Source: Radio New Zealand
Former National MP Marilyn Waring. Supplied
A group of former female MPs has called changes to the pay equity law a “flagrant and significant abuse of power”.
The unofficial People’s Select Committee was formed in response to the Equal Pay Amendment Act, passed under urgency last year.
The law cancelled 33 claims from female-dominated workforces which sought to prove they were underpaid in comparison to similar male-dominated industries, and raised the threshold for future claims.
The committee, led by former National MP Marilyn Waring and made up of 10 cross-party former MPs, is releasing a report on the changes on Tuesday, after reading nearly 1400 submissions, and holding three months of hearings.
It said the government had violated the rule of law in retrospectively cancelling existing rights and remedies.
“Funded sector employers, charitable organisations and unions spent millions of dollars and thousands of hours, with other resource consequences, on the 33 cancelled claims,” the committee said.
Ministers worked on the pay equity amendment in secret until May when the changes were announced and passed under urgency – no Regulatory Impact Statement was done.
The committee described the processes of planning for and enacting the legislation as a “flagrant and significant abuse of power”.
It also found the law breached the Bill of Rights, the Human Rights Act, and the Regulatory Standard Act principles, as well as a number of international conventions that New Zealand was party to, including International Covenants on Civil and Political, and Economic and Social Rights, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.
Deputy Prime Minister Nicola Willis told reporters last year that tightening the scheme amounted to about $12.8 billion in savings in total over the next four years.
The committee disputed this could be classified as budgetary savings, because it said the funds were reallocated to other government expenditure and coalition government priorities.
Committee members also said it could find no evidence in available Cabinet documents or parliamentary debates to support scrapping the scheme.
“No minister, or briefing bureaucrat, and no speaker in the parliamentary debate, demonstrated any knowledge of how comparators 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.”
Minister for Workplace Relations Brooke van Velden. RNZ / Mark Papalii
In a statement, Minister for Workplace Relations Brooke van Velden said members of the public – including former MPs – were free to hold their own opinions and publish their own material.
“As I said at the time, equal pay is here to stay, and a pay equity system remains.
“The new system is already processing claims under the new law. The government has made the law simpler and more robust.”
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
