to make it really clear about a framework for comparisons for comparators and actually getting us more in line with our international countries that we would normally compare ourselves to. Some of the feedback, for example, that we had received with the previous legislation was fisheries officers being compared to librarians. Now, I think most people, if you ask them on the street, “Would you expect that those are jobs of equal value and equal conditions?”, would not accept that that was a suitable comparator. So we need to have a pay equity process that is clearly understood, that is robust, that is sustainable into the future. That is why I’m proud to support this piece of legislation in the second reading.

I rise again as part of the second reading debate to speak on behalf of New Zealand First in support of this piece of legislation. Yet again, I think it is right, as my colleague Minister Upston referred to previously, to bring back the discussion to some form of reality. This is not removing the ability to proceed with a pay equity claim. Yes, we will be withdrawing all the current claims under this legislation to allow them to be reapplied—again, for clarity, so that all of these claims are processing under the same environment. It is the reason why this bill is under urgency, to ensure that we minimise the disruption that this change will bring about.

But, again, we have to emphasise that it is unfair to create this impression that somehow we are taking away the right to deal with sex-based discrimination in pay rounds. This is a change that will not remove anything. It will allow us to be able to process the claims and bring about resolutions where they are meritorious. This is an important part of the process.

When we talk about the idea of recognising valuable workforces, as has been spoken to previously, there are pay rounds, there are processes by which we can address pay conditions and the value of work through the pay round process. This is not impacting that process either. This is about bringing a sensible process to ensure that we have resolution to the equity claims. This is the ability to ensure we can move forward in this process, but it is to bring it back to the conditions that make sense. This is about comparators that make sense. This is about a system that makes sense and is workable.

It is really unfair to suggest that this is anti-women in any way. This is absolutely incorrect, and this idea of soapbox speeches that say that this is robbing something of women when the system will continue to exist—the system will still be available, and the equity claim process will still exist. It is irresponsible to suggest that that is being stolen away when the system will continue to exist.

This is about moving forward with a piece of legislation that will make the process clearer, fairer, more robust, and absolutely ensure that the system continues to exist. This is, again, about sex-based undervaluation of jobs, and this is a system that will continue to exist. Therefore, I have no hesitation of commending this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. What an absolute day of shame—an absolute day of shame. What an absolute debacle this bill is. This is another example of the wrecking ball that this Government is wreaking on workers’ rights, and in this particular case, low-paid wāhine workers. It is absolutely shameful and disgraceful. Everybody deserves dignity and decent jobs, and that includes low-paid work, which is predominantly held by women workers. I want to draw the point that actually amongst women workers as well, Pasifika and Māori women are paid even less compared to Pākehā men.

There was a rally outside, which was called in two hours, where people showed up to show their anger to this Government, with them undermining workers’ rights once again. I also want to acknowledge the work of Kristine Bartlett, the aged-care worker who successfully brought a pay equity claim through the process as well. As I read through the media, it said that she was crying; she was gutted. She was gutted for those low-paid workers as well.

But there’s another issue here that we need to discuss as a Parliament and that is the confusion—the confusion of the Government speakers who say that this will not hold back pay equity, that this will not hold back gender-based discrimination in the workplace. That is absolutely false, absolutely wrong. Thirty-three of these claims are going to be scrapped. Some of these claims have been on the workbooks for four years.

Outside we had Tessa, who was a librarian, and as she spoke, she talked about how she had spent four years working on their claim—four years’ worth of work in the garbage because these guys don’t want to acknowledge the work that needs to be done. It is absolutely a disgrace and shameful.

Even more shameful is the Prime Minister going to the media, saying that they’ve found the money. They’ve found their money for their Budget—billions of dollars they’ve found. Guess where they’ve found it: by taking away that money from low-paid workers, taking that money from women workers, taking that pay from those that deserve it the most. The people that deserve the most support from this House are being denied, are being put down by this Government, and it is an absolute disgrace and absolutely shameful.

The confusion is palpable on the other side of the House because they don’t know what this is about. Here’s the thing about the process: we could all actually deal with it if we weren’t doing this under urgency. So to people that are listening to these speeches today, we’re in urgency. The details of this bill landed on that Table just after question time, so we’ve only had an hour, I think, or two hours to get to grips with the details of this bill. So the ability to actually scrutinise this bill has been absolutely curtailed by this Government. We should have been able to get this piece of legislation early. It should have had a full process where we could take it to the select committee, where those people that are directly impacted could come and talk to this Parliament, could talk to this House and in many ways confront the Government—confront the Government in terms of the trampling on their rights, the trampling on workers’ rights, and the undoing of years and years and years and years of work.

