Delahunty Catherine: General Debate 
Delahunty Catherine: General Debate 
[Volume:665;Page:12987] 
CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green) 
: 
 I move  
That the House take note of miscellaneous business 
. Women do not have pay equity yet and it is not improving. Even if the Minister of Women’s Affairs prefers the yearly New Zealand Income Survey to the quarterly employment survey the picture remains bleak. In the 21st century as of today the pay gap is 12.8 percent. When the Government axed the pay and employment equity unit it ensured that years of work that substantiated discrimination was not going to be implemented. The problem the Greens have with using the New Zealand income survey data is that it is an annual figure based only on April to June in any given year. The value of the quarterly Statistics New Zealand data is that it is based on payroll and it is every quarter so we can speak authoritatively about a pattern—a pattern that is getting worse. 
A fair society is better for everyone and it must start with the basics such as honouring Te Tiriti o Waitangi and ensuring that 50 percent of the population has equal pay and pay equity. It is disturbing that we are still litigating an issue so fundamental in terms of human rights. Last year the Minister of State Services Tony Ryall told this House and the media that because of the recession we cannot afford pay equity for women. I ask what the excuse is this year. Apparently we are sort of out of the recession but women should still be patient while we build more motorways and somehow that will help to give us pay equity. How? Without a rigorous commitment from the Government and a requirement in law to make specific gender pay gaps public in both the public sector and private sector we are living a lie of a free and equal society and we do not even know the scale of the lie. 
Many young women whose mothers fought for the Equal Pay Act are deeply shocked when they find that pay equity is not a given and that the gap is 12.81 percent and rising. They have logically assumed that all the rhetoric around equal opportunity included economic equity. But au contraire the occupations where pay inequity remains are not just the caring professions which the Minister of Women’s Affairs has kindly told women they should abandon for jobs with a higher average pay; they are also unequal for women tertiary graduates who are now 6.8 percent behind their male colleagues at the end of their first year of work. That statistic about the tertiary graduates comes from the New Zealand Income Survey which is favoured by the Minister and it is relevant from that research because it is an annual statistic. 
So far the Government programme for addressing the gender pay gap is quoting selective statistics and getting women on boards. I am all for getting women on boards but for reasons other than to do with pay equity. Where is the evidence that getting more women on boards results in higher pay for the bulk of women workers? With the best will in the world the board employs the chief executive officer and can adjust his or her pay but the board does not set the pay rate for whole groups of workers and in many industries there is no board. There is no evidence that helping individual women to succeed impacts on the pay of marginalised groups of employees such as social workers and school support staff let alone marginalised women from Maori and Pacific nations. 
Everyone deserves decent work and a living wage—everyone. And we deserve to be treated with respect. A widening pay gap short-changes more than half the population and their dependent children. Often when we see women’s pay we need to remember that those women are the supporters of the next generation. We can turn this situation around with better leadership and with better law. It is not good enough to just continue ignoring the findings of the pay equity inquiry. I am drafting a member’s bill to improve the situation because a fair society is better for everybody. If we continue to treat the gender pay gap as a side issue as an irrelevancy or as something that can be dealt with by boards and by flexible working hours—both issues are important but completely irrelevant to the issue of closing the gender pay gap—we will make no progress as a country. All of us—men women and children—benefit when women who hold up half the world receive what we are due. At the moment there is a gap in the public sector so I urge this Government to listen seriously when we talk about legislation and to support gender equity because at the moment it is doing nothing about it.