Christopher Luxon’s pay equity blunder could be Chris Hipkins’ opportunity – Shane Te Pou

The decision by Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and his Government to scrap a pay equity law will impact low-paid female workers. Photo / Mark Mitchell

THREE KEY FACTS

• Christopher Luxon’s Government repealed pay equity legislation, affecting low-paid workers, mostly women, without consultation.
• The repeal aims to save billions, impacting teachers, care workers, and others expecting fair pay.
• The decision has sparked widespread outrage, with calls for opposition parties to restore the law.

Out of the blue, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and his Government ripped up the pay equity legislation this week. No consultation, no select committee process. Just one hurried press conference from a junior minister.

Just like that, the hundreds of thousands of low-paid workers – nearly all of them women – fighting for fair pay were sent back to square one, and with much steeper hurdles put in their way to get justice.

It would save “billions of dollars”, Luxon said. And where do those billions come from?

Every cent will be taken out of the pay packets of teachers, care and support workers, and others across dozens of professions who now won’t get the fair pay they were entitled to or, at best, will have to wait years more and get a reduced settlement at the end of the new process.

The amount the Government “saves” is the amount these workers lose.

What kind of government denies women their legal right to fair pay in the name of saving money?

It’s the kind of thing you expect, frankly, from Act and even National – but I would have expected Winston Peters to tell them where to stuff it. He’s had a good record of standing up for workers in the past. Now, he’s turned his back on them. Shane Jones, too. He recently told RNZ journalist Mihi Forbes that women must wait for fair pay until we’ve had economic growth – the same old trickle-down nonsense.

I know the Government’s books are cooked. But the Government cooked them. They chose to borrow for a $14 billion tax cut package. They decided to slam the economy into reverse by cutting infrastructure investment and house building and making thousands of people unemployed.

And, now that there’s “no money”, because of the Government’s choices, Luxon and co have decided it’s the care and support worker who spends her day helping disabled elderly people go to the bathroom who has to pay the price. The people we celebrated as “essential workers” during Covid are now expendable.

How about cancelling the landlord tax cuts, instead? Why not?

How much do you reckon Luxon would want to be paid to do what a disabled care worker does? Reckon he’d do it for minimum wage? Not bloody likely.

But, apparently, it’s okay to deny those hard-working women the fair pay they are due.

I’d like to see Luxon work in a retirement home for a week – dealing with dementia patients, cleaning people up, doing the sheer hard physical work – then come back and tell us again, why ripping up the care and support workers’ pay equity process is okay.

Sometimes, governments have to make hard trade-offs. This isn’t one of those times. The Government chose to go deeper into debt with irresponsible tax cuts and it’s now choosing to make women pay the price, rather than reverse those tax cuts.

There’s only one way women are going to get fair pay now: change the Government.

Politically, this is a huge blunder from the Government. The outrage at this disgraceful law is palpable from all over Aotearoa. Who’s going to vote for the parties that stand for lower wages; parties who will come and retrospectively take away your rights if they decide justice for you costs too much money?

The opposition parties need to come together and pledge to restore the pay equity law and the pay equity claims on day one when they get into power.

Luxon has gifted them the opportunity to show they are the ones on the side of working Kiwis and focused on the issues that really matter, while this Government spends its time fighting silly culture wars imported from America.

That’s the lesson for left-wing parties from the Liberals’ victory in Canada and Labor’s win in Australia. Mark Carney and Anthony Albanese won by focusing on the cost of living, jobs, public services, and by dismissing the weird culture war obsessions of their opponents. They showed they were the grown-ups in the room, they were ready for government, and they wanted it, while the other side were just playing at being mini-Trumps.

The Luxon Government has taken its eye off the ball on the economy and now spends its energy on bills designed to rewrite the Treaty, undermine workers’ pay, or make the already difficult lives of our trans whānau even harder.

This is the moment for Chris Hipkins to show his Government will be focused on the issues affecting families up and down Aotearoa: jobs, fair pay, homes, and health.

Luxon’s decision to undermine fair pay for women in the name of saving money tells us a lot about him as a leader. It also gives Hipkins the opportunity of a lifetime to show us what kind of leader he can be.