1. Almost 20% of current applicants will no longer to be eligible to enter the pay equity process
2. Hundreds and thousands of Kiwis had years of good faith claims and work blown up - effectively overnight, under urgency and under secrecy - by a govt that had been plotting it since April 2024.
3. New laws put power almost singularly with employers who will have to pay it - and they themselves get to decide if the claims have "merit". If they deem it not to, they can cancel the claim immediately
4. What's certain is at least $13,000,000,000 was stolen from Kiwi workers - men and women in female dominated industries - critical industries such as aged care, hospices, hospitals, schools, labs.
5. Despite having plenty of time the government chose not to undertake a Regulatory Impact Statement - which would have clearly laid out the reasons for and against as well as impacts. They also redacted all human rights impact advice and kept it under secrecy for fear of legal repercussions.
6. Seymour boasted Van Velden "saved the government's budget" - obvious once you see that this move injected $13bn back into a debt level that already exceeds Labour's in less time.
7. The new law also blows up existing review clauses under old pay equity settlements, and disallows any reviews for 10 years.
There is a reason Kristina Bartlett cried upon hearing the news
The same money tree where willis found 13 billion for tax cuts, 3 billion for landlords, 8 billion for new helicopters and rockets, and 3 billion and counting for cook strait ferries
You can only spend money once. Therefore you have to either cancel existing expenditure or raise taxes to afford the $13 billion, mostly to well paid middle class professionals.
In fact it would have been to many middle class men as well as women. The biggest group no longer qualifying are secondary teachers. The reason being that they are below to new threshold of 70% but were above the old threshold of 60%.
Superb. The grim reality of Pay Equity if it went ahead as opposed to the moral posturing of extraordinarily well-heeled, taxpayer-funded elite women is spelled out clearly here.
Well the govt should have been upfront about spelling out the issues and proposing proper solutions. The women on Marilyn Waring's team aren't being paid, and why not recruit retired women MPs as they are most familiar with Parliamentary processes.
Because they are financially well-insulated from reality. If the bill had gone ahead it would have required increased taxes and hardship for ordinary people, not former politicians with gold-plated super.
Chris - your argument that pay equity is unaffordable was made by the Business Roundtable about the national award system in the late 1980s. The mandatory pay equity agreement review mechanisms to maintain the newly established pay equity rates were similar to the relativity the Arbitation Court imposed on awards during the same period and earlier. The reason that there have been no private sector pay equity claims (outside of private organisations funded by the state) is that under our stuffed up collective bargaining system there is no industry bargaining structures that would allow unions to work their way through the pay equity processes to achieve an outcome for exploited female intensive workforce, such as the ones you mention. The Government's recent actions have all but extinguished a glimmering flame.
It is do disappointing to see that one of the best commentators in New Zealand makes two mistakes: shows no understanding of the numbers and does not see the biggest issue of the amendment.
The budgetary numbers include a retrospective estimation since 2020. They cannot be extrapolated, altogether the question has never been whether the pay equity legislation was affordable.
There are relevant questions, such as why the government should take responsibility for private sector underpayments, but the way how the amendment occurred is no way acceptable.
The amendment retrospectively cancelled out claims. It is unacceptable in modern democracies. Sadly, you haven’t highlighted this …
Yes, saw this coming with CT, as he had a chummy blokey session with Sean Plunket a few weeks ago which included the PE issue. Much commentary on social media has women attacking the move and men supporting it, although there have been obvious exceptions. So I assume the Nats will carve back some of the blokes' vote from ACT. The whole thing was self-evidently unfair and devious to me, and I gather the women in the original claim fronted by Kristine Bartlett now can't reapply till 2027 and are many of them back on the minimum wage.
I rather think, Joanne, that it was burgeoning “unquantifiable contingent liabilities” that forced the Coalition Government's hand.
The aged-care workers quarrel is not with the state, but with their union. The state adjusted their wages once - at a cost in excess of $2 billion. Keeping up the value of that adjustment was the responsibility of their union - i.e. themselves.
Doubt anything forced the Coalition's hand - they would have known about any problems well in advance. The unions could I imagine have been more nimble, but I recall Tracey Martin (who's in the aged care sector now) mentioning ongoing negotiations. She said they started smelling a rat when efforts under the current govt to negotiate were pushed back or cancelled for unexplained reasons. So I imagine the govt identified what they saw as problems, did nothing about them, and then rushed the legislation through to forestall informed discussion.
Oh, I'm sure you're right, Joanne. This was not a last-minute thing. But that in no way detracts from the argument that the fiscal facts set the whole process in motion. And where else was a right-wing government going to lay its hands on $13 billion? By borrowing even more? By raising taxes? Nicola Willis is not Chloe Swarbrick!
