Equal Pay Amendment Bill

I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak on the third reading of the Equal Pay Amendment Bill. But, firstly, Madam Speaker, if you would indulge me, I would like, on behalf of New Zealand First, as the first speaker after the Hon David Parker’s valedictory speech, to acknowledge his service, his friendship across the House, the strength of his words, his honesty and heartfelt account of an impressive career in politics, which left us somewhat speechless and humbled. I would like to acknowledge his departure from this House.

To this bill, I would like firstly to revisit the key point that pay equity claims will continue to exist after the passing of this legislation. The framework will be changed and existing claims will be impacted, but, as has been repeated numerous times in this debate, the bill delivers a framework for addressing sex-based undervaluation in remuneration. We are delivering a robust, workable, and sustainable solution that is focused on delivering resolutions. There has been much narrative about the adverse impact on women and how women are being disadvantaged in this process, but this is not the case. We have had a history of hard-fought battles to ensure that women are paid the same for the same work that men do. From my recollection, it was not until the 1970s that the Police delivered an equal pay framework for women. The legacy remained and, when I joined the Police in the 1980s, Police women were still referred to as “WDs”—referencing the Women’s Division. It has been an, at times, hard-fought process to address the system of equal pay, and I think we are in a good place.

This bill is delivering the system that will ensure that pay equity will be resolved, that we will be accountable, and that there will be solutions for real race-based undervaluation in remuneration in female-dominated occupations. This does not alter or impact the process by which a fair day’s pay is provided for a fair day’s work. There are mechanisms and protections to ensure this process is followed. This will drive accountability for the value of work and total remuneration conditions. More importantly, as has been mentioned, it will ensure that private sector employers will not be allowed to perpetuate undervaluing the workforce through an equity system that has a Government-funded backstop. Women are not being undervalued in this legislation. The protections will remain to address sex-based discrimination.

I have said before that I have spent nearly all my work life in male-dominated occupations and have worked with amazing women who, because of their value and contribution to their employer, have earned incomes well in advance of their male colleagues. There are workforces that are being undervalued and underpaid, and New Zealand First will fight to ensure there are protections to deliver for the hard-working Kiwi battlers, not because of their gender but because we will deliver First World wages as they deserve. But, in this legislation and at this time—

Hon Carmel Sepuloni: You’re not going to get First World wages when you can barely lift the minimum wage.

Hon CASEY COSTELLO: —very vocal—this bill will deliver a robust, workable, and sustainable system to address sex-based undervaluation, and we commend this bill to the House.

The next call is a split call—I call Takutai Tarsh Kemp.

Tēnā tātou e te Whare. Te Pāti Māori rises in staunch opposition to this so-called Equal Pay Amendment Bill. It is an amendment that tramples on the very name of the bill. In fact, it should be called the “Unequal Pay that Discriminates Against Women Amendment Bill” because that’s exactly what it is.

This is nothing but a disgusting attack on equal pay that will only discriminate against women and Māori workers who are taken advantage of. Let me talk to our whānau at home and say that this is what this Government thinks about women. We get notice an hour before the bill is being dropped, and this Government used urgency to push this bill through a process that misses out on the voices of our communities and the voices of our whānau, and there’s no chance for them to actually have their say.

I remember on Tuesday when we were in a meeting, and outside the window we could hear the voices of those women chanting, “Stand up, fight back.” I remember when, on 4 May, I attended the union demonstration in Manukau, where the same groups of whānau were chanting “Stand up, fight back”. Why? Because they’re all fighting for the right for equal pay, fair pay.

There has been no select committee process, no public submissions, no hearing from the very women that this bill will harm. There has been no scrutiny from Māori, unions, lawyers, human right experts, or the Human Rights Commission. What else is missing? A regulatory impact statement. There is nothing to show us what this bill will cost. There is no transparency about the risks or benefits, no modelling and no justification. Perhaps most disturbing of all, there’s been no analysis of the bill’s impact on the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, no assessment of whether it violates freedom from discrimination, the right to justice, or the right to equality before the law. When a bill has such sweeping consequences for the rights of women, especially indigenous women, that lack of oversight is not just negligent; it is dangerous.

