Reject Pay Equity at your Peril

🥇 In 1893, New Zealand became the first country in the world to give women the vote

🥇 In 2017, we delivered one of the biggest wins for pay equity in our history

🥇 In 2020, we enshrined the right to pay equity into law

💣 On May 7, 2025, we were dragged backwards

✍ The reform is an “enormous backwards step” that will take the country back, not pre 2017, but pre the 1972 Pay Equity Act

⚖️ Pay equity isn’t just about equal pay for the same job - it’s about recognising that work in female-dominated industries (like aged care, nursing, education, social work) has been systemically undervalued for generations

💡 Thanks to Kristine Bartlett’s fight - and the court rulings that followed - 55,000 aged care workers finally received the pay they deserved in 2017. By 2020, the law reflected that principle for all. Over 100,000 women have since benefited

🫸 But yesterday, all current claims were extinguished. New barriers were introduced that will make it nearly impossible for many women to bring a new one. This will affect hundreds of thousands - mothers, daughters, cousins, colleagues

🫷 This is not just policy. It’s personal. It's economic injury. And it is a betrayal of the very values New Zealand was once proud to lead on

🙏 By cancelling the claims, the Government would likely save billions over the Budget forecast period, although the PM said the issue was about workability of the law, and not Budget savings. But ACT leader and associate finance minister David Seymour credited van Velden with having “saved the taxpayer billions, she’s saved the Budget” 😱 

🎖️ We were first in votes. 🎖️ First in women in Cabinet. 🎖️ First in female Prime Ministers.

🤔 Now we’re first to unravel a decade of work on valuing women’s labour

Kristine Bartlett said: “It’s all gone.”

And she’s right - unless we fight again

There will be a response. There must be

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