Logie Jan: General Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Logie Jan: General Debate 
[Sitting date: 01 August 2012. Volume:682;Page:4172. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
JAN LOGIE (Green) 
: 
 That was the perfect segue into acknowledging our home insulation programme. Thank you Maggie Barry—that was beautiful. Today I would like to speak about the status of women in New Zealand and that is particularly coming on the back of the draft report back from the United Nations Committee on the Convention of the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women commonly called CEDAW. The Government acknowledged this report back in a release and talked about the UN commending New Zealand women’s progress with more progress to be made. It went on to state: “The Committee has expressed its appreciation for the comprehensive report on women in New Zealand presented by the delegation and acknowledged New Zealand for implementing a number of positive legislative and policy reforms for the advancement of women” and it went on to itemise three positive things. 
Well I read the report and to be fair to the Government I actually found seven things that it could have acknowledged that were positive. That is pretty good eh? You know—seven. It is just a shame that there were over 50 concerns and recommendations. If you are looking on the scale of commendation and work to be done I think it falls on the side of “work to be done” team. This Government has a lot of work to be done to progress the rights of women. In fact the rights of women under this Government are regressing. 
I would just like to remind my colleagues if you can see this beautiful picture which may be a little hard to see. When we wonder why the rights of women may be regressing I remember back to the day after the election and the front page of the  
Dominion Post 
. Here we have the National Party in caucus albeit non-officially. Here we have John Key Bill English Steven Joyce Murray McCully and Gerry Brownlee. This is the face of this Government and may I say it is not women-friendly. This Government has been consistent with that image in this term. It has not been women-friendly in its progress. In fact only 5 percent of women in this country feel as if they have equality—5 percent. 
Maggie Barry 
: How do you know? 
JAN LOGIE 
: Well there has been some quite good research actually Ms Barry. According to a  
New Zealand Herald  
survey last year 65 percent of women felt they were actively discriminated against in their workplace. 
Women’s unemployment has increased. This is most notable in Christchurch where I think it would not be going too far to say there is actually a bit of a crisis in women’s unemployment with over 60 percent of women being outside the workforce in Christchurch. There is an increasing reliance as stated in the report that came out today of women using credit and relying on credit debt to be able to get through which is really worrying because they cannot afford to get by in any other way. There has been an increase in the gender pay gap and women are three times as likely to be working multiple jobs compared with men. Women are working the same hours as men now but 65 percent of those hours are unpaid and 90 percent of sole parents in this country are women. So this is the status of women in this country which this Government thinks the UN has commended it on. You know economics are fundamental to women’s ability to achieve agency in this world. 
Another aspect that is really important for women’s ability to act in this world is to be free from violence and what has this Government done around that? Well it has no plan in relation to family violence. It has shut down the unit within the Ministry of Social Development. There has not been a report from the task force for family violence since last year in June. It has changed the police reporting of statistics in a way that the Minister for Social Development did not even know about so it is no longer able to actually even monitor the problem. It has cut funding—the funding for the women’s refuges is in a bit of a crisis I think you could say. So altogether this Government and the face of this Government have a lot more work to do.