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Welcome to Inside Politics, and what a week! Who will not be seething with disgust at one thing or another that has occurred around Parliament in the past few days? It could be rolling back pay equity laws, the scathing newspaper column with the c-word criticising the law, the minister who regurgitated the c-word in Parliament, or the record suspension recommended by the Privileges Committee for Te Pāti Māori MPs performing a haka during a parliamentary vote.
It has been an appalling couple of weeks of miscalculations by politicians and poor judgment by others. The journalist Andrea Vance in her Sunday Star-Times opinion piece echoed the real anger being felt across the country that well-paid women in Government were stripping billions out of future pay equity settlements for underpaid and under-valued women. “Turns out you can have it all,” wrote Vance. “So long as you’re prepared to be a c*** to the women who birth your kids, school your offspring and wipe the arse of your elderly parents while you stand on their shoulders to ear your six-figure, taxpayer-funded pay packet.”
Her use of c*** and phrases such as “girl-maths” have hijacked the debate about pay equity to one about language and allowed the powerful women in Government to look like victims. There has been virtually no support in the Press Gallery for Vance’s use of such language. She is a much-deserved finalist in tomorrow’s Voyager Media Awards in the category Political Journalist of the Year – for work produced in 2024. But if she wins, it will unfortunately look like an endorsement by the industry of her column last weekend.
Act deputy leader and the minister responsible for pay equity law, Brooke van Velden, took a big risk yesterday in regurgitating the c-word in Parliament as she condemned Vance’s column. The risk was that people would not read the fine print about what prompted it, and that she would be forever remembered as the MP who said c*** in Parliament.
Labour MP Jan Tinetti handed van Velden the invitation when she set down a question for her in Question Time about other parts of Vance’s piece. Interestingly, van Velden went as far as consulting the Clerk of the House, David Wilson, who knew of no rule that prevented her from using the word. Speaker Gerry Brownlee clearly knew what was coming and tried to curtail her answer.
It has been an own goal for Labour. If it had not been for Vance’s column, by this stage of the news cycle the debate would probably have shifted to the women Labour brought to Parliament this morning to share their experiences. Debate may have turned to the inherent prejudice in Government MPs declaring that, in pay equity comparisons (comparing work of equal value), librarians should not be compared to fisheries officers.
There is an implication that librarians should not be as valued as fisheries officers and that it has been done willy-nilly. The comparator part of pay equity is highly technical and complex. Workforce profiles have been built up over years by experts and have to be agreed within negotiations. Unions can’t just impose comparators on employers. In the case of the now stalled care and support workers claim, the three agreed comparator male-dominated workforces were fisheries officers, Customs officers and Corrections officers. Assessors looked at skills, responsibility, effort and working conditions.
Further comparisons involve pay scales, penal rates, hours of work, allowances, leave and training. The 65,000 care and support workers are the hardest done by. Their pay equity deal was time-limited and expired in 2022. Many are back to the minimum wage, yet under the new law, they cannot raise another claim until 2027.
Raising the Vance column in Parliament was not the only mistake Labour made. Chris Hipkins should have condemned the language used in it. It was not an issue of press freedom, as he suggested, but of basic standards.
Labour also invited the duel with National on Monday about which party was “telling lies”. Despite having more than enough real ammunition with which to attack the Government on pay equity, it has said repeatedly that the law change will “take money out of women’s pockets” and “will result in women being paid less”.
That led National to accuse it of telling lies because the reality is that pay equity settlements will be less than they would otherwise have been – to the tune of billions of dollars that will “save the Budget”. Hipkins makes it clear in interviews that Labour is talking about cuts to future increases, but Labour’s advertising exaggerates when it does not need to.
Hipkins has also highlighted how much preparation for the pay equity law change has been done by the Government in secret – since at least April last year – during which time negotiations and offers with groups of workers have continued in bad faith. Now it is back to square one.
The Privileges Committee has gone well over the top in recommending a lengthy suspension of 21 days for Te Pāti Māori co-leaders Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi – and it may be based on a misapprehension.
The committee was within its rights to say the haka performed during the vote on the Treaty Principles Bill “could have the effect of intimidating a member of the House in the discharge of their duty”.