Well if they wanted that amount, that was the easy option. One would have to have more details to know what the other options were, in terms of pruning elsewhere or not doing certain things. I'm not someone fussed about more borrowing, as NZ is not particularly overstretched there when international comparisons are made - but that's a whole other topic, I suppose.
Interesting. There is a bit of a debate at the moment in the US about some crowd called the Young Turks which seem to have moved right after being relatively progressive. To the point where they've gone to kiss the Trump ring. Which are number of other journalists have done as well.
I guess you could consider it "journalistic" camaraderie, but Plunkett in his public persona which is all I have to go on, is an arse. Who knows? Apparently Hitler was kind to dogs. :)
I think Plunket reinvented himself as 'the Resistance' 2 or 3 years ago, and is always having to find something to resist, now that his audience would mainly support the current govt. I'm originally from Sydney, and he and Michael Laws remind me of the old-style shock-jocks, Alan Jones and John Laws. Hell, Michael even shares a surname!
Unaffordable always does a lot of work in these types of statements. It's a little bit like getting an assignment back where the professor says "You should have spent more time on.....", Without telling you what you should have neglected to keep to the word limit." I always remember from years ago when the teachers were on strike, one of the slogans, a little long perhaps, was something like "Why do we have to organise a cake stall to buy equipment when the army gets millions spent on it."
Government spending is always a question of priorities. They gave billions of dollars to landlords, but can't give any money to the lowly paid. Which pretty much fits in with their ideology to be fair.
Oh, even when something is looming and we know something bad is coming, it may still be shocking when it comes. But, I don't want to lecture here. I did not expect this from Chris Trotter, especially for the two reasons I wrote: not understanding the numbers (I did not even mention that if we put those into context, it is minuscule compared to the increased defence spending) and the implications of the retrospective aspects.
Chris, the problem is that the 12.8 billion includes underpayment estimates since 2020. We don’t know exactly how much that is, but if the projected period of 4 years and the last period are accounted, the pay equity obligations might be only 1.5 billion per year.
Chris Trotter is a self professed libertarian, who appears to run in libertarian circles. My unsurprising comment refers to his commentary, not the pay equity reform, to be clear.
Indeed, I am, Mountain Tui, a Libertarian Socialist. A rare beast nowadays, I'll concede, but one who finds himself lamenting bitterly the degree to which his old leftist comrades have embraced authoritarianism.
I had hoped that the horrific historical consequences of Authoritarian Socialism might have produced a surge of kindred libertarian spirits on the Left, but, alas, it did not happen.
All I see at the moment is Maoism marching under a Rainbow Flag.
1. Almost 20% of current applicants will no longer to be eligible to enter the pay equity process
2. Hundreds and thousands of Kiwis had years of good faith claims and work blown up - effectively overnight, under urgency and under secrecy - by a govt that had been plotting it since April 2024.
3. New laws put power almost singularly with employers who will have to pay it - and they themselves get to decide if the claims have "merit". If they deem it not to, they can cancel the claim immediately
4. What's certain is at least $13,000,000,000 was stolen from Kiwi workers - men and women in female dominated industries - critical industries such as aged care, hospices, hospitals, schools, labs.
5. Despite having plenty of time the government chose not to undertake a Regulatory Impact Statement - which would have clearly laid out the reasons for and against as well as impacts. They also redacted all human rights impact advice and kept it under secrecy for fear of legal repercussions.
6. Seymour boasted Van Velden "saved the government's budget" - obvious once you see that this move injected $13bn back into a debt level that already exceeds Labour's in less time.
7. The new law also blows up existing review clauses under old pay equity settlements, and disallows any reviews for 10 years.
There is a reason Kristina Bartlett cried upon hearing the news
So, John, it is now right-wing to expose what amounted to a massive transference of wealth from working-class women taxpayers to middle-class women professionals - is that your contention? Personally, I find it easier to describe those defending such a colossal rort as right-wingers. They certainly display the requisite sense of entitlement.
I've re=read the article and nowhere does it mention a "massive transference of wealth". I find the attitude of Mr Trotter to be essentially anti-women. I'm afraid that the disagreement I have with Mr Trotter is too wide to be covered over. It appears that just as Mr Trotter has gradually moved to the right, I have shifted to the left,
But to explain rather than simply abuse, Comrade, let me paraphrase someone ( you can ask if you’re curious).
Your metaphor of ‘sexism’ like all metaphors does not become untrue descriptively, because truth does not apply to it. It becomes imaginatively unconvincing and goes away.
Poets celebrated heroes, then ultimately were reduced to panegyrics on Stalin, Mao, Hitler, the Elector of Saxony, Ms Adern etc
‘Holderlin says of Napoleon: he belongs to his own world, and the poets should leave him there’
Very thin gruel you have to work with. It must be unsatisfying.
It’s perhaps pointless to pick up this dead thread now. But, there is a small laugh to be had here.
