The Equal Pay Amendment Bill passed its final reading in Parliament last night, locking in changes that will raise the threshold for new pay equity claims and bring 33 existing claims to a halt.
Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Brooke van Velden appeared on TVNZ’s Breakfast to defend the legislation, saying the government remains committed to a fair and sustainable pay equity system. But unions have called the move an attack on women, and a petition opposing the changes has already gained more than 31,000 signatures.
Van Velden said the government wanted a system that could genuinely identify and address sex-based discrimination. “We do respect and value women who are working,” she said. “But we want everybody to know that when we are lodging equity claims, we can genuinely, hand on heart, say that we’ve got evidence of sex-based discrimination and undervaluation.”
She said the previous regime blurred the lines between pay equity and other industrial matters. “Over the last few years, there’s been a conflation between collective bargaining, collective agreements, and pay equity settlements,” she said. “Some of those clauses even required inflation to be taken into account — that’s not what pay equity is about.”
The new legislation raises the threshold for initiating a claim from 60 percent to 70 percent female-dominated workforces. When asked how many of the 33 existing claims would no longer meet the new bar, van Velden said, “I can’t give you a specific figure, but my officials have advised a vast majority would still meet those early entry thresholds.”
Van Velden said the government wanted to avoid running two systems at once. “We want to ensure that there is one system going into the future, so that we didn’t have two systems progressing with different laws at the same time,” she said. “That’s why we’ve drawn a very clear line in the sand and said these will be the new rules going forward.”
She also addressed concerns from unions and frontline workers that years of work on their claims would be lost. “That doesn’t mean necessarily people will have to start right from scratch,” she said. “There’ll be a lot of work that can still be used for those claims. We’ll just have to use them under new thresholds now.”
Van Velden pushed back on accusations that the overhaul was a cost-cutting exercise driven by the upcoming Budget, though she acknowledged the financial impact. “This will have a serious reduction in the cost to government — that will be in the billions,” she said. “But that has not been the motivating factor for me.”
She said her interest in reforming the pay equity system began before discussions on budget savings. “I made it very clear to the Prime Minister when I entered this term of government that I was interested in looking into the Equal Pay Act and the pay equity system,” she said.
Van Velden also addressed concerns about retrospectivity in the legislation. “The only retrospectivity in the bill is to do with the review clauses in the settled claims,” she said. “It’s to ensure that when we’re reviewing claims into the future, we can have a time period that actually allows us to detect sex-based undervaluation — not inflation or CPI.”
She defended the speed at which the legislation was passed under urgency, saying consistency was critical. “We needed to do this quickly to have that new system in place,” she said. “It is to ensure that there is consistency across the system going into the future — that we didn’t have multiple claims going through under different regimes.”