Let us be absolutely clear: this is not equal pay legislation; this is pay oppression in disguise. The Government has told minorities and women once again to go and stick it, that we are not worthy of due process, that all we deserve is an hour, that all we deserve is actually nothing, and that all we deserve is that they are going to push us backwards on all the work that has been done over many, many years by the women who have stood up to fight back.

Let us ask why, on the sixth day of May 2025, this Government thinks that it’s acceptable to use its power and oppress—to remove pay equity for women. In 16 days, this Government will announce their Budget. It is clear that they’ve fudged the numbers—that’s right—and they’re coming up short. They’ve given $3 billion to landlords. They’ve cut the jobs of nearly 20,000 public servants, and then we hear the Prime Minister say that this bill will save billions. Well, now we know where the billions are coming from—from the pockets of those that work hard and service this country.

This bill is a brutal assault of the rights of working women. It tears down the legal pathway that wāhine Māori, Pacific women, and low-paid workers have used to fight for justice. It guts the definition of women’s work, wipes out every active claim, and gives bosses unchecked power to shut them down with no reason needed. It bans back-pay, delays fair pay for years, and locks women out of raising a claim for decades. Unfair. Unjust. Te Pāti Māori will not stand by this Government to see this happen. Kia ora tātou.

I rise on behalf of the Green Party to strongly oppose the Equal Pay Amendment Bill. Let’s be absolutely clear: this bill does not modernise or streamline anything. It’s not about improving processes or making things fairer. This bill is a direct attack on the hard-fought rights of women—especially wāhine Māori and Pacific women, who have, for too long, been underpaid and undervalued in this country. It makes it harder to lodge a pay equity claim. It makes the evidence threshold higher, earlier. It limits what jobs can be used for comparison. It halts claims already under way—33 claims of hundreds and thousands of women.

So what does this mean? Let’s look at a massively female-dominated industry: of secondary teachers. They make up 66 percent of women—but, under the new legislation, there must be 70 percent of women in an industry to make a claim. This is the reality of this bill.

In September 1893, New Zealand became the first self-governing country in the world which had women have the right to vote in Parliament elections. Almost 32,000 votes—signatures—from women and people all across the country. You can walk over to the National Library and see that scroll of signatures that those suffragettes gathered, showing what a trail-blazing country we were.

In 2020, when the Equal Pay Amendment Act passed, under the leadership of our Green colleague the Hon Julie Anne Genter, there was hope in this House—hope that we were finally taking meaningful steps towards pay equity; hope that we were honouring the legacy of the 1972 Equal Pay Act and the activism of trail blazers, like Kristine Bartlett.

But this Government prioritises greed over women’s rights. This Government is showing that they are more focused on reducing costs than upholding the principle of equality. This Government have said that there is a problem because there has been so many pay equity settlements. They think it’s a problem that women are getting paid more. They think it’s a problem that women are getting paid fairly. The Government are saying, “We want women to be paid equally”, while also saying that too many women have won the right to be paid fairly—make it make sense.

This bill turns back the clock on the progress that has been made. Let’s talk about that disproportionate impact on women. The pay gap between Pākehā men and Pākehā women is 8.1 percent; for Asian women, it is 18.2 percent; for Māori women, it is 19 percent; and for Pacific women, it is 20.9 percent. Essentially, Māori and Pacific women, in 2024, worked from 21 October to 31 December for free.

Now, let’s talk about what kind of workers we are talking about. In COVID, we had essential workers who we valued so much because they were the ones out there keeping our country running. We were talking about cleaners, we’re talking about teachers, and we’re talking about at-home carers caring for our disabled and elderly people, and our aged-care workers who were helping those elderly people who were not able to see their families. These are the workers that we were talking about.