It is an absolute disgrace, and you can count on the Greens to stand up for the workers. You can count on the Greens to back the unions, who’ve been working incredibly hard on these issues. The Greens absolutely disagree with this piece of legislation, disagree with this process, and we’ll work together with our friends in the unions, with our friends across the Opposition benches, to make that known very, very publicly.

But it is very important for those people out there across our communities, across our society, to question your local MPs, to question your Government MPs, because this is an absolute shame. It is an absolute disgrace. It is another example of a Government that cares more about profit than for people. You hear them talk about “There aren’t enough lollies. We’re not going to have a lolly scramble.” It’s because certain Ministers have gotten all the lollies, and none of them are for the workers. None of them are for the low-paid workers. It is an absolute disgrace, and the Greens oppose this bill.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’m not going to have that stand on the record without correcting factual inaccuracies within that last speech. National supported the pay equity Act in 2020. We supported it. But we supported it, and may I quote the Hon Maggie Barry: “So I commend the bill to the House but we oppose Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 548 for very good reason.” The Hon Nicola Willis spoke in that debate, and she said, “We support this bill, but we have grave concerns about that SOP because it didn’t go to select committee.” Yet the Opposition stand up today, in this House—in this House—and argue that the problem is it’s not going to select committee.

This afternoon, we have had the Opposition say, “Let’s not make this political—let’s not make this political.” Yet that is exactly what they are doing. It is about time that the Opposition recognised, like so much of what they drove through the House in the last Government and the one before, that their approach, their policies, their legislation didn’t work. It was this side of the House, it was the National team, that pointed that out to them and said, “This isn’t going to work. It’s not going to be effective. It’s not going to be robust. It’s not going to be sustainable.” I back our Minister of Finance with what she said in that debate, and now we are fixing it. We are making it sustainable, we are making it robust, and we’re making it practical.

So let me end by just giving one of the examples of how that’s going to be the case. You settle a pay equity claim. You settle it. National had said in 2017, we need to settle these things. We need legislation to do that. We led the charge. You settle these things, and then we’re saying you give the industry 10 years before—if the same conditions, the threshold of conditions are met—you can raise another claim. But not after three years. I commend this bill to the House.

Camilla Belich—a five-minute split call.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. This is an absolutely shameful day for this Parliament. Kristine Bartlett took a claim to the courts of New Zealand and the interpretation was that the Equal Pay Act that has been in place since the 1970s applied to claims for work of equal value. At that time, the National Government that was once proud to stand on behalf of low-paid women at that time settled her claim for the first care and support workers’ settlement. I was there across the road when the event for that happened, and I saw National MPs come in and I saw them be congratulated for standing up for working women. What I want to ask is: where is that National Party today?

On this day, where—and no matter what anyone on the other side of the House has said, this bill makes pay equity claims for low-paid workers much harder. It takes the threshold to 70 percent. It means that you can’t bring a claim for 10 years. It gives employers the entire right to decide a comparator and whether a claim is meritorious. It’s retrospective. It gets rid of existing pay equity settlements. It is a blow to every working, low-paid woman in New Zealand that works in a female-dominated role. These people are midwives, allied health professionals, librarians, social workers, nurses, teacher aides. These are the people that this National Party is attacking by bringing through this regressive, retrospective bill, brought in under urgency at the very time that they knew that we were all having our caucus meetings. Snuck in. Only provided on the Table one hour ago, and we are meant to support this type of bill.

This bill will make every aspect of claiming an equal pay claim harder. The hierarchy of comparators which is put into this bill, which I bet no one else has had the opportunity to look at yet because it’s complex, was initially suggested by the National Party when the National Party wanted to settle pay equity claims after the Kristine Bartlett case. That was roundly rejected. The reason for that is because when you look at a hierarchy of comparators, you’re essentially saying that you need to find a comparator in your workplace. And if you can’t find a comparator in your workplace, you need to look at similar jobs. And if you can’t find similar jobs, you need to look at similar industries. It’s like an onion; it goes out and out and out. The bureaucracy of trying to find a comparator, which is already very difficult, when you implement this hierarchy of comparators, will make—mark my words—this legislation completely unworkable for low-paid women.

