Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): E Te Tiamana tēnā koe ki a koutou huri noa i Te Whare tēnā koutou katoa.[Greetings to you Mr Chairman and to you all throughout the Chamber.]We still have much work to do before women in this country are safe free and able to access all of their rights. I would like to speak tonight about Vote Women and the ability of the Ministry for Women to support the much-needed changes for women in this country. Last week has been described fairly I think as a shitter of a week for women in New Zealand. It was a week where a high-profile business leader Kevin Roberts said that it was not a problem that there are not more women in leadership and that the reason for our absence from senior positions in business is our lack of vertical ambition. It was a week where a judge and a lawyer in a sexual assault case considered it OK to ask the complainant whether her no" really meant no and would not any red-blooded male do the same. It was a week when a report of an alleged sexual assault by professional rugby players was followed by a range of leaders all around this country very publicly questioning the morality and decision making of the woman complainant. It was a week where everyday sexism was on glaring display all over our media. But the real problem is not that last week was a bad week but that this was an expression of the everyday realities for many many women in this country. The gender pay gap is widening. The private sector continues to lock women out of seats on their boards and a disturbing number of businesses continue to exclude women from senior management in their workplaces. And our conviction rate for sexual and domestic violence remains painfully and life-threateningly low. So what does the budget for the Ministry for Women tell us about how seriously this Government takes the freedom security and rights of women in this country? By budget the Ministry for Women is the smallest ministry in the country. Next is the Ministry for Pacific Peoples which has almost twice the budget of the Ministry for Women and a budget that I would argue is also woefully inadequate. So the ministry representing more than half the population—half the population who are still under-represented in this Parliament on boards in business in the media pretty much everywhere except in tertiary education outcomes and low-paid jobs; half the population is underpaid and undervalued and under attack in our homes and in our workplaces—this ministry has the smallest budget of all. Vote Prime Minister and Cabinet has a budget 15 times that of Vote Women. The only vote smaller than Vote Women is for the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. I guess we cannot expect anything else when the Minister for Women does not even sit in Cabinet—a decision made by this National Government. The Ministry for Women is the Government's principal adviser on achieving better outcomes for women. It should be conducting the research and holding the expertise to inform us of the impact of policy on women and also what initiatives beyond what the Government is doing it could do to improve the status of women. But the truth is that the ministry is so horribly under-resourced at the moment that it is excluded from even key initiatives. The Government has been having a working group working on equal pay principles and the Ministry for Women was not even included."