National blows up its support from women with pay equity debacle

Thursday, 8 May 2025

The coalition government's surprise move to introduce emergency legislation to make it harder for employees and unions to raise a pay equity claim has drawn condemnation from the political left, and unions.

Janet Wilson is a regular opinion contributor and a freelance journalist who has also worked in communications, including with the National Party.

OPINION: If the fomenting debacle that is the pay equity row proves anything, it’s the Napoleon Bonaparte quote that, “in politics, stupidity is not a handicap”.

How else to explain the wiping off the books of 33 women’s pay equity claims which fully advantages one coalition partner – ACT, which has no female support to worry about, at the expense of another – National, whose female support is historically rock bottom and about to fall further because of its handling of the pay equity issue?

ACT’s Brooke van Velden may have made the arrow, but it will be Finance Minister Nicola Willis who will have to fire it in another fortnight – and receive all outrageous fortune’s slings and arrows in return.

Which goes some way to explaining Tuesday’s spectacle of Willis being flanked in barbed formation on Parliament’s tiles by four female colleagues, a self-professed feminist, forced to deny that this extraordinary move was all about making the Budget figures stand up, while across the lobby that’s exactly what David Seymour was saying.

While Willis claimed that she was “comfortable” with van Velden’s “very principled case”, you could almost hear the pitter-patter of centre-right female voters deserting.

Nicola Willis has put a brave face on the pay equity decision, but will have to wear much of the flak personally, writes Janet Wilson. (File photo)

Both parties have handed a golden opportunity to Labour and the unions. Expect them to mine it for all it’s worth over the coming months, as a phalanx of teacher aides, carers and midwives rally publicly and are trotted out to decry - quite rightly - how the coalition denied them justice.

It’s hard to know if this act of political expediency is the product of cynicism or idiocy, but once more Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has fallen prey to his junior coalition partner’s whims and in the process stands to lose the gender divide while looking penny-pinching and mean-spirited in the process.

Roy Morgan’s April poll, released on Tuesday, explains why this issue is a win-lose for him and his party when it comes to the female vote.

National has the support of just 28% of women and ACT 4.5%. Add age to the equation and the contrast is clear; under 20% of 18-49-year-old women support National while only 1% in the same category support ACT; while female voters 50+ stand at 34.5% for National and 8% for ACT.

Brooke van Velden can witter on all she likes about “the (Equal Pay) act not working as intended” and the previous government’s amendments creating collective bargaining issues, but she has conflated legal claims and produced changes that don’t take pay equity back to 2017 - and the landmark settlement between the government and health care workers that year - but many years before that.

Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety Brooke van Velden, who has led the scrapping of existing pay equity legislation, won’t care about the voter impact because working women aren’t her constituency, writes Janet Wilson.

And, in making the claims retrospective and under urgency, without consultation with the hundreds who’ll be affected, let alone allowing officials to provide a Regulatory Impact Statement, the coalition Government is complicit in pulling together a dirty little deal that saves it billions while denying working women their day in court.

Not that van Velden will care, because working women aren’t her constituency, but Nicola Willis should because she symbolises the very centre-right vote her party once stood for.

In another fortnight she’ll stand in Parliament to deliver an anorexic Budget that has delivered what she promised but with a political price that must be paid and is yet to be extracted.

It’s a far cry from the days when her old boss John Key won the female vote across successive elections. A 2011 poll revealed that 49% of women picked Key as their preferred prime minister - a figure today’s party can only dream about.

Those women didn’t consist entirely of pearl-swathed rural women from the provinces or Adrienne Winkelmann-clad urban ladies-who-lunch. They were the grafters and battlers, the women working nightshifts in hospitals and aged-care homes or teaching those in need.

This week’s decision to deny them justice will see the trickle of female voters leaving the party, a process that began in 2020, turn into a torrent.

Nicola Willis may believe that this was a dead political rat that had to be swallowed. That it was simply a matter of putting her hard-hat on and relying on the myopia of the electorate to forget.

But potentially she’s handed the opposition a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get their teeth into an issue that defines them, while, at the same time farewelling a rapidly disappearing voting bloc her party can’t afford to lose.

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