Now, through that COVID period, we revered these people, and, today, we are turning back the clock on that and saying, “We don’t value you”. These women have not had their say because you have decided to ram this through without a select committee process, without time to actually have the experts have their say. This is a way of silencing women.

This bill is not just regressive; it’s cowardly, it dismantles a process built through years of negotiation and cross-party consensus—including National’s own support—and it does so quietly, rushed, and without honour. We vehemently oppose the process which this has been passed—

The member’s time has expired.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Enough has been said in this debate during the course of today. I stand here with National’s proud record since 1972 through to 2017. In the words of our female leadership, all we’re doing is correcting what the last Government rushed through, under urgency, without select committee processes—as much has been spoken about in this House today—we’re fixing that to ensure a robust, a sustainable, and a practical system is in place. On that basis, I commend this bill to the House.

I think it says a lot when the members on the other side can’t even give a full speech, in the third reading of what it is a significant piece of legislation, when they didn’t even allow it to go through a select committee process. As I was talking—they’ve just stopped now, but they’re laughing as if it’s funny. I need to say to that member Carl Bates and to the members of the Government that are in the House tonight that this is far from funny for so many New Zealanders.

This morning, I went to an Auckland event; they were celebrating 15 years since the Supercity was set up, but almost every woman who I saw who spoke to me when I walked in the room talked about the legislation that Government has put in place, and the halting of pay equity. A prominent woman, who’s not actually a Labour Party voter—they know very well; I won’t mention her name—said she could not understand what they were thinking. Now, what does that say? That says that women in all parts of society, on each side of the divide know that this is wrong. But that side of the House don’t know that this is wrong, apparently. They continue to stand up in the House and gaslight us and gaslight the rest of New Zealand, and tell us that we’re wrong; the unions, the workers who are upset about this are wrong; the women’s organisations who are very vocal in their opposition to this, they are wrong; the academics who are speaking out against this Government move, they are wrong. Again, what we have is a National - New Zealand First - ACT coalition telling the rest of the country that they know what’s right, we’re all wrong, and then gaslighting all of us with regards to this issue.

I’m still confused about how this came about, in some ways. It just happened so quickly and then here we are now passing this ugly piece of legislation, and we’ve had different versions of the truths from that side of the House. However, I suspect that the ACT Party leader’s version of the truth—the soon to be Deputy Prime Minister of New Zealand—is probably this time, this one time, the truth. He was very clear about the fact that they’ve saved millions of dollars for the Government as a result of this. What a way to make cost savings: taking money away from New Zealand women workers now and into the future, taking money away from their children, from their families, from their communities. And what for? To pay for tax cuts that they were told were unaffordable in the first place, to give $2.9 billion worth of tax breaks to landlords, to give a tax break to the tobacco industry.

You know what’s most shameful about this is that Government were not upfront with New Zealanders going into the last election. No one voted for this. I don’t recall any of their politicians standing up on a platform saying, “If you vote us in, we will repeal the pay equity legislation and we can assure you women will be paid less.” Who voted for that? Any woman in this country or any man with a woman in their life that cares about that woman will be regretting their decision if their decision at that election was to vote for that Government.

I have to say it’s very clear: it comes down to choices and we can see that women are not a priority for that Government, and now the rest of New Zealand can see it as well. I think they have underestimated the sense of feeling of this issue. What is really difficult to watch is the members on that side of the House quote themselves from how many months or years ago, trying to prove to us and the general public that they support pay equity. Simply not the case.

I think that this is not over, even though the Government would like to think that it is. They think that by passing this legislation, it’ll be done and dusted, they could do it quickly, sweep it under the rug and move on. Well, I can guarantee you that will not be the case at all.

What I feel very sad about, actually, is that this Sunday is a significant day. What is this Sunday?

Hon Members: Mother’s Day.