This legislation introduced today is the ACT Party getting away with taking away women’s rights. And the New Zealand First Party and the National Party are sitting here, letting it happen. This will mean that there is no closing of the gender pay gap. It will mean that people like care and support workers continue to be on the minimum wage—absolutely shocking. I don’t know how you can sleep at night, bringing this legislation through. It is absolutely shameful.

What about the process? I looked at the Cabinet paper. Under the heading of human rights, every single part of that was redacted. I ask: why was it redacted? I think we know the answer to that: because this bill goes against human rights. Women’s rights to be fairly paid and for equal pay are human rights. I bet—even though I can’t see it and this House has not been given the opportunity to see it—that that Cabinet advice is exactly what that says and that’s why it’s been redacted. Absolutely despicable process to sneak this through the House.

Additionally, I have had a look at the departmental disclosure statement, which states that there was not sufficient time for a regulatory impact statement. What is going on with this Government that you will bring in legislation under urgency, repeal it in one single day, not even have a regulatory impact statement, not allow us to see the advice on human rights? It is absolutely a shameful way of running a democracy.

I just want to emphasise, because I don’t have a lot of time left, that existing pay equity settlements that are already settled—already settled now—will be disestablished. And those people will not be able to make another pay equity claim for 10 years, no matter what happens. So the existing settlements: the nurses’ settlement, the social workers’ settlement—all of these jobs that we value so much that are female-dominated—no matter what happens in the next 10 years, under this legislation, they will not be able to bring another equal pay claim. This is an absolutely despicable way of bringing human rights legislation to the House. It is taking away the rights of low-paid, working women throughout New Zealand and the National Party, the New Zealand First Party, and the ACT Party should be ashamed.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I want the members on the other side to go away and re-read the comments just made by my colleague Camilla Belich, who has worked on pay equity here in New Zealand and the UK for most of her working career. I bet the National Party members, who have given some of the most deluded, terrible speeches today, have no understanding of what they are voting for. This woman over here does, and I urge you to listen to her.

I have been so angry at so many things this Government has done, particularly Nelson Hospital, but nothing compares to this—nothing compares to this. Bringing this under the cover of urgency to undermine the women of New Zealand is a disgrace, and shame on the National Party. Today, the Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, said the quiet part out loud. He admitted it. He then came back and corrected it. But he admitted—he admitted. Here is what he said when he was asked: “I admit the changes will actually lead to lower costs for the Government.” There will be less money for teachers. There will be less money for nurses, less money for midwives, less money for our aged-care and support workers, less money for our social workers, less money for all of the female-dominated industries in New Zealand that rely on pay equity legislation to ensure that they are paid equal pay for work of equal value—and I’m going to get to that now, because National Party members have gone on and on about the legislation they introduced when they were in Government. It did not work.

They talked about comparators. The comparators were too narrow. In fact, lawyers, like the wonderful Peter Cranney, who took the Kristine Bartlett case, said that under National’s legislation, Kristine Bartlett would not have secured the settlement, because Kristine Bartlett’s pay equity claim compared aged-care workers—and I hope you listen over there, the women members on the other side; I hope they listen. Peter Cranney has said that Kristine Bartlett would not have won her case under National’s legislation—that is a fact—because, under Kristine Bartlett’s case, they compared aged-care workers to corrections officers. Now, the Minister got up and pooh-poohed that, and she talked about some of the comparators in place and scoffed at them. How dare she do that. Aged-care workers do heavy lifting; they deal with really challenging, difficult work, and absolutely they should be compared to corrections workers. But the National Party is reverting to the type of legislation that would have stopped that comparator being made, and there would not have been a settlement for Kristine Bartlett.

The other thing—the other nasty little thing that was put in that settlement—was that workers weren’t able to take a claim for years and years and years. Again, listen to Camilla Belich, who has said that this is going to stop people from being able to take claims for 10 years. That is an absolute disgrace. I say on record today: this is a war on women; this is a war on women workers. I have already had emails from people saying, “We are going to march in the street over this.” Women are outraged, and I say to every National MP sitting there, hanging their heads in a shame right now because they didn’t know about this either, in marginal seats: you should be very afraid of what will happen to you at the next election, because this issue galvanises women. They will be knocking on your door. They will be demanding to know why they cannot come to select committee and tell their story. They will be demanding to know why you are going to make it harder for them to get pay equity. They are going to demand to know why National has, today, cancelled all of the existing claims and said, “They are over; they are gone.” Those women workers, who have been fighting and putting up robust arguments over the last few years for pay equity—their claims are gone, stopped. They have to come into this new mechanism that has tougher thresholds that make it harder for them to do it.

