Changes to pay equity laws ‘flagrant and significant abuse of power’, say former MPs
Tuesday, 24 February 2026
A group of former MPs from across the political spectrum who investigated the Government’s planning and enacting of the Equal Pay Amendment in 2025 have found it was “a flagrant and significant abuse of power”.
The changes, made in May last year, saw live pay equity claims dumped, the threshold for future ones narrowed, and sparked fury from unions for creating billions in savings for the Government at the expense of hundreds of thousands of low-paid women.
The committee, the People’s Select Committee on Pay Equity group led by former National Party MP Professor Marilyn Waring, held three months of hearings and pored over 1390 submissions on the law changes, which in essence placed more stringent limits on the criteria for bringing a pay equity claim.
Its full report is being released this morning.
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The committee, which also included Jo Hayes, Jackie Blue and Belinda Vernon, former Labour Party MPs Lianne Dalziel and Lynne Pillay, former Labour Party ministers Nanaia Mahuta and Steve Chadwick, former Greens MP Sue Bradford and former New Zealand First MP Ria Bond, have ultimately sided with the unions’ conclusion on the law changes.
The committee found breaches of a range of existing legislation in the Equal Pay Amendment Act and the way it was introduced. Laws and principles the committee believes it has broken include those that underpin the Regulatory Standards Act, the New Zealand Bill of Rights, the Human Rights Act, the UN women’s Convention, and the Conventions on the Rights of People with Disabilities, among others.
In essence, the committee found the retrospective cancellation of existing rights and remedies was a serious violation of the rule of law, and came after employers, charitable organisations and unions spent millions of dollars and thousands of hours, with other resource consequences, on the 33 cancelled claims that were axed by the law change.
The committee found that no evidence was produced in any of the accessible Cabinet documents, in press statements or in the parliamentary debates, to support the demolition of what it called “the world’s leading pay equity regime”.
After Workplace Minister Brooke van Velden’s rushed the reform of pay equity laws through Parliament under urgency, Finance Minister Nicola Willis defended the changes, saying adhering to the previous law would have cost the government billions of dollars - a cost “far, far” greater than had been signalled at the time Pay Equity Laws were passed in 2020.
The committee, however, found no budget savings were made in cutting pay equity – the funds were reallocated to other government expenditure and Coalition Government priorities.
One of the main points of contention was that of “comparators”. Van Velden said the framework for comparing different kinds of work to assess whether a job was equal to another was too loose, or simply not realistic, decrying the fact there had been “librarians who’ve been comparing themselves to transport engineers”.
She introduced a “hierarchy of comparators” instead, favouring comparators to be chosen within the same industry or occupation making the pay equity claim.
The committee excoriated the move, saying “no minister, or briefing bureaucrat, and no speaker in the parliamentary debate, demonstrated any knowledge of how comparators (librarians with fisheries officers)and factor scoring work.
“The committee found that it is a sophisticated, highly rigorous process of co-research between worker and employer negotiators. The only evidence of attempts to game the system the committee could see were in the behaviours of government agencies.”
The full report is published on the payequity.org.nz website.