12-05-2025
Willis responds to Vance celling her a c**t
Nicola Willis writes:
Having the C-word directed at me by a journalist in a mainstream publication wasn't on my bingo-list for Mother's Day 2025. Nor was being accused of 'girl-math'.
But there you have it, that's what was thrown at me and my female colleagues in a recent newspaper column as hopelessly devoid of facts as it was heavy on sexist slurs.
It is astonishing that a journalist would not just write a column accusing female Ministers of being c**ts, but that the newspaper would publish it.
It could only happen against National and ACT Ministers. Can you imagine if a journalist had written a column describing either of the past two female Prime Ministers as c**ts. Every other media outlet in NZ would have it as their front page story.
Also consider the hypocrisy that media have all these articles decrying sexist attacks on female MPs from people on social media, and they then publish this column! Their credibility is zero.
Nicola doesn't respond to the insults with insults of her own, but facts:
First, the right to equal pay remains as it ever was. Equal pay has been protected in New Zealand law since 1973. It's the simple concept that a woman doing the same job as a man should get the same pay. Nothing has changed there. I'd resign my job before I'd let that happen.
Second, no woman has had her pay cut. Twelve existing pay equity settlements including for nurses, social workers, midwives, teacher aides, school librarians, care and support workers and a range of other female-dominated workforces remain. Those settlements resulted in higher pay for tens of thousands of women, and they continue to be funded by the Government, at a cost of around $1.8 billion a year. Our Government values those workers and none of them should be scared into thinking their pay is at risk. It's not.
So no change to equal pay, and no unwinding of the 12 settlements already made.
In 2020, a full three years later, Labour finally got around to putting its own, very loose, regime into law. Unfortunately, like almost everything Labour got its hands on, the system got way out of whack and became completely unaffordable; admin workers were being compared with civil engineers; social workers were being compared with detectives; and librarians were being compared with fisheries officers. Multiple employers were being joined to claims and some had dozens of very different jobs in scope.
What started as a pay equity regime had become a Trojan Horse for a multi-billion dollar grievance industry driven by public sector unions. It had departed a very long way from issues of sex-discrimination.
Sounds like it was done by the same people who delivered Kiwibuild and Te Pukenga!
What the Government did last week was put in law a much more workable pay equity regime that focuses squarely on the actual issue of sex-based discrimination, setting out a transparent process through which employers and employees can negotiate the question of equal value.
And one that won't bankrupt the country by comparing admin staff to engineers.
Yes, fixing Labour's flawed regime has released billions of dollars that we can now invest in this and future Budgets. Yes, that will mean there is more funding available for things like cancer drugs, new schools, new hospitals and other much needed initiatives. Yes, that means our Government won't have to tax and borrow even more to balance the Budget. You can call that 'girl-math', I call it facing-up to financial reality.
I'm a feminist, I wear the badge proudly and I've upheld those values throughout our Cabinet's consideration of pay equity issues. I'm up for a debate on how to define sex-based discrimination, but I'm not up for misleading rhetoric and seeing women MPs having their gender weaponised against them and their views dismissed. All our daughters deserve better.
I really am astonished that Stuff published the column. We all know that a column that used the same wording against prominent Labour MPs would have been killed long before publication.