You don’t like ‘lifeboats’ as an aphorism? A point to you: it’s a poor one. We all die. There is no lifeboat.
But disgusting behaviour as if there were is a choice.
I don’t like the term ‘leafy suburbs’, which to me is liar language for envy, which like unavoidable death is a real thing. But unlike death involves choice.
Now, is too hard to mention? Too obscure? Too annoying for for those trained to only accept cold spaghetti cut with scissors into tiny lengths?
I believe fools can learn and the wicked ( who say they don’t understand, but do) can be separated from the former.
But instead of Brigadier General ( don’t claim higher) I think of your ilk as Gigadier Brindles. All hat no cattle.
In WWI excitable foolish women ( there have been some ) would present young men not yet signed up to go and get shot in France with a white feather. I can’t think of anything more despicable.
If you didn’t like Mr Trotter’s thoughts, you ‘ll perhaps think better of his after considering mine.
Women, like a field of daffodils, are a gift from God - best admired respectfully from an appropriate distance. Rhetorical and ideological wheelies and handbrake turns in that bank of daffodils are what is really anti- women. However much you claim agency for them while doing so.
(I skate around Mr Trotter dividing them into classes because I’d rather point out your thoughtactions)
Lenin said Communism was Soviet power plus electrification of the masses. Jacking up the power bill and trying to cause splits is bad form, Comrade.
It's bad enough having to put up with the musings of people who don't seem to know when it's time to put down the bong, without you trying to weave me into their weedy fantasies.
John Knox with a twist of lemon ‘The Monstruous Regiment of Women’, with you at the head of said army, like all of your tribe. I don’t pretend to speak for women. I have conversations where possible.
Perhaps more a left leaning conservative; if you insist on categorising people, John.
I'm not convinced that shaming and bullying people into ideological conformity is a good idea. We know what tends to happen when adherence to ideology, in the face of all evidence, becomes paramount.
No point in mandating ideological conformity, and it's a tendency of some leftists. But it's also true of some on the right. It's very easy to get shut down or blocked by opponents - in my case, as a leftist, by at least three loud proponents of free speech. It's to do with intolerance of challenge, not to do with the particular ideology.
Well I was blocked on Fb by my then-MP Simon O'Connor for a crack about the Nats' (married) MP who sent dick-pics to a variety of women: that guy was turfed by Judith Collins. Next election, O'Connor was defeated, but by Brooke van Velden....
Hmmmm. There's a sub-text here which, could I but decipher it, holds out the prospect of generous political reward. Care to surface the submarine, Joanne?
Just calling a spade a spade. You're a disgrace with your apologist musings and you should be ashamed of yourself. Which of course you won’t, being so consumed with your pathetic rhetoric that blames poorly paid people for wanting to be treated equitably. You keep voting ACT Chris
Chris, the rotten truth at the heart of this issue is that employers in both the public and private sectors are making the choice to underpay their female employees, or the class of employees working for them.
What’s the solution?
Personally, I believe it would have been fairer to reduce mens’ pay to achieve equity. This government didn’t have the intelligence to see that that option would have saved twice as much.
I hope you did not see the prev reply as negative. Your words shine a light, which if you will allow me to reword, will use.
Political economy works ‘best’ , when there are a mass of ignorant peasants, and a very few cunning overlords with muscle. From the point of view of cunning overlords, certainly.
The peasants are too knowledgeable and opinionated, the wannabe but has to be said mediocre overlords have proliferated beyond any capacity of the pasture. Don’t fool yourself that the wannabe overlords ( are you one?) include themselves in ‘Pay Equity’ barbed wire enclosures.
‘Pay Equity’ like ‘Leafy Suburbs’ is not ultimately in the interests of poorly paid women or anyone.
Sheep fighting over grass is not dealing to the bloated ranks of the not cunning enough but trying to be.
‘Basil’ is from the Greek for wisdom, from which comes ‘Basileus’, one of the names for their Emperors.
I wish for bad sheep and fewest but good Emperors if there needs to be any.
There are trends that make much of the pay equity legislation appear rather backward looking, women are taking on (taking over?) many formerly male dominated and higher paying sectors. Two thirds of law graduates are now women, and 60% of medical school graduates, for instance.
However women are more inclined, by nature, to go for people orientated work: teaching (especially junior school), nursing, care and social work etc.; careers that are highly valued but not highly paid. There's an obvious disparity there.
Men are more into things (STEM fields are strongly male dominated) and most of the seriously dirty and dangerous work is left to men - forestry work, power linesmen (linespeople?), construction and farm work. Many of them don't get paid very well either; it's complicated.
If you are, indeed, devoted to a socialist revolution, Ju, then behave like a revolutionary. Organise "working people". Otherwise, the term "utter charlatan" is best applied to yourself.