Hon CARMEL SEPULONI: Mother’s Day, and what that Government decided to gift all the mothers of this country was a pay cut. Effectively, that’s what it is. What they have said is to all the teacher mums, all the social worker mums, all the mums out there that are carer and support workers—what they have said to them is that you cannot expect to get pay equity under us or in fact for the next 10 years, and you will continue to fall behind your male counterparts and you cannot expect to be paid fairly. That is the Mother’s Day gift that that side of the House has given every mother in this country. Now, let’s not forget that it’s not just about the women and these mothers; it’s about the children that they are looking after. It’s about the families that they care for. It’s about the communities that they live in. Today, the gift that they have been given for Mother’s Day is a pay cut.

We, of course, are opposing this bill, and we can’t help but see so much of a contradiction from that side, with regard to the speeches that they give, with respect to the support they showed, unanimously for the bill when it first went through. We’re sad for Aotearoa New Zealand, because we have had a proud history of being leaders for women—albeit mostly led by this side of the House—and today they take us backwards. Today they reverse that progress. Today they stand against everything that we are so well known for internationally, for standing up for, and the rights and the working conditions and the pays of women are just a few of those things.

I said it in my first speech and I’ll say it again in the third reading speech: all too often, we see members on that side of the House standing up in front of microphones and international forums, talking about the progress New Zealand has made for women, and I’ve seen women on that side of the House talk about the progress that we have made for pay equity. I don’t want to see any of those women or men stand up and speak to these gains ever again. In fact, when those women take the podium at those international events, what they should be doing is saying, “Actually, to everyone in this room, we have to acknowledge that as a country, we’ve just taken significant steps backwards for women.”, and that is because of their Government’s decisions, and you will need to stand up and say that you voted for pay equity to be halted, and you will have to stand up and say, because of you and because of your colleagues, women will continue to be paid less and that gender pay gap will continue to be the persistent pay gap that it is, and you will have to stand up and own that that is because of you. I want to hear those speeches.

It is a dark day for New Zealand today and it has been a dark two days as the country has been taken by absolute shock as a result of this. I feel for the women who probably, for many, are still already struggling with the cost of living, rising rents, rising energy bills, and now they are going to be looking forward to very little in the way of pay increases and will not be able to expect to get pay equity any time soon.

Hon Andrew Bayly: That’s not right.

Hon CARMEL SEPULONI: That member Andrew Bayly is yelling out in opposition to what I’m saying, but I’m pretty sure no one sees him as the bastion of support or workers’ rights or the person who should be speaking on behalf of or for women. So perhaps that member should remain silent during the duration of the speech and up until I finish, because I don’t think he has much value to add.

We oppose this bill. We are ashamed for that Government, and the fight continues because the legislation may pass this evening but that doesn’t mean that we’re going to remain silent on this issue or the rights of women in any area.

Can I just make the point before I call the next member, that comments across the House should not be personal. Thank you.

Hon Carmel Sepuloni: Point of order, Madam Speaker. If I’m getting heckled by a member on the other side of the House in an interjection, then I think that I have the right to make reference to the heckling.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): Absolutely.

Well, thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a great pleasure to speak on this bill and I’m very proud of this bill; I think it’s a great step forward. I’d just like to say there is a difference of opinion on this bill, and that’s fine. But people should also respect other people’s views. I respect the views of the people on the other side of the House that don’t agree with me, and I think that they really should think about themselves if they can’t respect a different view. Maybe they don’t have a very good argument if they want to attack the messenger. Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. I commend the bill to the House.

This is a split call—I call Camilla Belich.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I think what we need to have in this debate is a bit of perspective. There are differences of opinions, as that last member said. But what we need to look at are the actual facts of what the Government is doing here. This Government is changing the current law on equal pay in such a way that it will make it almost impossible for predominately female groups of workers to make pay equity claims and to receive pay equity claims. Now, that is no joke. That is about recognising the rights of women to have their work valued and to live free of discrimination. This is a human rights issue.

