Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): I rise to take a call on behalf of the Green Party in relation to the Vote Finance Estimates. I want to speak about the issue of women's pay and the fact that in the Estimates I am struggling to find where the Government's commitment to paying women fairly shows up. I see that there is an increase in unappropriated Budget initiatives identified in this vote but it is not allocated and there is no transparency around it. I see there is discussion about a contingency for mental health but I do not see a discussion around a contingency to pay women fairly.This is a really really important issue for us as a country. The fight for equal pay for work of equal value started over 124 years ago with the suffragettes. Next on their agenda after getting women into Parliament was to get women's work fairly recognised and fairly paid. It is a struggle that continues. We have a gender pay imbalance now of between 12 and 14 percent between men's and women's hourly earnings. We know that traditional women's work is undervalued.This is something that requires a political solution and commitment. In front of the Government at the moment I know of the community mental health pay equity claim; the early childhood teachers and staff pay equity claim; part-time secondary schools teachers' pay equity claim; district health board (DHB) nurses midwives and healthcare assistants' claim; education support workers' claim; teacher aides' claim; the DHB clerical admin staff in the South Island's claim; and Oranga Tamariki social workers' claim. I do not see this in the contingency or in any of the budget showing up in this vote when there is significant financial liability that is surely coming and we know that these many thousands upon thousands of women are being significantly underpaid at the moment.This has a real-life implication for these women and I am concerned that it is actually not showing up in Vote Finance in explicit contingency because the Government introduced legislation yesterday that is going to make it so much harder for those women to get fairly paid for the work that they do and their contribution to our society. Yesterday the Government introduced legislation that raises the threshold to be able to establish the merit of a claim and it will now require expert evidence about historic socio-economic and labour market factors before a claim can be heard. This will apply to these cases that I have listed which have already been lodged. So the Government is changing the goalposts mid-game on women to make it harder for them to get paid fairly.The labour market factors in there may just sound like a phrase but my understanding is that the Government's official understanding of that is that it means that a job that is not in the public sector or not primarily funded by the Government has had their pay rate set by the market so therefore it is not possible that they are undervalued despite the experience of history proving that to be wrong. So New Zealand women really really really need to be paying attention to this because it is rolling back our rights and our protections.It will also create a restriction on access for women to get information to be able to establish a claim. You can only get access to information after you have already proven the merit—the threshold of which has been raised—to be able to take a claim. It will also give employers considerable discretion to delay responding and notifying claims—much tougher than our legal process at the moment. It will also then—the hierarchy of comparatives—overturns the court ruling in support of the Kristine Bartlett case and makes more hurdles for women to jump over. Now the legislation will create new numerical definitions of what is female-dominated and male-dominated and surprisingly the ratios are different—ha ha!—so it makes it just so much harder.Then the legislation is also removing the right to back-pay if the case goes to court. It is removing a legal entitlement that is available for any other person. This is deeply deeply worrying.