Workplace Relations Minister Brooke van Velden responds to questions from reporters over criticism from Winston Peters. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Workplace Relations Minister Brooke van Velden responds to questions from reporters over criticism from Winston Peters. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Opinion by Thomas Coughlan
Thomas Coughlan, Political Editor at the New Zealand Herald, loves applying a political lens to people's stories and explaining the way things like transport and finance touch our lives.
The Government’s pay equity reforms were the main topic of political conversation this week, with the changes signed into law.
The reforms also prompted a debate on the use of the c-word, which was wielded by a columnist against women ministers.
Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters quoted William Shakespeare to defend the speed of the reforms.
“If the deed should be done, it had better be done quickly,” Winston Peters growled at Chlöe Swarbrick in Question Time last week, defending the use of Parliamentary urgency to rapidly and retrospectively upend New Zealand’s pay equity regime.
Peters told us it was Shakespeare he was quoting(although, as Audrey Young revealed this week, Shakespeare might have been channelling the Gospel of John).
The original is actually, “if it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well it were done quickly”.
It’s a good play to borrow from. Poor Lady Macbeth deserved an equity deal of some kind. Her spineless husband wields the dagger, sure, but she’s the one telling him where to plug it, and yet for all her gory efforts, poor Lady Mac doesn’t even get her own name.
More curious was the decision to borrow these particular lines. They’re from a Macbeth’s soliloquy outside King Duncan’s bedchamber, right before our naughty, wet-blanket laird sneaks in and snuffs the generous monarch to nick his crown.
If Peters was looking to offer reassurance, quoting the last words of a man before he embarks on one of literature’s most infamous killing sprees certainly didn’t provide it.
But you can hardly blame the NZ First leader for trying to lift Parliament’s tone. The place limps to the end of the Budget sitting block having embarrassed itself in almost every possible way. This is a plague on all houses – on the House, frankly. No party is blameless, and they should all lift their game.
The changes, which will make pay equity claims more difficult to take, and once taken, will likely make the settlements less generous than under the prior regime, were passed through all stages last week and signed into law by the Governor-General this week.
The reforms are now the law of the land, and yet almost no one, and certainly not the 180,000 odd people who will have their pay affected by it, knows anything really about how the law will work.
They certainly don’t know the most important part of the reforms, which is the amount of money Treasury estimates the Government will save by tightening up eligibility. It is ridiculous that this figure has been withheld, despite the law already being passed.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon was asked on Monday to reveal the number, but refused, citing Budget sensitivity. This was despite the fact that he had structured that precise press conference around revealing a Budget sensitive education spend.
But this only underlines the ridiculousness and hypocrisy of the Government’s intransigence on pay equity. The screen industry’s half-billion-dollar top-up doesn’t even exist yet. It won’t exist until the Budget is passed into law and starts paying out later this year.
The cuts to pay equity, on the other hand, do exist. Today, right now, they are the law – and there is only one real reason for the Government to keep the fiscal impact of the cuts secret until Budget Day, whilst tactically declassifying the cuddlier parts of the Budget to string out the good news over as many days as possible.
It’s particularly cruel to the hundreds of thousands of workers whose hopes of a claim have been dashed by the reforms who are now counting down the sleeps to Budget Day like it’s a topsy-turvy Christmas in which workers have to wait till the day itself to unwrap the detail of out just how much the Government has filched you for.
You’d think with a target as big as this, the opposition couldn’t miss, and yet somehow they managed to – somehow, the opposition managed to blunder, and blunder so badly that members of the Government were able to claim, without a hint of irony, that having slashed pay equity days before, they were now sticking up for feminism.
(Not wanting to test the public’s fraying patience with newspaper columnists, I’m going to sit on the fence with this one. The pay equity reform was clearly not feminist, yet sticking up for the right not to be called the c-word clearly is).
Labour leader Chris Hipkins got it wrong on Tuesday by not coming out more strongly against the use of the “c-word” against female Ministers in a Sunday Star-Times column.
Hipkins has been a strong advocate for the right of women in politics to not be the target of such slurs – a stronger advocate than Luxon at times. His weak response on Tuesday undermined all that, by making his advocacy look like it extended only to his own side.
He could have survived this. Leaders get asked a lot on their Tuesday morning “caucus runs” and they don’t always get it precisely right. Where Labour got things quite catastrophically wrong the next day was in deciding to have MP Jan Tinetti ask a primary question in Question Time, quoting from the column (a section without the offending word) and asking Workplace Relations Minister Brooke van Velden whether she agreed with it.
