Moroney Sue: General Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Moroney Sue: General Debate 
[Sitting date: 19 September 2012. Volume:684;Page:5378. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
SUE MORONEY (Labour) 
: 
 Well 119 years ago today New Zealand women won the right to vote and we were the first in the world to win the right to vote so I think it is timely to ask what Kate Sheppard would think. What would she think of question time today with John Key slipping and sliding all over the place in order to defend John Banks? He is a Prime Minister who cannot even be bothered to read a police report. What would Kate Sheppard think of a Prime Minister running this country who is pretending now that he cannot even read? He cannot even read about what his Ministers have been up to and he is not taking any responsibility. I do not think that that is what Kate Sheppard had in mind when she cycled all around Canterbury getting signatures on that petition to uphold our democracy. I think she would be ashamed of the performance from the Prime Minister today. 
I also think she would be ashamed of that Government the National Government blocking the extension to paid parental leave. I do not think that is what she had in mind either when she did all of that work led those women and very good men to ensure that women had the right to vote in New Zealand. I am pretty sure that she would be ashamed that a Minister of Women’s Affairs in the year 2012 spoke against and voted against extending paid parental leave to 6 months and that this Government thinks it is OK that women for financial reasons have to leave their 14-week-old babies behind while they go back into the paid workforce. I do not think that is the vision that Kate Sheppard had for this country. 
I also think that she would be ashamed as the United Nations was actually about this Government’s record in closing down the pay and employment equity unit. National had barely taken charge of the Treasury benches when one of its first acts was to close down that opportunity for pay and employment equity to be addressed in this country. As a report of the Government Administration Committee recently noted the only work now being undertaken by that Government to address the gender pay gap of 12 percent in this country is to say: “Well women just have to go off and get men’s jobs.” 
That is the only answer that the Government has and this is what the multiparty select committee had to say about it in its report  
2010/11 financial review of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs 
: “We are concerned that the ministry has ceased work on pay equity in those occupations and professions dominated by women. We were informed that the ministry’s only strategy for closing the gender pay gap is to encourage women into male-dominated occupations and professions.” Well that just lacks the sort of vision that Kate Sheppard and her contemporaries had 119 years ago—that the only way forward for women in terms of closing the gender pay gap in this country would be to go and do men’s jobs. 
Then there is the rate of female unemployment. This year it reached 7.2 percent under that Government. That is the highest rate since the last time we had a National Government in place. It is the highest rate of female unemployment since 1998. The other thing that the Government did was reduce its ambition for having women on boards. Under Labour we had a target of having 50 percent women membership on State sector boards by 2012. But this lazy Government would not go down that path and has reduced it to 45 percent by 2014. 
Then there is the issue of how the Government treats education. The Government got the class sizes issue wrong because it does not understand how strongly women feel about education for their children—not only having an education and access to it but the quality of the education for their children. The Government also does not understand the importance to New Zealand women of early childhood education and the priority that that should be. Again that was one of the first areas that this Government cut into. In Budget 2010 the Government cut $400 million out of the early childhood education budget. The Government not only cut it out of the early childhood education budget but it did it in a way that would affect women’s employment because it cut the funding for gaining 100 percent qualified staff in early childhood education. 
Hon Anne Tolley 
: This member never gets it right. 
SUE MORONEY 
: That Minister did it when she was in charge. Being a qualified teacher in early childhood education is a great career pathway for women and it was specifically the funding that underpinned it that the Government cut.