National members have talked about pay equity legislation gone by. It used to be about man lawyer versus woman lawyer, because, once upon a time, male lawyers were paid less than women lawyers, and we outlawed that. This is about equal work of equal value, looking at a women-dominated job versus a male-dominated job. That is the point. That is actually the point of this, saying, “This group of women workers are, collectively, undervalued because the work they’re doing is done by women, and this is a male-dominated industry that is comparable.” That is the point—that is the point—and National are undermining this today, and shame on them. Bring on 2026, or earlier.

Just referring back to the bill and its legislative statement, which is on the Table for us all to peruse and absorb, I think it’s important to go back to the fundamentals of what this piece of legislation is seeking to achieve. Officials say here that “The proposed changes to the Act will improve the process for raising and resolving a pay equity claim and provide a better framework for assessing whether there is sex-based undervaluation.” The bill maintains a process to raise and resolve pay equity claims while ensuring “that the process is workable and sustainable.”

As my colleague Carl Bates has alluded to in a previous speech, National did support the 2020 Equal Pay Amendment Bill, but our colleagues of the day did not support the Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) that was rushed through—the SOP that was put there with amendments without notice. In 2020, the Hon Nicola Willis and the Hon Maggie Barry raised grave concerns as to the impacts that those amendments on that SOP at the last minute would have. So, in our view, they have been borne out, and we are now here, as a party and as a Government committed to pay equity, but it must be based on solid evidence, reflect international norms, and be sustainable in the long term.

The Hon Louise Upston—to finish with—also looked overseas, didn’t she? She looked at the comparable countries that we often line ourselves up against as a comparison, and, unlike most comparable countries, New Zealand allows unions to pursue claims across multiple employers. These reforms that we are putting down today will bring us closer in line with international best practice, where claims are typically made against a single employer.

As I’ve said, National supported the 2020 legislation without the last-minute amendments. It was National who settled the $2 billion case in 2017, when Bill English was Prime Minister, and we legislated then. It was National in 1972, under the Jack Marshall administration, that tabled and passed through three stages the Equal Pay Act 1972. National has a very proud history in equal pay and pay equity, and we will continue to have that. Thank you.

This is a five-minute split call.

I want to quote a speaker from the third reading of the Equal Pay Amendment Bill back in 2020: “I’m proud to stand in this House tonight and say that National will support this final reading of the Equal Pay Amendment Bill. And I’m proud that our party has contributed to crafting this legislation and bringing it to the House. We support the simple concept that people should be paid the same for the same work, regardless of their gender, and we support the equally important concept that, if someone has been doing work and there are reasonable grounds to believe that that work has been historically undervalued based on their gender and has been underpaid because of that, they should be able to make a pay equity claim. So we support this bill”—Nicola Willis, speaking in the House a few years ago.

Camilla Belich: Where is she today?

Hon Dr Megan Woods: Yeah, where is she?

Hon Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL: Where is she? Hiding. So why the change? Why the change at this point? Coming into the House today, the Prime Minister said—and it’s quoted on Radio New Zealand—that this change that the National Party and their minions are putting through will save billions of dollars; billions of dollars. But, if we go to the Cabinet paper which has been released, and we can have a look at it now, something that has been redacted is all the financial recommendations, all the information about the finances. They’re not telling us how much this is going to save.

I tell you who it’s not going to save money for: it’s not going to save money for the aged-care workers, who desperately need every penny they can get at the moment; it’s not going to save money for teachers, who have a pay equity claim in there at the moment and have been historically underpaid—those teachers are losing money because of that; it is not going to save money for teacher aides—people we need in our classrooms to help with looking after especially children with extra learning needs; it’s not going to save money for cleaners, also underpaid in the long term. And all these jobs are jobs historically done by women. That Government really does not care about women workers, and it does not care about low-paid workers. All it cares about is balancing the Budget, and it is doing it in a way that kicks the lowest-paid women in this country. That is appalling; it is an absolutely appalling thing to do to our workers.