1. Almost 20% of current applicants will no longer to be eligible to enter the pay equity process
2. Hundreds and thousands of Kiwis had years of good faith claims and work blown up - effectively overnight, under urgency and under secrecy - by a govt that had been plotting it since April 2024.
3. New laws put power almost singularly with employers who will have to pay it - and they themselves get to decide if the claims have "merit". If they deem it not to, they can cancel the claim immediately
4. What's certain is at least $13,000,000,000 was stolen from Kiwi workers - men and women in female dominated industries - critical industries such as aged care, hospices, hospitals, schools, labs.
5. Despite having plenty of time the government chose not to undertake a Regulatory Impact Statement - which would have clearly laid out the reasons for and against as well as impacts. They also redacted all human rights impact advice and kept it under secrecy for fear of legal repercussions.
6. Seymour boasted Van Velden "saved the government's budget" - obvious once you see that this move injected $13bn back into a debt level that already exceeds Labour's in less time.
7. The new law also blows up existing review clauses under old pay equity settlements, and disallows any reviews for 10 years.
There is a reason Kristina Bartlett cried upon hearing the news
In the sense that it was allocated to the group in budget calculations and then taken for other purposes. Seymour boasted about the amount., along the lines of taking it from one group and giving it back to Willis and the govt, as a great achievement for ACT and his Deputy Brooke vV. Dame Judy McGregor (former EEO Commissioner who worked on the original legislation) called it a 'heist'. But hey, another middle-class woman....
Well ... yeah ... she is. What's more, she's made a career out of fronting for the sort of elite feminism that celebrates the number of women in the boardroom, but has considerably less to say about the lives of the women tasked with cleaning the corporate offices on the floors below it.
In the talk where she called the thing a 'heist', she also recalled going undercover as a care-worker in a rest-home while working on pay equity, and said she found it was the hardest work she'd ever done.
The fact that there is pay inequity is clear, however, how a badly drafted piece of legislation aimed at correcting this, and rubber stamped by all except Act is not clear. Was there not enough thought that went into this hugely important legislation, and if not why not. Being a National supporter it seems inconceivable to me they agreed to this idea in the first place. In simple terms the new laws would direct employers to pay women equal pay to their male counterparts and have us, the tax payer pay the difference. Really. What could possibly go wrong. As it’s turned out 13 billion is what could go wrong. I don’t understand the legislation but how long was this arrangement supposed to go on, Indefinitely?. The inability of the state to carry the can for the vast amounts of money required over time is not hard to see, and that fact has finally dawned on this current National government who have had the balls to do something about it.
I don’t propose to Know the solution to this, but maybe some sort of tax incentives to employers who fairly complete pay equity claims. Perhaps Marilyn Waring could use her supposed intelligence and support for women to come up with something that won’t send the country to bankruptcy. That would be nice.
Gosh - great commentary, Chris. You clarified some things for me which I didn't seem to getting from anywhere else.
This article ignores quite a few facts:
1. Almost 20% of current applicants will no longer to be eligible to enter the pay equity process
2. Hundreds and thousands of Kiwis had years of good faith claims and work blown up - effectively overnight, under urgency and under secrecy - by a govt that had been plotting it since April 2024.
3. New laws put power almost singularly with employers who will have to pay it - and they themselves get to decide if the claims have "merit". If they deem it not to, they can cancel the claim immediately
4. What's certain is at least $13,000,000,000 was stolen from Kiwi workers - men and women in female dominated industries - critical industries such as aged care, hospices, hospitals, schools, labs.
5. Despite having plenty of time the government chose not to undertake a Regulatory Impact Statement - which would have clearly laid out the reasons for and against as well as impacts. They also redacted all human rights impact advice and kept it under secrecy for fear of legal repercussions.
6. Seymour boasted Van Velden "saved the government's budget" - obvious once you see that this move injected $13bn back into a debt level that already exceeds Labour's in less time.
7. The new law also blows up existing review clauses under old pay equity settlements, and disallows any reviews for 10 years.
There is a reason Kristina Bartlett cried upon hearing the news
Fine - let's roll back what the govt has done, then. Just one question - who will pay for it, and how?
The same money tree where willis found 13 billion for tax cuts, 3 billion for landlords, 8 billion for new helicopters and rockets, and 3 billion and counting for cook strait ferries
Not to forget the 8% payrise mps will get over this parliamentary term
You can only spend money once. Therefore you have to either cancel existing expenditure or raise taxes to afford the $13 billion, mostly to well paid middle class professionals.
In fact it would have been to many middle class men as well as women. The biggest group no longer qualifying are secondary teachers. The reason being that they are below to new threshold of 70% but were above the old threshold of 60%.
Ironically I wrote a long reply and accidentally pressed forward, and lost it. I'll respond again tomorrow. Cheers.
