Under urgency, without basic paperwork, the Govt moves to change workers’ rights – Thomas Coughlan

Protesters outside Parliament on Tuesday campaign against the Government's planned changes to pay equity laws. Photo / Marty Melville

THREE KEY FACTS

• The Government is legislating to change the pay equity regime.
• The changes will make it more difficult to take a pay equity claim.
• Final figures have not been released, but the Government says it will deliver “billions in savings” although this will mean hundreds of thousands of workers’ pay rising slower than otherwise.

This morning, the Government announced changes that will, by its own admission, touch the lives of “hundreds of thousands” of workers – some of whom are the most poorly paid in the country.

By teatime, MPs had, under urgency, passed the bill through to committee stage – a process that usually takes months. It will shortly have its third reading. The slowest part of the legislative process may be finding a slot in the Governor-General’s diary so that it can be signed into law.

But make no mistake, that change is coming – and very soon, wide-ranging changes to employment law that almost no one knew about on Tuesday morning will be the law of the land.

Beyond the fact that it will save the Crown “billions”, according to Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, we don’t know much more about what the legislation will do to wages, to hiring, and to the economy.

That isn’t good enough – not even close.

The Government is moving so quickly there will be no select committee on the bill, meaning the Coalition won’t even pretend to have an open mind when it comes to tweaking the bill to make it more receptive to the concerns of the people whose jobs will be touched by it.

Almost as bad is the fact the bill was worked up so quickly officials did not have time to write up a regulatory impact statement (RIS) – quite the irony considering the changes were made by Brooke van Velden, a member of the Act Party that is the champion of good regulatory process (and is responsible for creating the RIS).

There are likely to be Treasury papers with some detail on what the law will do, but it could be August before they are released. The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment told the Herald the Government intends to publish an after-the-fact supplementary analysis report.

Compounding these injuries is the fact that part of the legislation is retrospective. Parliament tends to avoid passing retrospective legislation – and for good reason. If it does legislate retrospectively, it tends to require a very good justification and it definitely should avoid doing so in a hurry.

If the Government does have a good reason for urgency in this case (it says it doesn’t want multiple different regimes operating at once), it hasn’t made a very good case for it.

To recap: the Government is using Parliamentary urgency to pass retrospective legislation affecting hundreds of thousands of low-paid workers, saving itself “billions” of dollars, but has not done basic regulatory due diligence on what this means for the workers in question, and is not saying how much money is on the line.

That is bad lawmaking at the very least.

Van Velden, one of the Government’s best-performing ministers, made a case for some reform of the existing regime, noting some comparator roles, which are used under the current regime to set appropriate pay rates, had raised some eyebrows.

“Health New Zealand admin and clerical staff, as an example, have been compared to mechanical engineers, Health New Zealand librarians have been compared to transport engineers, and Oranga Tamariki’s social workers have been compared to air traffic controllers,” she told Parliament.

Equally, van Velden makes an interesting case about how wide-ranging and unwieldy claims can be, drawing in vast numbers of employers.

Kristine Bartlett needed five years of litigation to get her landmark pay equity settlement over the line. Photo / Mark Mitchell

But if this is a strong argument for reform of the legislation, it would be better accompanied by departmental paperwork proving why this is such a profound problem in need of urgent change.

Labour leader Chris Hipkins said he would “absolutely” reverse any changes, but in Government Labour struggled to use the existing regime to get its own replacement to the original 2017 care and support worker settlement over the line.

Perhaps some change is necessary, but in lieu of any paperwork, we won’t know whether it is or isn’t until long after the bill is passed.

Frankly, almost none of the MPs currently passing the legislation know one way or the other whether these arguments hold water – most only discovered this morning they’d be debating the legislation in the first place.

Even if they were given more time, without a RIS, MPs have little idea one way or the other what the legislation will do beyond making people’s wages go up by less than would have otherwise been the case.

If the Government cannot publish official papers that explain why that is a good idea, the public can be forgiven for concluding this is because it isn’t one.

Further evidence for this conclusion might be found in National’s rather odd “dead cat” tactic of introducing a social media ban member’s bill about an hour before the pay equity changes were announced.

It took Kristine Bartlett five years of litigation to get her landmark pay equity settlement over the line – and a further three years before the Government legislated the current regime in response.

It is deeply wrong that Parliament can take away that work in a matter of hours.

Thomas Coughlan is the NZ Herald political editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the Press Gallery since 2018.