But committee chair Judith Collins was wrong on RNZ this morning in claiming that the MPs had stopped the Act Party from voting. Votes are taken in order of party size and Te Pāti Māori, as the smallest party, is the last to call out its vote. The haka took place after the other parties had voted and just before the Clerk of the House would have declared the vote lost. So it definitely delayed the overall voting procedure, which is a big deal and warranted some suspension. But it did not prevent any party from voting. The more junior MP Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke was suspended for a week.
But the party’s lawyer, Tania Waikato, said this morning that the MPs’ intention had been to disrupt the vote, which would only have reinforced the majority view on the privileges committee.
So just how extreme is the punishment? According to the Clerk of Parliament, the last member suspended by the House, on the recommendation of the Privileges Committee, was Sir Robert Muldoon in 1987. He was suspended for three sitting days for reflecting on the Speaker. But he would not have lost pay. The requirement to stop the pay of suspended MPs was introduced in 2013.
Other MPs have been suspended on the spot by the Speaker more recently for being disorderly, but only for a day.
The war over profanities has been a distraction from Nicola Willis’ second Budget, which she will deliver in a week’s time. Today, she made a commitment of $190 million towards a social investment fund and outlined some of the initiatives it will fund. Associate Education Minister David Seymour announced $140m for a drive to get kids back to school, and the Green Party launched an alternative Budget.
• Parliament paid its respects yesterday to mark the death of Peter Hilt, the MP for Glenfield from 1990 to 1996.
• Last week, we reported Winston Peters quoting Shakespeare to justify the Government passing pay equity under urgency: “If the deed should be done, it had better be done quickly” (Macbeth), he said. But one learned reader of Inside Politics suggests that Shakespeare may have been inspired by Jesus Christ: “What you are going to do, do it quickly” (John 13.27), which he said to Judas just before Jesus’ impending betrayal – and that that might be more apt, given the betrayal of women workers.
• The Asean Secretary-General, Dr Kao Kim Hourn, has been visiting Wellington this week.
• Finance Minister Willis told Newstalk ZB’s Heather du Plessis-Allan she was sent a bouquet of flowers on Monday from a former MP who had had “no words” after reading the Sunday Star-Times column. The MP was Annabel Young.
• The Liberal Party in Australia has elected its first woman leader, Sussan Ley, aged 63 (28 years after its sister party in New Zealand did so). She takes over from Peter Dutton, who led the Liberals to a loss of 20 seats, including his own. One feature that has stuck with Ley through almost every profile is the fact she changed her name from Susan to Sussan in her 20s – apparently on the advice of a numerologist. No words.
“The only c-word that’s done more damage to us here in Aotearoa is ‘colonisation’” – Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi in the general debate yesterday.
Who referred to the Green Party co-leaders this week as Chlöe Marx and Marama Engels? (Answer below.)
Goes to Andrea Vance, a usually excellent journalist, for using the c-word in her Sunday Star-Times column criticising women ministers for their rollback on pay equity. Not only gratuitous, she derailed the debate about pay equity.
Goes to former Labour Prime Minister Helen Clark, who, unlike the current Labour caucus, had no difficulty in criticising the language in the Vance column as “unacceptable”.
Super Fund withdrawal: New Zealand will pass an economic milestone in 2028 when the Government is forecast to make its first ever withdrawal from the New Zealand Superannuation Fund.
Alternative budget: The Green Party is promising a radical overhaul of the New Zealand tax system, raising $88.8 billion in new revenue and taking the size of the state to over $200b a year.
Regulatory Standards Bill: In an urgent hearing yesterday, the Waitangi Tribunal heard the concerns of those opposed to David Seymour’s Regulatory Standards Bill and the response from the Crown.
OPINION – Waitangi Tribunal review: Despite the howls of protest, the unusual part of the review into the Waitangi Tribunal is not that it is happening, but that – on the face of it – it looks rather puny, writes Audrey Young.
Parker interview: Newly retired Labour MP David Parker talks tax, calling an MP a “tosser” and outlining his greatest political achievement.
Quiz answer: Winston Peters (or Winston Trump if you prefer).
For more political news and views, listen to On the Tiles, the Herald‘s politics podcast.
Cabinet has agreed to explore part-privatisation once the ferries arrive.