In terms of thinking about this speech today, I recalled Professor Judy McGregor. Judy McGregor was our first Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner, and one of the things that she did was go undercover as an aged-care worker to find out what the work was really like. Let me quote what she said—she produced an amazing report Caring Counts, which really led the charge for pay equity—in terms of aged care, “When I did the job myself, I realised the immense emotional labour that goes into it, the skill, the technique, the fatigue.” She recognised just how hard that job was. And, at about the same time, Kristine Bartlett, with the aid of her union E tū, took a pay equity case. Today, Kristine Bartlett is nearly crying, and she said, “What’s going to happen to these low-paid workers? It’s hurting—it’s really hurting.”

These are people who are ignoring the evidence, and ignoring the evidence just in order to balance the books. The previous speaker, Cameron Brewer, said that the National Party had, in the previous debate on this, supported the pay equity legislation. It had some rules and one of the things was that it had to be “sustainable in the long term”. That’s the exact words used by the previous speaker. Sustainable for who? That’s the question. Sustainable for who? We already know that working families in this country are having to go to the food bank to get assistance, because wages are simply not high enough. We already know that 30 percent of New Zealanders had to get food assistance last year, and yet this Government is turning around and taking away one of the key protections for low-paid workers. What an absolute shame.

Just before I call the next speaker, the comments about members not being here—I’ll take that as a metaphorical question about absence. However, some of the comments from the sidelines were not so metaphorical—just a reminder for subsequent speakers about that rule.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise in this second reading speech for the Equal Pay Amendment Bill, a bill shepherded by the Hon Brooke van Velden. What I think is very important to do is to just get us back to basics to a great extent, because what I’m hearing from across the House, I feel is actually unfair in the characterisation. There are some things that we’re missing and some people are refusing to acknowledge this is the case.

Equal pay is essentially when women and men are paid the same for the same work. So this is when workers in the same roles are paid the same, paraphrasing. Pay equity is when women and men are paid equal amounts for equal work where they’re in different roles, even if the roles are not identical. We speak about the framework of comparisons—the comparator factor—and I just want to ask the House a question: we’ve reached a point where a fisheries officer is compared to a nurse. Now, someone on the other side of the House said some of these examples that we’re mentioning are embarrassing. Is it embarrassing to say, essentially, what is a fisheries officer? A fisheries officer gathers information on aspects of the fishing industry and enforces fisheries laws. So they gather information. These officers, with all due respect to them, are being placed in the same category as a nurse, a healthcare professional. Is this logical? Is this reasonable?

All we’re trying to say is there’s a lot of unreasonableness in where we’ve reached because, as usual, everything that the Labour Party puts their hands on becomes murky, becomes nebulous. All we’re doing is we’re making it more reasonable; more clarity. I commend this bill to the House.

This is a five-minute split call.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. I think the debate so far has highlighted the fact that the main speakers on the Government side are Carl Bates and Cameron Brewer—those long-time proponents of women’s rights and equal pay! And now we have Rima Nakhle, who doesn’t even understand what the basis of what pay equity is. I think that reflects the bill that we are debating right now, the bill that has no regulatory impact statement.

For a party—ACT—who is all over regulations and trying to have some “What is the change that we are trying to do to make sure that we have a clear understanding of why we are changing the law, and the impact that this will have, to know that it’s valued?”, there is no regulatory impact statement to understand what this bill will do in New Zealand. In the actual official documents, the entire section on human rights has been withheld. We’ll be challenging that, because I reckon the New Zealand public would really like to know what the human rights implications are for this bill.

We know, on this side of the House, that it detrimentally impacts women in the lowest-paid jobs. We have a Government that has the gall to say that they’re going for growth, that they’re actually putting more money in New Zealanders’ pockets. The truth is that they are taking it out of the most vulnerable, lowest-paid workers in New Zealand—those people who work long hours in carer roles, in administrative roles, and cleaning roles; those areas that get paid the least—because this Government is quite happy for them to clean their toilets and clean their floors and do all their dirty work, but they’re not prepared to pay them what they’re worth.

That is going to come back and bite this Government at the next election, because there is one thing that women are good at, and that’s being unified. All women in New Zealand are going to sit up and pay attention to what underhand business this Government is doing today under urgency, with no regulatory impact statement, withholding information on what it’s doing to the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, and no select committee process—no ability for New Zealanders to comment on taking away pay equity claims in New Zealand. Tonight in the House, 33 active pay equity claims are being written off with this bill, with no course for any woman, any person in New Zealand being able to have a say on that.

