The coalition Govt just doesn't care about women

Newsroom

21-05-2025

Analysis: In the 1970s, women workers the world over came together for the Wages for Housework campaign. Beginning in Italy and spreading globally, the campaign focused on the invisible and unpaid labour of housework primarily done (then and now) by women.
The domestic sphere, and the domestic labour required for society to function, became visible through mass feminist mobilisation. But these feminists – housewives, mothers, waitresses, and a myriad of other workers – weren't just trying to make domestic labour visible.
Neither were they just focused on showing the direct relationship between gendered oppression and labour relations. Crucially, they were demanding the wages they were due for all of the work they had been doing for free.
The demands of this movement are useful in illustrating why people are rightfully angry about the chopping of the pay equity claims for these so-called Budget savings. Women's liberation movements in 2025 should be far past having to fight for equitable pay in waged work, let alone having to fight to even seek legal recognition of pay inequity.
Basic recognition of inequitable pay for the labour that is paid is the very least the Government could do for women. Market-traded and paid labour would not be possible without the care work done (with and without wages) by women. The work historically and presently assigned as women's work is systemically devalued, often unpaid, and almost always underpaid.
The Government's dismissal and belittling of women workers is the latest in a long history of ignoring the life-making and society-sustaining labour of women. Like some sort of cruel joke, the pay equity claims were dismissed within days of Mother's Day and May Day.
Mothers, women, and workers – and crucially mothers and women as workers – are struggling each day in Aotearoa New Zealand to navigate gender injustices. We live in a country that is far from any sort of women's liberation or even gender equity.
Women comprised 90 percent of job redundancies during the Covid pandemic, and their experiences of intimate partner violence surged.
Women did the majority of unpaid labour caring for children and the household throughout the lockdowns, often holding down paid work at the same time.
Out of OECD countries, New Zealand ranks among the very lowest for paid parental leave entitlements and has some of the most expensive childcare.
In 2024, a two-parent household in Aotearoa New Zealand spent 37 percent of their combined income on early childhood education fees. If parents can't afford childcare, it is usually women who leave paid work to do childcare – for free – thus losing job opportunities and their source of independent income.
National campaigned on 21,000 families being $250 a fortnight better off under its government, yet fewer than 50 families have received this promised amount.
Our statistics for sexual and domestic violence are stark. For incarcerated women, the numbers are even worse. At least 75 percent of women prisoners have been victims of intimate violence, and almost 70 percent of these are wāhine Māori.
Not unrelatedly, their right to vote was removed shortly before the pay equity announcement. These examples barely scratch the surface of the structural gender oppression faced by women in Aotearoa New Zealand, and they are all connected to the ability to access material resources.
We can better shape our feminist politics – and our society – if we consider the lessons from the Wages for Housework movement: labour relations and gender oppression are deeply entwined in our society.
That is, the primary way we access money and resources in society is to work. If the labour that our society makes women's work is paid less or not at all, then women have less access to money and resources.
They therefore have less power and freedom in society. The correlation between wages, work, gender and freedom will be true so long as capital, not life, is at the centre of our economy.
It is not a coincidence that these gendered matters have remained off the radar (or actively made worse) under the coalition Government. The cutting of pay equity claims is the coalition once more loudly proclaiming they do not care about women, let alone their health, safety, and financial independence.