Superb. The grim reality of Pay Equity if it went ahead as opposed to the moral posturing of extraordinarily well-heeled, taxpayer-funded elite women is spelled out clearly here.
Well the govt should have been upfront about spelling out the issues and proposing proper solutions. The women on Marilyn Waring's team aren't being paid, and why not recruit retired women MPs as they are most familiar with Parliamentary processes.
Because they are financially well-insulated from reality. If the bill had gone ahead it would have required increased taxes and hardship for ordinary people, not former politicians with gold-plated super.
So the govt said. Govts always have a choice of what to spend money on.
Chris - your argument that pay equity is unaffordable was made by the Business Roundtable about the national award system in the late 1980s. The mandatory pay equity agreement review mechanisms to maintain the newly established pay equity rates were similar to the relativity the Arbitation Court imposed on awards during the same period and earlier. The reason that there have been no private sector pay equity claims (outside of private organisations funded by the state) is that under our stuffed up collective bargaining system there is no industry bargaining structures that would allow unions to work their way through the pay equity processes to achieve an outcome for exploited female intensive workforce, such as the ones you mention. The Government's recent actions have all but extinguished a glimmering flame.
Oh dear Chris,
It is do disappointing to see that one of the best commentators in New Zealand makes two mistakes: shows no understanding of the numbers and does not see the biggest issue of the amendment.
The budgetary numbers include a retrospective estimation since 2020. They cannot be extrapolated, altogether the question has never been whether the pay equity legislation was affordable.
There are relevant questions, such as why the government should take responsibility for private sector underpayments, but the way how the amendment occurred is no way acceptable.
The amendment retrospectively cancelled out claims. It is unacceptable in modern democracies. Sadly, you haven’t highlighted this …
Best wishes
Laszlo
Yes, saw this coming with CT, as he had a chummy blokey session with Sean Plunket a few weeks ago which included the PE issue. Much commentary on social media has women attacking the move and men supporting it, although there have been obvious exceptions. So I assume the Nats will carve back some of the blokes' vote from ACT. The whole thing was self-evidently unfair and devious to me, and I gather the women in the original claim fronted by Kristine Bartlett now can't reapply till 2027 and are many of them back on the minimum wage.
I rather think, Joanne, that it was burgeoning “unquantifiable contingent liabilities” that forced the Coalition Government's hand.
The aged-care workers quarrel is not with the state, but with their union. The state adjusted their wages once - at a cost in excess of $2 billion. Keeping up the value of that adjustment was the responsibility of their union - i.e. themselves.
Doubt anything forced the Coalition's hand - they would have known about any problems well in advance. The unions could I imagine have been more nimble, but I recall Tracey Martin (who's in the aged care sector now) mentioning ongoing negotiations. She said they started smelling a rat when efforts under the current govt to negotiate were pushed back or cancelled for unexplained reasons. So I imagine the govt identified what they saw as problems, did nothing about them, and then rushed the legislation through to forestall informed discussion.
Oh, I'm sure you're right, Joanne. This was not a last-minute thing. But that in no way detracts from the argument that the fiscal facts set the whole process in motion. And where else was a right-wing government going to lay its hands on $13 billion? By borrowing even more? By raising taxes? Nicola Willis is not Chloe Swarbrick!
Well if they wanted that amount, that was the easy option. One would have to have more details to know what the other options were, in terms of pruning elsewhere or not doing certain things. I'm not someone fussed about more borrowing, as NZ is not particularly overstretched there when international comparisons are made - but that's a whole other topic, I suppose.
See my comments above - they secretly plotted this since April 2024, and the idea was floated to Willis in December 2023.
Trotter's article is so influenced by libertarianism friendship, he's forgotten which side he should be sitting on.
Interesting. There is a bit of a debate at the moment in the US about some crowd called the Young Turks which seem to have moved right after being relatively progressive. To the point where they've gone to kiss the Trump ring. Which are number of other journalists have done as well.
I guess you could consider it "journalistic" camaraderie, but Plunkett in his public persona which is all I have to go on, is an arse. Who knows? Apparently Hitler was kind to dogs. :)
I think Plunket reinvented himself as 'the Resistance' 2 or 3 years ago, and is always having to find something to resist, now that his audience would mainly support the current govt. I'm originally from Sydney, and he and Michael Laws remind me of the old-style shock-jocks, Alan Jones and John Laws. Hell, Michael even shares a surname!
Unaffordable always does a lot of work in these types of statements. It's a little bit like getting an assignment back where the professor says "You should have spent more time on.....", Without telling you what you should have neglected to keep to the word limit." I always remember from years ago when the teachers were on strike, one of the slogans, a little long perhaps, was something like "Why do we have to organise a cake stall to buy equipment when the army gets millions spent on it."
Government spending is always a question of priorities. They gave billions of dollars to landlords, but can't give any money to the lowly paid. Which pretty much fits in with their ideology to be fair.
