Next time I hear one of our government politicians banging on about New Zealand being the first country in the world to give women the vote, it will sound very hollow.  

Because while that might be something to crow about, what the Government’s doing in relation to equal pay for women, isn’t.   

You’ve got to, at the very least, give Brooke van Velden credit for taking one for the team yesterday and announcing that the Government is pulling the plug on any current pay equity claims and making it harder for any future claims to get through.   

And that’s exactly what it’s going to do. We know that because not only is the Workplace Relations Minister saying that the pay equity rules are “muddied and unclear”, the Prime Minister is also saying that these changes could save the Government “billions of dollars”. 

That’s because the majority of the women affected by this are government workers. But they won't be the only ones.  

There may be some people who like the sound of saving billions of dollars. Probably most of them blokes. But I’m picking the majority of people will find that kind of sales job appalling.  

I do.  

Especially when these changes aren’t going through the usual processes. There’s no select committee process. Within hours of Brooke van Velden making the announcement, it was all underway under urgency.  

And it’s going to mean that current pay equity claims in the system will be dropped and must be started again under the new rules, which are going to make the whole thing tougher and save us billions.  

The government’s reasoning —or the reasoning it’s talking about publicly, anyway— is that pay equity claims have been going through without what it describes as “strong evidence”.  

Apparently, after the announcement, ACT MPs were crowing that Brooke van Velden had single-handedly rescued this month’s budget with these changes.  

National MPs pushed-backed on that. With Finance Minister Nicola Willis fronting media —flanked by fellow female National MPs Judith Collins, Erica Stanford, Louise Upston and Nicola Grigg— denying that this is being done to balance the Government’s books.  

She said that the Government believes in the principle of pay equity when women can prove that they have been disadvantaged.  

She said: "What this is about is ensuring we are clear, transparent, and fair to ensure that where those claims are made they relate to gender-based discrimination and that other issues to do with pay and working conditions are raised during the normal employment relations process."  

Which is a fair and reasonable thing to say. But what isn’t fair and reasonable is the way the Government is going about this – leaving out the select committee process and rushing it through.  

Until the Government can convince me otherwise, I’m believing the ACT MPs who obviously think that this is all about saving money and nothing more. 

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