Ex-National MP Marilyn Waring leads 'select committee' on pay equity changes

Monday, 26 May 2025

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Labour leader Chris Hipkins are accusing each other of lying about the pay equity changes.

Former National MP Marilyn Waring has launched a “people’s select committee” with a cross-party group of women former MPs, to hold hearings on the Government’s controversial changes to the pay equity regime.

Waring, who famously clashed with Prime Minister Robert Muldoon in the 1980s and has since been a leading policy researcher on women’s work, announced the public hearings on the pay equity changes at the Women’s Suffrage Room in Parliament on Monday morning.

“I just have a lot of difficulty, as a researcher, in seeing pieces of legislation of such magnitude passed without evidence before the House and before Parliamentarians,” Waring said.

Joining Waring for the people’s committee would be former National MPs Jackie Blue, Jo Hayes, and Belinda Vernon, former NZ First MP Ria Bond, former Labour MPs Lianne Dalziel, Steve Chadwick, Nanaia Mahuta and Lynne Pillay, and former Green MP Sue Bradford.

The committee planned to hold its first public hearing on August 11 in Wellington.

Policy scholar and former MP Professor Marilyn Waring announces a co-ordinated response to the Government’s Equal Pay Act changes from a group of former women MPs from across the political spectrum.

Groups including Business NZ ‒ which Waring said had changed its position on pay equity despite an absence of evidence explaining this ‒ would be invited to submit. The committee would not be requesting Workplace Relations Minister Brooke van Velden appear.

“If she wants to come and talk to us, great.”

Van Velden, in a statement, gave no indication she would present to the public forum. She said the public, including former MPs, were welcome to hold meetings, but the Government would not change the law now the new system was in place.

“Current parliamentarians have opportunity to question the Government and ministers. I have presented evidence during Committee of the Whole House, responded to oral and written parliamentary questions, answered at annual review hearings and we will receive further questions in scrutiny week shortly.”

Finance Minister Nicola Willis similarly said the law had been passed and would not change.

“People are free to share their views on it and have debate, but the Government has made up its mind on the issue.

“We have very clear evidence that the costs for that scheme had blown out considerably.”

Earlier this month the Government, under parliamentary urgency, scrapped 33 pay equity claims and overhauled the regime designed to lift the pay of historically underpaid sectors staffed by a majority of women workers, a move which wiped $12.8 billion in forecast costs off the 2025 Budget.

Though backed by the unions, Waring said the committee was not a campaign against the pay equity changes and she did not know the former MPs’ own position on the changes.

Waring with Fleur Fitzsimons, national secretary of the Public Service Association, and Martin Robinson, board chair of Whānau Manaaki, a non-profit association for ECEs across the country.

Instead, she said it was to complete the task of hearing expert evidence and public submissions on the changes in the manner that was not done in Parliament, due to the changes being made under urgency.

Waring said evidence for the change had “not been brought together in a consolidated, rigorous way for people to make their own decisions, as opposed to just listening to a lot of kind of high flying cliches”.

“For example, I do not know what the mechanics of trying to achieve a pay equity settlement are, and we've heard lots of easy headlines of comparing this group with that group.

Fitzsimons said the PSA would be supporting the group’s “important work”.

“We’re going to investigate each amended section in terms of the evidence that is in front of us and report on that. So our work is confined … to what material should have been before Parliament before those changes were made.”

Waring said she began making calls about forming the committee on May 7, and within five days she had assembled the group.

The committee would be assisted by Amy Ross, the former pay equity lead at the Public Service Commission, and Bessie Sutherland, a former librarian at Parliament.

They were discussing with Speaker Gerry Brownlee about holding the first public hearing at Parliament.

Public Service Association national secretary Fleur Fitzsimons said the committee was “important work” and the union would be supporting it, including by bringing forward workers’ whose pay equity claims had been cancelled.

She said this would not have been needed if the Government had not “committed constitutional vandalism and wage theft on a national scale”.