Define "lowly paid".
Is it disappointing if it's unsurprising?
Oh, even when something is looming and we know something bad is coming, it may still be shocking when it comes. But, I don't want to lecture here. I did not expect this from Chris Trotter, especially for the two reasons I wrote: not understanding the numbers (I did not even mention that if we put those into context, it is minuscule compared to the increased defence spending) and the implications of the retrospective aspects.
If you take a look, FPC, I think you'll find that the projected increase in defence spending is less than $13 billion.
Chris, the problem is that the 12.8 billion includes underpayment estimates since 2020. We don’t know exactly how much that is, but if the projected period of 4 years and the last period are accounted, the pay equity obligations might be only 1.5 billion per year.
How on earth is that unaffordable???
Chris Trotter is a self professed libertarian, who appears to run in libertarian circles. My unsurprising comment refers to his commentary, not the pay equity reform, to be clear.
Indeed, I am, Mountain Tui, a Libertarian Socialist. A rare beast nowadays, I'll concede, but one who finds himself lamenting bitterly the degree to which his old leftist comrades have embraced authoritarianism.
I had hoped that the horrific historical consequences of Authoritarian Socialism might have produced a surge of kindred libertarian spirits on the Left, but, alas, it did not happen.
All I see at the moment is Maoism marching under a Rainbow Flag.
yeah, I got that!
thanks anyway!
👍 spot on! This should go to MSM to clarify the facts for everyone.
Here are the facts:
1. Almost 20% of current applicants will no longer to be eligible to enter the pay equity process
2. Hundreds and thousands of Kiwis had years of good faith claims and work blown up - effectively overnight, under urgency and under secrecy - by a govt that had been plotting it since April 2024.
3. New laws put power almost singularly with employers who will have to pay it - and they themselves get to decide if the claims have "merit". If they deem it not to, they can cancel the claim immediately
4. What's certain is at least $13,000,000,000 was stolen from Kiwi workers - men and women in female dominated industries - critical industries such as aged care, hospices, hospitals, schools, labs.
5. Despite having plenty of time the government chose not to undertake a Regulatory Impact Statement - which would have clearly laid out the reasons for and against as well as impacts. They also redacted all human rights impact advice and kept it under secrecy for fear of legal repercussions.
6. Seymour boasted Van Velden "saved the government's budget" - obvious once you see that this move injected $13bn back into a debt level that already exceeds Labour's in less time.
7. The new law also blows up existing review clauses under old pay equity settlements, and disallows any reviews for 10 years.
There is a reason Kristina Bartlett cried upon hearing the news
Another article by Chris Trotter that gives the lie that this man is from the left, He is inching closer to avertise himelf as a man from the right,
So, John, it is now right-wing to expose what amounted to a massive transference of wealth from working-class women taxpayers to middle-class women professionals - is that your contention? Personally, I find it easier to describe those defending such a colossal rort as right-wingers. They certainly display the requisite sense of entitlement.
I've re=read the article and nowhere does it mention a "massive transference of wealth". I find the attitude of Mr Trotter to be essentially anti-women. I'm afraid that the disagreement I have with Mr Trotter is too wide to be covered over. It appears that just as Mr Trotter has gradually moved to the right, I have shifted to the left,
And why not, John? It's a free country!
But to explain rather than simply abuse, Comrade, let me paraphrase someone ( you can ask if you’re curious).
Your metaphor of ‘sexism’ like all metaphors does not become untrue descriptively, because truth does not apply to it. It becomes imaginatively unconvincing and goes away.
Poets celebrated heroes, then ultimately were reduced to panegyrics on Stalin, Mao, Hitler, the Elector of Saxony, Ms Adern etc
‘Holderlin says of Napoleon: he belongs to his own world, and the poets should leave him there’
Very thin gruel you have to work with. It must be unsatisfying.
Death comes for us all, Comrade. Try not to elbow your way to a lifeboat and a better seat on that.
And ( this is typical) use the young and unaware of perfidy to achieve it.
What the fucking fuck are you fucking talking about, Kevin?
Lifeboat? Perfidy?
Dude, you need to take a break.
It’s perhaps pointless to pick up this dead thread now. But, there is a small laugh to be had here.
You don’t like ‘lifeboats’ as an aphorism? A point to you: it’s a poor one. We all die. There is no lifeboat.
But disgusting behaviour as if there were is a choice.
I don’t like the term ‘leafy suburbs’, which to me is liar language for envy, which like unavoidable death is a real thing. But unlike death involves choice.
Now, is too hard to mention? Too obscure? Too annoying for for those trained to only accept cold spaghetti cut with scissors into tiny lengths?
I believe fools can learn and the wicked ( who say they don’t understand, but do) can be separated from the former.
Is this all too many words? Too literary?
