Stuart Nash and why more women in politics is the antidote to male stupidity
Sunday, 26 July 2026
Andrea Vance is national affairs editor for The Post and Sunday Star-Times.
OPINION: Two things can be true at once. Stuart Nash is a sexist oaf. And everyday women can feel a bit cheated by the parental leave enjoyed by MPs.
The late-night text spree from former Labour minister turned NZ First candidate Stuart Nash – decrying Napier MP Katie Nimon as the “laziest MP” for taking time off to have a baby – was predictably boorish.
Nimon, who stepped back from parliamentary sitting duties while continuing her local electorate work to care for a newborn, deserves zero blame.
We want women to have children while serving in politics. From Whetu Tirikatene-Sullivan to Ruth Richardson, Julie Anne Genter, Willow-Jean Prime, Nicola Grigg and Jacinda Ardern, normalising motherhood in Parliament is progress hard-won over a century.
Read more:
Chris Hipkins takes aim over NZ First’s ‘oral sex’, ‘masturbation’ jibes
No apology from Stuart Nash following ‘sexist’ text and resignation
In the fallout of Nash completing his career-ending hat-trick, a third truth emerged. Men can make absolutely everything – even a genuinely critical issue about working mothers – about their dicks.
Nash had barely resigned his candidacy when Labour leader Chris Hipkins seized the mic, not to refocus the nation on parental leave inequality or sustained family budget pressure, but to score political points.
Pointing out Christopher Luxon’s double standards over crude comments by Winston Peters and Shane Jones isn't wrong, but his instinct to drag the debate straight down into shouting matches over “knee pads,” oral sex jibes, and locker-room insults was predictably male.
When a woman MP takes leave to care for a newborn, it is branded as laziness by an old-boy rival. And when the men respond, it devolves into a gutter fight over whose side said the crudest thing.
Either way, the actual lived reality of working mothers got swallowed up by their noise.
Women MPs are not the problem. The collective gag reflex from working women this week wasn’t about Nimon, nor the tone-deaf male posturing. Rather, it’s about the staggering double standard of parliamentary entitlements.
MPs operate under a system that shields them from the financial consequences most parents face. They get a full parliamentary salary, taxpayer-funded accommodation support, and the ability to step back from the chamber while maintaining their electorate responsibilities.
Contrast that with the average Kiwi mum.
The 26-week Paid Parental Leave (PPL) system is considered bottom-of-the-barrel among developed nations. While most OECD countries tie parental leave payments to previous earnings, we rely on a flat-rate cap that forces many working parents to take pay cuts during their baby's first months.
Worse still, while Australia and many OECD countries have introduced paid “use-it-or-lose-it” partner leave to encourage shared caregiving, New Zealand remains an outlier with no paid partner leave scheme.
When National was last in government, Finance Minister Bill English used a rare financial veto to block extending paid parental leave to 26 weeks. (It was later passed by Labour.)
So while ordinary mums and dads face capped payments, rising household costs and difficult choices about when they can afford to return to work, politicians enjoy a system that insulates them from many of those pressures.
The Nash controversy is only the latest flashpoint in a broader frustration among women who feel the Government does not understand the pressures shaping their daily lives.
The Post/Freshwater Strategy polling numbers from June show a government haemorrhaging support among female voters, particularly those in their prime working and parenting years.
The Government holds a comfortable lead among men, topping 52%. But among women aged 35 to 54 - the mothers, mortgage-holders, and primary caregivers keeping households afloat - that collapses into the low thirties.
National’s own party vote among middle-aged women has plunged below 20%, completely eclipsed by Labour in the mid-forties.
Remarkably, NZ First is an unlikely anchor, holding around 13% female support. In MMP arithmetic, that’s a lifeline. Strip away NZ First, and the National-ACT block collapses to a miserable 27% among women.
This demographic divide is down to policy decisions that hit female voters where it hurts most, paired with a focus on culture war distractions that alienate them.
While men in the 35–54 bracket tend to prioritise macroeconomic messaging, nearly 50% of those women rank healthcare as a top concern (compared to barely 30% of men). Perceived underfunding in frontline hospital services directly undermine their trust in the Government's competence.
At the same time, working families’ finances are strained. Three-quarters of middle-aged women rank the cost of living as their number one worry, and nearly a quarter report they could not cover an unexpected bill.
And yet, when the Government needed to make its budget numbers stack up, it chose to balance the ledger on the backs of low-paid, female-dominated workforces. Many women still see the scraping back of pay equity progress as a profound betrayal.
Rather than addressing healthcare and household financial distress, the Coalition has burnt political capital on divisive pet projects like removing comprehensive sex and relationship guidelines from the national curriculum and omitting crucial discussions on consent and relationship safety.
It axed jobs and funding for family and sexual violence service providers in their first budget. And it backed rage-bait distractions, like NZ First’s imported crusade to write “biological female” into the statute books. Even a proposal to improve sexual assault laws last week got drowned out by partisan bickering.
And no wonder the Government keeps misreading the country. Today, barely 30% of National’s caucus are women. NZ First has only two. ACT, with almost half its caucus female, is the exception.
Only seven Cabinet ministers are women. Worse, the Minister for Women, Nicola Grigg, sits outside Cabinet altogether. When decisions on health funding, tax cuts, or pay equity are debated at the top table, the minister explicitly tasked with advocating for women isn't even in the room.
The only way out of this trap is by stacking electorate seats and list rankings with women. That’s bad news for senior men at the top of National’s list who would have to surrender real estate to women like Nancy Lu.
But lads, think of it as basic political risk management.
Women MPs rarely engage in the kind of loutish, ego-driven self-destruction that repeatedly sees male politicians disgraced in the headlines. When was the last time you saw a female politician fantasise about blowing up a ministry, reduce people to their genitals, call a worker a loser or insult a fellow foreign minister as a “Chinese puppet”?
Elevating women isn’t just progressive policy or identity politics. It’s also a useful defence against male political stupidity.
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