I want to talk briefly, if I can—I do have a short call—about the impacts of a settlement. I have a study here on the NGO social worker settlement. The results of when women received the settlement was: 52 percent decrease in employees who skipped a meal; 55 percent decrease in employees who went without groceries; 51 percent decrease in employees struggling to make essential payments or mortgage payments; 91 percent increase in employees who reported that they had other money available and nothing left in their account; 37 percent decrease in employees who required other sources of income—e.g., Working for Families tax credits—40 percent of employees reported they could save more for their KiwiSaver.

This is about dignity. This is about recognising the work of underpaid women in our society, and this is why this legislation was first brought to the House. The changes that this Government is making today will make these types of outcomes for our lowest-paid women, for the work that is undervalued, less likely—very less likely.

I want to acknowledge the people who brought this to the House. When I was first a lawyer, I did research on the Kristine Bartlett case. In my maiden speech, I acknowledged John Ryall, I acknowledged Peter Cranney, I acknowledged Kristine Bartlett, and I said, one of the things I was proudest of, of that Government, was the work they’d done to value the work of women. It is a shameful day to be in the House to see that wiped away today, because I have met so many people in my career who have gone through pay equity processes, and, for the first time in their lives, they look objectively at the work that they do and they realise that what they actually are doing is highly skilled. It is important. It is not low-level work; it requires a lot of intelligence, a lot of emotional intelligence, to do the work—a lot of heavy lifting. They realise that they are, and their work—and some of them have been working in these jobs for 30, 40 years. They realise their value, and this is what is being taken away today.

I know the Government says that there is still an Act in place, but let me tell you a few things. This Act will bring in a higher threshold for making a claim. They will quash review clauses. Care and support workers, of which Christine Barlett was one, have a claim in the authority. That claim will be extinguished when this bill is passed, and all of her colleagues will have to wait until 2027 before they can even raise a claim. Now, when she first brought her claim in 2013, it wasn’t resolved until 2017. So how much longer will these people have to work on the minimum wage without access to pay equity? They have removed back-pay. This is really important. Currently, if you have an equal pay claim, if it’s not settled, you’re not disadvantaged during the negotiations because you know you’ll get back-pay. What incentive is there to negotiate in good faith, when every single day you are losing an extra dollar? It is absolutely ridiculous, and it absolutely proves that this Government is changing equal pay and they’re making it a lot worse and they’re making it more disadvantageous to women.

Even if that wasn’t the case—even if the things to do with retrospectivity, extinguishing claims, and removal of back-pay weren’t bad enough—the hierarchy of comparators that this Government is putting into the legislation will make it impossible for people to prove that they have a pay equity claim. And it also doesn’t make sense. Why are people who work in close proximity to you more likely to be able to help you prove that you’ve been systemically undervalued? It’s more likely if it’s in another industry.

This is a fundamental problem with this Act and it will disadvantage women. It is a huge step backwards. This bill is taking money out of the pockets of working women in New Zealand. We won’t see pay equity settlements. We won’t see rises in pay. All we will see is what we have seen throughout the history of New Zealand, which is consistent undervaluation, consistent not valuing of women’s work, and consistent pay discrimination against working women. It is absolutely shameful. The National Party should be ashamed of letting this bill go through the House. It is absolutely terrible, and I think you’ll live to regret it.

I rise to contribute to the third reading of the Equal Pay Amendment Bill. I’d like to just say to anyone listening in our public, our neighbours, at home, around the world, actually, that I’m talking to you, dear listeners. I don’t care to refute what has been said and the scaremongering taking place on the other side of the House. I’m talking to you.

The National Party always has—

Hon Dr Megan Woods: Point of order. The speaker has repeatedly brought the Speaker into the debate. She may wish to speak to “dear listeners” but maybe she could leave the Speaker out of it.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): Point understood. I was signalling to the member to not bring the Speaker into the debate.