I don’t think so.
And you were doing so well, Kevin.
As you wish
But instead of Brigadier General ( don’t claim higher) I think of your ilk as Gigadier Brindles. All hat no cattle.
In WWI excitable foolish women ( there have been some ) would present young men not yet signed up to go and get shot in France with a white feather. I can’t think of anything more despicable.
And you differ in kind, how?
If you didn’t like Mr Trotter’s thoughts, you ‘ll perhaps think better of his after considering mine.
Women, like a field of daffodils, are a gift from God - best admired respectfully from an appropriate distance. Rhetorical and ideological wheelies and handbrake turns in that bank of daffodils are what is really anti- women. However much you claim agency for them while doing so.
(I skate around Mr Trotter dividing them into classes because I’d rather point out your thoughtactions)
Lenin said Communism was Soviet power plus electrification of the masses. Jacking up the power bill and trying to cause splits is bad form, Comrade.
I've never read such sexist clap-trap in my life. A field of daffodils indeed! I would indeed be surprised if Mr Trotter agreed with you.
Oi! You just watch yourself, sunshine.
It's bad enough having to put up with the musings of people who don't seem to know when it's time to put down the bong, without you trying to weave me into their weedy fantasies.
John Knox with a twist of lemon ‘The Monstruous Regiment of Women’, with you at the head of said army, like all of your tribe. I don’t pretend to speak for women. I have conversations where possible.
I think I understand you. You are of the tribe of all Chiefs and no Indians. G.B. Shaw’s ‘Modern Major Generals’
Perhaps more a left leaning conservative; if you insist on categorising people, John.
I'm not convinced that shaming and bullying people into ideological conformity is a good idea. We know what tends to happen when adherence to ideology, in the face of all evidence, becomes paramount.
The truth is not tribal.
No point in mandating ideological conformity, and it's a tendency of some leftists. But it's also true of some on the right. It's very easy to get shut down or blocked by opponents - in my case, as a leftist, by at least three loud proponents of free speech. It's to do with intolerance of challenge, not to do with the particular ideology.
And yet, Joanne, you're still here.
Intolerance should be made of sterner stuff!
Well I was blocked on Fb by my then-MP Simon O'Connor for a crack about the Nats' (married) MP who sent dick-pics to a variety of women: that guy was turfed by Judith Collins. Next election, O'Connor was defeated, but by Brooke van Velden....
Hmmmm. There's a sub-text here which, could I but decipher it, holds out the prospect of generous political reward. Care to surface the submarine, Joanne?
Nah, no subtext, but it's Tough being in Tamaki (old enough to remember Muldoon...)
What utter libertarian, apologist, bollocks Trotter.
Yet another rational argument from my friend Mike!
Just calling a spade a spade. You're a disgrace with your apologist musings and you should be ashamed of yourself. Which of course you won’t, being so consumed with your pathetic rhetoric that blames poorly paid people for wanting to be treated equitably. You keep voting ACT Chris
If you cannot conduct yourself civilly here, Mike, then you had better go somewhere else.
Chris, the rotten truth at the heart of this issue is that employers in both the public and private sectors are making the choice to underpay their female employees, or the class of employees working for them.
What’s the solution?
Personally, I believe it would have been fairer to reduce mens’ pay to achieve equity. This government didn’t have the intelligence to see that that option would have saved twice as much.
Well, Labour could have done that when in power. But they did not. Why do you suppose.
And if they ever get power again, do you think they will?
Would then not reducing men’s wages be a proof of their dumbness?
Or, reducing men’s wages be proof of the Make NZ like Albania under Hoxha collective intelligence?
If your boss, if you have one, cuts your wage, will you be glad and think well of this?
Mr Basil Brush
I hope you did not see the prev reply as negative. Your words shine a light, which if you will allow me to reword, will use.
Political economy works ‘best’ , when there are a mass of ignorant peasants, and a very few cunning overlords with muscle. From the point of view of cunning overlords, certainly.
The peasants are too knowledgeable and opinionated, the wannabe but has to be said mediocre overlords have proliferated beyond any capacity of the pasture. Don’t fool yourself that the wannabe overlords ( are you one?) include themselves in ‘Pay Equity’ barbed wire enclosures.
‘Pay Equity’ like ‘Leafy Suburbs’ is not ultimately in the interests of poorly paid women or anyone.
Sheep fighting over grass is not dealing to the bloated ranks of the not cunning enough but trying to be.
‘Basil’ is from the Greek for wisdom, from which comes ‘Basileus’, one of the names for their Emperors.
I wish for bad sheep and fewest but good Emperors if there needs to be any.
There are trends that make much of the pay equity legislation appear rather backward looking, women are taking on (taking over?) many formerly male dominated and higher paying sectors. Two thirds of law graduates are now women, and 60% of medical school graduates, for instance.