Those members opposite, particularly those women who have let other men step forward and try and argue that this is more robust, that this is going to provide more clarity, that we’re all suddenly going to be a hell of a lot better off with this great new invention that you’ve tabled at the last minute with no select committee process, that somehow this will give us the certainty that will drive us forward as a nation and make us more productive—by paying women less and holding them back, the very women that we rely upon to make our country work, to make sure our children are looked after, to make sure there’s food on the table, to make sure they have shoes when they go school—those are the women who put every last penny into making sure we have a country who cares. This sad, miserly, selfish Government will take the money out of the pockets of the women that keep our country working, that keep our country ticking over.

If I was sitting on that side of the House, I would put up Carl Bates and Cameron Brewer because I would be too ashamed to stand up and speak to such a disgraceful bill. There is no way this Government has the ability to stand up and say they are going for growth, that they are interested in productivity, and that they are putting more money in the pockets of New Zealanders, when the blatant truth today is that they are doing the exact opposite. They are looking to those who earn the very least and they are making their lives harder. In the same brief, they are lining the pockets of their rich mates. It is a sad day in New Zealand when we see you taking from those who work hard, who do not have enough to pay for bills, and you turn around and have a Budget that will reward those and find money where they could not account for it themselves. I do not commend this bill to the House. It is a sad day in New Zealand for women’s rights.

I vividly recall visiting rest homes in my electorate of Wigram and talking to rest home workers and carers who had received pay increases under pay equity. They told me stories of being able to afford the bus to travel to work for the first time. They told me stories of not having to walk home for 40 minutes at the end of a shift because they simply could not afford other forms of transport. They told me about the dignity of being able to supply their families and their kids with some treats from time to time. This is the difference that paying women workers their fair share makes to lives.

We have a disgraceful move from a Government, today, that is stripping away the rights of 33 groups of largely women workers to progress their pathway to dignity. That is what this Government is stripping away. We see a sea of suits sitting opposite us. I challenge every woman in the Government parties to come down, take a call, and explain to other women why they think it is their right to legislate away their pathway to dignity and to being valued what they are worth, because that is what the members opposite are doing today.

Make no bones about it; the Prime Minister said it on the tiles on the way into question time today. He talked about the money savings that are going to come from this legislative change. David Seymour was just about leaping with delight about the billions of dollars that his Minister had saved with this legislative change. Those dollars are being stolen out of the pockets of women across this country. They are not theoretical dollars. They are dollars that would allow women to be able to afford to take public transport to work or to get to work some other way than adding a 40 or 45 minute walk at the end of a hard shift.

We are talking about some of the women workers in this country that do the hardest graft day in and day out. They are the dollars that this Government and every member opposite is going to have to front up to those women across the country about and tell them why they thought it was OK to take those dollars out of their pockets and instead use it because they spent too large on tax breaks for landlords and in terms of putting subsidies in place for the tobacco industry.

So we cannot underestimate the injustice that is being done to women today. We’ve been told “It’s OK. We’re just putting in place a less complex system. It’s too difficult.” We might compare industries with industries that don’t make sense, but make no mistake, this is about saving money.

We heard the Prime Minister had to correct his statement at the end of question time because when asked whether they’d received advice on it, he said, “Oh no, it’s not about that.” But within less than an hour, the Prime Minister was having to backtrack on it because when Cabinet came to make this decision, we know that they received money about the savings. Every time we talk about those savings, I want every member in this House to reflect on where that money could have been, and that is in the pay packet and pockets of some of our lowest-paid women in this country that have been historically undervalued for their work.

Sometimes Opposition Governments do things we don’t like a little bit, but I remember being in this House and looking up at Kristine Bartlett’s face when we passed the pay equity legislation—the difference that we as a House and the National Party at the time who supported it could make to the lives of everyday women. Instead, we have a caucus full of National Party members and ACT and New Zealand First who have sold every low-paid woman worker in this country down the river today. This day will go down in history. This will be the day that women know that this is a Government that has turned their back on them, and most of their women MPs aren’t even in the House to acknowledge that.

Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan: Madam Speaker.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: One more speech before you, Mr Xu-Nan.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Well, what on earth? I just have to say, what we’ve heard today is a little bit of Labour—I don’t know what actually, but I’m going to say: take a little bit of a story, twist it round, make it into a drama, and talk a load of nonsense. This bill is not about taking away the fight for pay gender equity. It’s not about that. This bill is about clearing up what is happening in this system. It is about making the system clearer and better—end of story. It is not about all the women of the world getting paid less—it’s not. That’s not what this is about. But if you listen to the rhetoric from the other side, that is what you will hear.

Dr Tracey McLellan: You’ve been sold a lemon as well, then, if you believe that.

DANA KIRKPATRICK: Well, it might take a lemon to know a lemon. There you go.

What I would say is can I remind everyone that there are an enormous number of very good employers in this country out there paying women well. A lot of them are women; they do a great job. So let’s not just tarnish every employer in the country with this. We have a lot of women doing a great job, getting paid well. We are not giving up the fight for gender equity in pay.

What we are doing is returning the pay equity system to its intended purpose in 2017. Since then, it became too broad and needed to be brought back to a place where it was clearer, and it’s become difficult to tell recently if pay differences were due to sex-based discrimination or other labour market forces. So what we want to do is clear that up.

Hon Dr Megan Woods: Read it like you mean it.

DANA KIRKPATRICK: The rhetoric has already started. You’ve heard it—that women will be paid less as a result of this. What a load of nonsense that we’re throwing out pay equity. We are not doing that. I repeat, this is simply not true. The Government supports women, it supports gender equity, and it supports equal pay.

The National Party began this journey in 2017 to introduce the legislation, and we are not turning our back on our commitment to pay equity. We support this bill and commend it to the House.

Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan—and I’ll just say that this is a split call, too.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It is incredibly concerning that we are seeing a bill of this nature being introduced under urgency with no preparation, no awareness, no select committee, and no way for the New Zealand public and the people of Aotearoa New Zealand to contribute on something that affects them in a significant way. It is shocking and appalling that this Government would like to take the form of an authoritarian Government and a dictatorship to allow something like this to go through without the proper democratic process—shameful! The Green Party will not support this bill, because it will make it more difficult for groups of women workers to raise pay equity claims, and the fact that you’re also halting all current claims—it is absolutely shocking.

This legislation was introduced by—our own—the Hon Julie Anne Genter, as the Minister for Women. It was widely supported, and it was also supported by the National Party when it was introduced. We saw people who stood up and said how much they wanted it and who also actually criticised people for not raising this early enough, and now you are turning your backs on the very thing that you agreed to because the National Party, at the end of the day, is pandering to their coalition partners. This is not something that is needed.

We hear members from the other side of the House talking about the fact that “Oh, women are not being paid less in the workplace.” We are seeing women being paid less in the workplace. In every scrutiny that we do—everything we do—when it comes to public services, we ask what their progress is towards pay equity, and you see all of them, consistently and shockingly, say that there is still a lack of pay equity. I can’t think of anyone before the select committee, and also in the portfolio that I’m involved with, who can actually confidently say that there is no gender pay gap in public services, and this is going to make it harder and harder for us to move towards that.

We did see, like I said, the support that we had when the legislation was first introduced. We have heard today from the people of Aotearoa outside Parliament expressing themselves because, again, that was the only opportunity that the New Zealand public had to be able to express themselves when it comes to this legislation, and I think that we are going to be taking their voice into the committee stage coming up later today because, again, with this bill, there’s no regulatory impact statement. There is nothing—there is no work, there’s no evidence.

Everything in this entire bill is vibes—they are hot takes. I don’t even know where the source of this information is coming from.

There is no evidence that supports that this legislation is needed in the first place, and we would love—love—to scrutinise and also ask questions of the Minister during the committee stage on every part of this bill because, again, we have not given the people of Aotearoa New Zealand the opportunity to express themselves through the select committee stage. That is disgraceful.

Finally, I want to say that in this week, this Sunday is Mother’s Day. Well, happy Mother’s Day to all of the mothers with this particular bill, which looks to further discriminate against women in the workplace. Despite the fact that they do similar work, comparable work, they are being paid at a lower rate. We know that it is happening, and we have seen other bills being introduced in the House that call for pay transparency, but those were also not supported by the governing parties.

So the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand will not support this bill, because it is badly put together. It will put women workers at more risk of lower pay, and we would love to ask the Minister some more questions during the committee stage.

This bill is set down for committee stage immediately. I declare the House in committee for consideration of the Equal Pay Amendment Bill.

In Committee

Part 1 Amendments to Equal Pay Act 1972