RIMA NAKHLE: My apologies. I’d like to speak to those that are beyond these walls, and I’d like to say that the National Party has, always will, and does support equal pay based on genders; pay equity.

But what I would like to say is when something has ballooned out of control, out of what it was initially intended to address—that is a lack of pay equity based on gender—then we are stepping in and saying, “Let’s take it back to basics.” That’s what we’re doing with this bill here.

I heard constantly about how people across the House are very angry. They’re filled with anger. I wonder where this anger was when they voted against the Gangs Act. I wonder where this anger was when they voted for sexual abuse and against victims when they voted against the Sentencing (Reform) Amendment Act. I wonder where this anger was when they voted against adjusting tax brackets—

Hon Dr Deborah Russell: Point of order. I have taken deep personal offence that that member has said that people on this side of the House voted for sexual abuse. That’s outrageous.

Kahurangi Carter: Speaking to the point of order, I find it deeply, deeply offensive and I am personally offended at her saying that we support sexual offenders. That is deeply offensive and completely untrue.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): I will ask the member to stand, withdraw, and apologise.

RIMA NAKHLE: I withdraw and apologise. I commend this bill to the House.

Earlier this evening, just before the dinner break, the Minister of Finance stood in this House and cried crocodile tears. We know the National Party know they’re in trouble when they send down the Minister of Finance to speak on a bill which is not her piece of legislation at third reading. She waxed lyrical about the greatness of Kristine Bartlett and how proud she was to have voted for that. The only problem for Nicola Willis and every other member of the Government is what Kristine Bartlett herself has been saying. It is that woman’s words that count. She says, “It’s hurting. It’s really hurting. I feel as though women have just been let down so terribly today. It’s just so sad. I don’t know what is going to happen in society.” They are the words of Kristine Bartlett, the New Zealander of the Year who crusaded and fought hard and crusaded with so many other women and men to ensure that women were paid decently and women were paid fairly by valuing their work and rectifying historical wrongs that had seen the undervaluation of women’s work.

The National Party voted for that, but, over the last 24 hours, we’ve seen a National Party that has ripped that up, and, with that, they have ripped up the hopes and aspiration of women across this country, and men who also work in those industries that have traditionally been women’s work—work that is undervalued. We’re talking about teachers, we’re talking about Plunket nurses, we’re talking about nurses, midwives, care and support workers, hospice nurses, healthcare assistants, librarians, and admin assistants. These are just some of the people in the 33 claims that are getting thrown on a scrap heap by this Government. These are the real people.

What we’ve seen is that the Public Service Association have calculated that for one group of these workers—the care and support workers—by tossing out their pay equity claim, they are going to be $148 a week worse off than they are. When you are on a limited income per week, $148 is a huge amount of money. And this Government under urgency has passed this law that takes away the opportunity for those workers to earn that money.

I have been sent something by someone in my electorate who voted National at the last election. She sent me the pat reply that she’s received from a National MP that she contacted when she expressed her disgust. What are the lines they’re sending out? The National Party—and it’s Vanessa Weenink, in this case—are saying that they’re amending the Equal Pay Act to make the process more robust, workable, and sustainable.

Let us be very clear: sustainable means billions and billions of dollars saved so they can make their Budget add up, because at the core of this is what David Seymour said yesterday, what Christopher Luxon said on the tiles on the way in, and what Nicola Willis had to admit in question time today. This is about freeing up billions of dollars for a Budget that is on the tails of a Budget last year that gave billions to landlords and tobacco companies, and somehow it has to be paid for. It is some of the lowest-paid workers in our country, and particularly women, that are paying for this year’s Budget. Let us be incredibly clear about that.

