Brooke van Velden says she would do some things differently on pay equity if she had that time again. Photo / Mark Mitchell
As women in Parliament go, Brooke van Velden is one of the more buttoned-up.
She is conservative in her dress, she is particular in the way she speaks, she is very controlled and quite matter-of-fact.
Yet whenever her political epitaph comes to be written, she’ll be remembered as the woman who used the C-word in the House.
And she has no regrets about it.
“But I also don’t think I should regret standing up for myself or standing up for other right-wing women,” she tells the Herald in an interview.
But it is clear the subject touches a nerve, and she justifies it as her response to being called the wrong kind of woman.
“And I think one of the things that has frustrated me in my terms in Parliament is that I had a sense that people think that there’s a right way to be a woman, and that’s being a very outwardly emotive or outwardly having lots of feelings type of woman rather than an analytical woman who wants to do the tough jobs and do those tough decisions and stand by them.”
There was quite a prequel to her use of the expletive.
It happened after one of the most shocking actions taken by this Government: a pre-Budget ambush to change laws making it harder for pay equity claims by women to be lodged and won, and cancelling 33 current claims.
The prequel also included a reference to the C-word in a newspaper column in relation to the women in cabinet who had backed the move – then a reference to that column by a Labour woman MP in Parliament.
“I was responding to a woman in Parliament intentionally bringing misogyny into Parliament,” said van Velden.
“And my response was in defence of women who actually want to speak up for themselves and are sick of being told they’re the wrong kind of woman.”
Van Velden, Act’s deputy leader and Workplace Relations Minister, had been asked by her Cabinet colleagues to push through the pay equity law without consultation, under urgency, to free up $13 billion in forecast spending over four years.
“I’m a team player and I did what I was asked to do,” she said.
If she had her time again, she would do the process differently. She would still want to make changes to the pay equity regime, but would not want to do it as fast as she did.
“But it was asked of me to do it in a very different time frame than I expected to do.”
In 2023, van Velden was as surprised as anyone that she was made Workplace Relations Minister.
She had taken part in coalition negotiations with Act leader David Seymour, but left the wrangling over ministerial positions to him and Prime Minister Christopher Luxon.
Her work experience is limited. After leaving St Cuthbert’s, where she excelled at singing, she studied economics and trade at the University of Auckland. Her political preferences shifted from Green to Act.
She had taken jobs to help fund her studies, including at a North Shore light fitting manufacturing business, a marine parts warehouse and helping students sitting exams for the Royal School of Music.
After university, she went to work for Matthew Hooton’s lobbying firm Exceltium.
She was first elected to Parliament in 2020 at the age of 28, having worked closely with Seymour to get the assisted dying bill passed.
During her first term, in Opposition, she had the health, foreign affairs and trade portfolios, although Act had an extensive range of workplace policies going into the 2023 election.
Apart from the vitriol she attracted from the pay equity move, her reforming zeal in workplace relations and safety has put her deeply offside with unions, who feel sidelined by her.
While centre-right Governments rarely have comfortable relationships with unions, it would be safe to say that, other than Bill Birch, who deregulated the labour market in 1990 with the Employment Contracts Act, van Velden has been the most polarising minister of labour or workplace in the past 50 years for unions.
So is that disdain by unions a badge of honour for her?
“No, I think there are probably some people out there who think, yeah, that’s really awesome, and then some people think, oh, I don’t know why that would be awesome.
“I kind of just sit in the middle,” she said. “I just want to do my job and provide a really good policy base for people to just get on with their own lives without lots of Government intervention and confusion.”
Unsurprisingly, business rates her. In the recent Mood of the Boardroom survey, she rated eighth-best performing minister out of 28, in front of Seymour at 11th.
“Most of the portfolio changes for policy that I’ve been doing is to try and build business confidence because I want to see more jobs for Kiwis, and you’re only going to get more jobs if businesses have the confidence to hire,” she said.
But she claims not to favour consulting business over the unions.
“I don’t believe that that’s fair. What I’m not into, which you might be picking up, is I’m not into performative politics.
“I don’t see a need to have meetings for the sake of it, just to say I’ve had a meeting with someone.”
She said she runs a “high-trust model” in which her officials engage regularly with business and the Council of Trade Unions.