However women are more inclined, by nature, to go for people orientated work: teaching (especially junior school), nursing, care and social work etc.; careers that are highly valued but not highly paid. There's an obvious disparity there.
Men are more into things (STEM fields are strongly male dominated) and most of the seriously dirty and dangerous work is left to men - forestry work, power linesmen (linespeople?), construction and farm work. Many of them don't get paid very well either; it's complicated.
You're a now deficit hawk? Go into the dustbin of history lol
It would be helpful, I believe, Ju, if you were to make an appointment to see Dr. Arithmetic.
2 + 2 do NOT equal 13,000,000,000.
Chris: Enough with identity politics we should return to class politics
Also Chris: It’s too expensive to redistribute wealth they helped create to working people
Utter charlatan!
If you are, indeed, devoted to a socialist revolution, Ju, then behave like a revolutionary. Organise "working people". Otherwise, the term "utter charlatan" is best applied to yourself.
I have no objection to the Pay Equity issue being checked up on ... but under urgency and the arrogant secrecy is unacceptable .
Stop treating us , the voters, like children who don't understand !!
See above. There's a lot this article omits.
Quite so Chris. But the left no longer speaks even for women workers - stopped speaking for men quite some time ago.
The Democratic Party in the USA is experiencing identical difficulties in relation to what used to be be its rock-solid working-class base.
This article ignores quite a few facts:
1. Almost 20% of current applicants will no longer to be eligible to enter the pay equity process
2. Hundreds and thousands of Kiwis had years of good faith claims and work blown up - effectively overnight, under urgency and under secrecy - by a govt that had been plotting it since April 2024.
3. New laws put power almost singularly with employers who will have to pay it - and they themselves get to decide if the claims have "merit". If they deem it not to, they can cancel the claim immediately
4. What's certain is at least $13,000,000,000 was stolen from Kiwi workers - men and women in female dominated industries - critical industries such as aged care, hospices, hospitals, schools, labs.
5. Despite having plenty of time the government chose not to undertake a Regulatory Impact Statement - which would have clearly laid out the reasons for and against as well as impacts. They also redacted all human rights impact advice and kept it under secrecy for fear of legal repercussions.
6. Seymour boasted Van Velden "saved the government's budget" - obvious once you see that this move injected $13bn back into a debt level that already exceeds Labour's in less time.
7. The new law also blows up existing review clauses under old pay equity settlements, and disallows any reviews for 10 years.
There is a reason Kristina Bartlett cried upon hearing the news
Stolen? How do you steal from an undifferentiated mass something that has never been theirs?
Denied them the opportunity of discovering whether something might have been theirs? Yes. Stolen? I think not.
In the sense that it was allocated to the group in budget calculations and then taken for other purposes. Seymour boasted about the amount., along the lines of taking it from one group and giving it back to Willis and the govt, as a great achievement for ACT and his Deputy Brooke vV. Dame Judy McGregor (former EEO Commissioner who worked on the original legislation) called it a 'heist'. But hey, another middle-class woman....
Well ... yeah ... she is. What's more, she's made a career out of fronting for the sort of elite feminism that celebrates the number of women in the boardroom, but has considerably less to say about the lives of the women tasked with cleaning the corporate offices on the floors below it.
In the talk where she called the thing a 'heist', she also recalled going undercover as a care-worker in a rest-home while working on pay equity, and said she found it was the hardest work she'd ever done.
She has just risen in my estimation. That was well done. (Although, to be fair, Barbara Ehrenreich did it first.)
Legislation and news suggests otherwise. The only opinion is my judgement of the actions
Did you have to spam your opinions in multiple places in this topic? And I use the term "opinion" deliberately.
I think we were all able to read what you said the first time.
Legislation and news suggests otherwise. The only opinion is my judgement of the actions
The fact that there is pay inequity is clear, however, how a badly drafted piece of legislation aimed at correcting this, and rubber stamped by all except Act is not clear. Was there not enough thought that went into this hugely important legislation, and if not why not. Being a National supporter it seems inconceivable to me they agreed to this idea in the first place. In simple terms the new laws would direct employers to pay women equal pay to their male counterparts and have us, the tax payer pay the difference. Really. What could possibly go wrong. As it’s turned out 13 billion is what could go wrong. I don’t understand the legislation but how long was this arrangement supposed to go on, Indefinitely?. The inability of the state to carry the can for the vast amounts of money required over time is not hard to see, and that fact has finally dawned on this current National government who have had the balls to do something about it.
I don’t propose to Know the solution to this, but maybe some sort of tax incentives to employers who fairly complete pay equity claims. Perhaps Marilyn Waring could use her supposed intelligence and support for women to come up with something that won’t send the country to bankruptcy. That would be nice.
A good, fair and well-balanced post thanks Chris.
And my thanks to you, Peter.