The pat reply that’s being sent out also says that claims have been able to progress without strong evidence of sex-based undervaluation. Well, we have asked—we have asked and asked and asked through the committee stage; we have asked in question time—what are the examples of this? What are the examples of these claims that have been able to progress? Which of the 33 is so egregious that you’re having to let down 150,000 workers in this country? Not one answer. This Government has not gone through the scrutiny of a select committee process. They have refused to answer the questions in the committee of the whole House stage. We and the country are still none the wiser of what the claims that have been able to progress are.

What is the problem we are trying to rectify? If we start from the basics of policy formulation, problem definition, we’re still in the dark. We still don’t know what the problem is. Only we do, because David Seymour let it slip out. The problem is making the Budget stack up and paying for the things that it squandered the money on tax cuts in last year’s Budget for, because that, in reality, is the critical problem definition.

Then the condescending email that is being sent out to people goes on to say, “It is difficult to compare pay rates from across different industries.” That is correct. Is it a surprise to anyone that rectifying sometimes centuries of undervaluation of women’s work is not an easy task, requires complexity, and is difficult? It’s the very reason why we set aside the money when we were in Government. What is more—as my colleague Camilla Belich rectified—we also said, “You know what? We will back-pay this while we work this through, because it is complex, it is going to take time, and nobody should pretend that rectifying centuries of the undervaluation of women’s work is going to be done in the flick of the switch. It is going to be hard.” But this Act that we are debating today—or this bill, which is soon to become an Act—takes away that back-pay. It takes that away and it puts it back into the Budget. It puts it back, essentially, into tax cuts for landlords, and tax breaks for tobacco companies, because this Government cannot make its Budget add up. These are the kinds of lines that this Government is peddling.

But let’s take this back to the humans that are at the source of this. In a second reading speech yesterday, I talked about sitting down with some rest home workers in my electorate many years ago and them telling me about the fact that they could finally afford the bus fare to get to work—but, more importantly, the bus fare to get home from work. They weren’t having to walk 40 and 45 minutes home at the end of an incredibly hard shift, and I think any of us in this House that have spent, either as elected representatives or as family members, time in rest homes have nothing but awe for the workers who work in rest homes. None of us can imagine having to walk home 45 minutes after the kind of graft that those people do—the kind of hard work that they do.

These are the very workers that this Government is letting down. They are saying to the midwives, to the hospice workers, to the care and support workers, to the teachers, to the nurses, and to the admin workers, “You don’t matter. Balancing our Budget is more important. We squandered the money at the last Budget and, I’m sorry, you’re going to have to be the sacrificial lamb.”

What we have from the National Party is a whole lot of excuses and a whole lot of women MPs who, frankly, will not front on this. The challenge for every National woman MP is to get out and explain to women why they think it is OK to use their position of power to legislate away their rights and their dignity, because that is what this Government is doing. They are taking away the rights of women to be valued the same as their male counterparts by getting rid of pay equity. This is not easy work. No one ever pretended that it would be. But this is nothing short of taking money out of the pockets of women.

One of the things that we do know is that there are 150,000 workers across the 33 claims that are going to be impacted by this, and what the National Party need to realise is that for every one of those 150,000 workers, they have family. They have children. They have partners, husbands, wives, parents, sisters, and brothers. The ripple of this change will be enormous. When I think about what $140-odd will do for families that I represent in Wigram each week—the difference that that would make that this Government has ripped away from them. Let’s even just put to one side the fact they’ve let them down over the promises they made about support for early childhood education and the fact that hardly anyone’s receiving that. This is nothing short of a betrayal of women.

The member’s time has expired.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I thought that I might just repeat my speech from last night, but I think it’s already been said many times. Just a couple of things from me: the Government supports women, it—

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

DANA KIRKPATRICK: The Opposition enjoyed my speech so much last night, it is almost worth repeating! The Government supports women, it supports gender equity and pay, and it supports equal pay. The National Party began this journey in 2017, to introduce the legislation, and now we are continuing to ensure it is workable and clear. We support the legislation, and we commend the bill to the House.

Bill read a third time.