“So I don’t have regular catch-ups with Business New Zealand or the CTU because I leave that to my officials, who I trust to do all the technical arrangements and get it right.”
Her reforms, either having passed or before the House at present, include the following:
One of her recent announcements included a proposed resolution of the Holidays Act fiasco in which employer groups, including the work regulator the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, have been miscalculating holiday pay. It seems to have been met with less resistance than many of her other reforms.
But perhaps the biggest piece of contentious policy reform is yet to come. That involves foreshadowed changes to the Health and Safety Act 2015, which was passed with bipartisan support after the Pike River disaster.
The CTU has been scathing about what it has seen so far, although a bill has yet to be introduced, and says plans for change are based on ideology, not evidence.
Van Velden’s plan for reform of health and safety law and regulation was inked into the Act-National coalition agreement, so she was committed to change, no matter what.
She then undertook a national “roadshow” last year with 23 meetings attended by 600 people in 11 towns to build the shape of the reforms.
And according to her, businesses live in fear of the current law and don’t know how to apply it.
She is going to change it so businesses, no matter what size, will be required to focus on minimising critical risk, meaning the things that could lead to death or serious injury, “rather than focusing on whether or not you’ve ticked the right box and you have done your duty to put a whole bunch of very expensive documents in a filing cabinet”.
The greater emphasis would be on giving businesses guidance rather than making them fearful of the law.
From what she heard from businesses, they felt really stressed.
“They feel like they’re being told that they’re the bad guys, quite a lot, but they’re the good guys because they’re actually there to try and help people have jobs and income and provide for their families,” she said.
“What I’m aiming to do is reduce some of that stress that they have, that if something happened, they’re going to get put into prison.”
People she met did not want their workers to be harmed.
“They want to do the right thing, but they have just no idea what the right thing is.”
She said it was not an ideological approach. Before the roadshow, she thought she would scrap the whole Health and Safety Act and start again, but the feedback from businesses was the bones of it were okay.
However, the act was supposed to be backed up by regulations that had not got off the ground.
She encountered some mockery when she put her name to a press release a few months back, suggesting the reforms would look at whether kids on farms could safely collect eggs. But there was a real issue around the use of quad bikes by kids, she said.
As part of her changes, industries including construction and agriculture could start developing their own approved codes of practice instead of waiting for WorkSafe to write them.
“They’re not dictating their own rules on health and safety,” she insists.
They still have to get WorkSafe’s approval for the approved code of practice and WorkSafe was still putting out the guidance documents people needed to follow.
As well, the inspectorate workforce was the highest ever.
She says she would love to get the portfolio again if the Government is returned to office next year.
Van Velden is also the minister for the less contentious miscellaneous department known as Internal Affairs, which covers areas ranging from fire and emergency services, the National Library, Royal Commissions of Inquiry, to citizenship and passports.
And she loves it.
“DIA hasn’t been given as much love as I’ve probably been giving it,” she said.
“It’s actually really fantastic work.
“I really enjoy getting into the nitty-gritty of the operational sides of DIA rather than just the policy areas.”
Waiting times for passports had been reduced from 25 days to seven days on average. And the waiting time before a file for a citizenship application is opened has been cut from about 13 months to 90 days.
The other relatively new field of work is that of an electorate MP.
She beat National’s Simon O’Connor in Tāmaki – he had been one of the chief parliamentary opponents of the assisted dying bill – meaning Act now has a second electorate besides Seymour’s Epsom.
“In the Tāmaki role, I’m really getting into the weeds of details of individual people’s lives and trying to help them navigate Government and where it’s gone wrong, individually assisting them.”
She had helped more than 250 constituents in the past two years.
One early case was particularly memorable – and she had his permission to share it, she said.
She had received a call from a man who said he was a Kāinga Ora tenant and hadn’t left his flat for three years because he was in a wheelchair and on the third storey of a block of flats.
“I didn’t believe him at first because I thought that sounded so unlikely… so I went to go and visit him and it was true.”
She took on his case and got him moved to a disability-friendly unit with an outdoor garden that he could get to.
“We have made genuine benefit to those people’s lives, and that really makes me get up in the morning and go back to Tāmaki because those people do deserve better, and I feel really privileged that I can help them.”