Former Prime Minister Chris Hipkins MP Jan Tinetti. Photo / Tom Eley
Tinetti suggested the question at Labour’s procedures meeting that morning, when MPs bid for one of Labour’s question slots and plan House strategy. No one, so far as the Herald could ascertain, lodged any serious objection, including Hipkins, who was at the meeting.
After the question was lodged, Labour alerted the media, saying they might want to be watching for an explosive session. They needn’t have bothered. The Government had already been on the blower to the press gallery wanting to know what the hell Labour was thinking.
Willis cannily used her well-deserved right of reply column in The Post to lay out the Government’s principled position in favour of reform.
The column did such an effective job arguing Willis’ position that several other members of the Government drafted op-eds expressing their own (again, quite justifiable) offence at the column, along with a few neat points about their brilliant policy platforms.
Greens co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick announcing the party's tax plan. Photo / Mark Mitchell
The plan hoses mid-to-high-income earners to the extent that an average registered nurse would end up losing after-tax income. Data from February 25 from Health NZ says the average salary for an RN was $125,662, which includes overtime and allowances, enough to see a nurse about $3 a week worse off, rising to about $33 worse off for senior nurses.
The Greens’ tax plan includes about 30 times more new tax than Labour’s plan in 2020, nine times more than the wealth tax Labour put up in 2023, and 11 times more than the Greens’ own relatively modest 2014 plans. Quite how they managed to soak the economy for that much revenue and still need to hike taxes on the likes of nurses shows how difficult the Greens and Labour are going to find things heading into next year’s election.
And finally, Te Pāti Māori. The privileges committee investigating last year’s rule-breaking haka has thrown the book at the party’s co-leaders, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi, recommending the House dole out extraordinarily harsh 21-day suspensions to each. Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke got seven days. Speaker Gerry Brownlee believes the recommendations would be the most severe ever doled out by Parliament. He was right, on Thursday, to very delicately suggest Parliament may want to thoroughly think about the consequences of such a sentence.
No side is blameless. Te Pāti Māori regularly treats Parliament with contempt – returning the favour to a Parliament that has treated Māori in the same contemptuous fashion for most of the time since it first sat in 1854.
The attendance of Te Pāti Māori MPs is an embarrassment to Parliament and an offence to the taxpayer (Peters quite fairly pointed out that it was rich for the opposition to care so much about the three MPs’ attendance during the Budget debate next week, when they skipped it last year). The Speaker and the Greens have quietly offered to help Te Pāti Māori with basic House procedure, including getting MPs’ questions into order. Those offers have been rebuffed. As a result, in their fifth year as MPs, Ngarewa-Packer and Waititi still struggle at question time, Waititi particularly so.
The party’s voters deserve better – and frankly, so do taxpayers. There are few jobs paying $168,000 a year that would let you get away with refusing to learn the basics and would tolerate that level of regular rulebreaking.
Te Pāti Māori seems not to care, and is quite content to use Parliament as a soundstage for its social media content. It’s far from the first political party to do this – but it’s the first party that only uses the House for this purpose. The governing parties are cheesed off and appear to have allowed that quite justifiable frustration to push them into an unjustifiably harsh recommendation.
The recommended punishment seems to reflect the accumulated anger of five years of regular and egregious rulebreaking. That goes beyond the select committee’s remit, which was to look at last year’s haka on the Treaty Principles Bill – a clear contempt, but not an unprecedentedly naughty one.
If the goal of the governing parties is to prevent Te Pāti Māori from inflicting further chaos upon the House, that would better be accomplished by extending an olive branch, not by loading a single privilege breach with years of grievances.
Who is to blame for this chaos? An MP half jokingly suggested it might be the fact that Parliament’s bar, “3.2”, closed down last year, meaning less cross-party socialising. If that’s the case, then the villain of the piece is nice-guy Minister Chris Penk, who moved his office into the old bar (a new watering hole, dangerously close to the press gallery, will open soon).
Poor Macbeth might have made a good MP. Midway through his killing spree, he confided, “I am in blood, stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er”.
That’s probably a familiar sensation to all MPs – and particularly in this past fortnight, when the whole precinct has suffered from a surfeit of pigheadedness.
Pity Macbeth didn’t take the opportunity to wade back – as our MPs should do. Anyone thinking Macbeth is a model for parliamentary tactics would do well to read to the end of the play.
Thomas Coughlan, political editor at the New Zealand Herald, loves applying a political lens to people’s stories and explaining the way things like transport and finance touch our lives.
