Labour MP's pay transparency bill advances with National's support
On Wednesday night, her Employment Relations (Employee Remuneration Disclosure) Amendment Bill passed its second reading, thanks to National voting alongside the three Opposition parties.
The bill would ensure that pay secrecy clauses, which prevent employees from discussing their salaries with colleagues, would no longer be enforceable, meaning employers could not take legal action if an employee talked about pay.
There will be cases where pay differences were justifiable (such as different skillsets or qualifications), but the bill's intention is to shed light on situations where they were unjustifiable.
Camilla Belich's pay transparency bill advanced with National's support.
Australia, the UK, the EU and some US states have either banned pay secrecy clauses or made them unenforceable.
Belich said people already talk about their pay with colleagues, but stopping businesses from taking action against them for it would keep New Zealand up with the times.
'It takes away the right for them to take action and discipline their employees when they talk about their pay. We know this happens already at the moment. So there's definitely a common sense, pragmatic element to this bill,' she told RNZ.
'It's making sure that usual human behaviour and workplace discussions are not something that people are disciplined for.'
Six National MPs took calls on the bill at its second reading.
Every one of them referenced the gender pay gap and were hopeful the bill would be a mechanism to reduce it.
Banks Peninsula MP Vanessa Weenink, who gave National's first contribution to the bill, told RNZ the party supported the bill because it had a 'proud history' of driving down the gender pay gap.
'We know that pay transparency is a key factor for driving down the gender pay gap. International studies have shown that when that legislation has been brought in, that it's measurable in the amount of reduction in the pay gap. So we really want to see that continue to fall down.'
An Opposition bill on pay transparency is winning support from across the aisle. Photo / 123rf
Belich said it was great to see continued support for the bill.
'I was heartened by the comments made in the house, where the National Party members said they would support this right through. I hope that's what they do,' she said.
'I think given the current context, where we've had significant changes to our pay equity regime, where women have had the ability to take pay equity claims severely curtailed, these types of bills, which make small changes to make a more transparent workforce, are increasingly important.'
Weenink said the 'optics' around pay equity had nothing to do with National's support for the bill, as the party had also supported the bill at its first reading, well before the pay equity changes were announced.
'It's just our ongoing commitment to doing what we can to make the workplace fair and improve productivity. How I see it is that if you can see you're being paid less than someone else who's working right beside you, doing the same job, then that's going to massively reduce your motivation, isn't it?'
She did not see it as National handing Labour a win, but rather an opportunity to put party politics aside and improve things for New Zealanders.
The bill passed its first reading in November.
Sometimes, a bill is given cautious support at its first reading, in order to send it to select committee to see if the kinks are ironed out.
The Education and Workforce Committee received 225 submissions on the bill, the majority in support.
Belich said a number of changes were made to the bill through the select committee process, including making it clear there would be no requirement to make a disclosure.
'It's still something that can be a private matter. It's only if you wish to that you shouldn't be disciplined for the desire to actually discuss that. So that was probably the major change through select committee.'
She said there were some definitional tidy-ups, including making it clear what the definitions of remuneration and detriment were, as well as ensuring the bill would not be retrospective.
Some privileged or commercially sensitive information, for example, owner benefits for a business owner who also receives an employee salary, would also be excluded.
Despite the changes, Act and New Zealand First continued to oppose the bill.
Act said it would allow people to breach agreements they had signed up to, for which there should be consequences.
'Once you've signed something, you are supposed to oblige [sic] to the conditions that you have signed for. If you do not agree to something in the agreement that you have signed, then there is an opportunity for you to go back and renegotiate the terms and conditions that you don't agree to,' Parmjeet Parmar told the House.
'But you don't just breach the agreement and say that there should be no consequences for that.'
New Zealand First's Mark Patterson said it 'runs smack into the brick wall' of the party's belief in the 'sanctity' of contract law.
'While this bill doesn't prevent pay secrecy and that's still able to be incorporated within a contract, it does limit an employer's ability to enforce it, and that goes against what a contract should be,' Patterson said.
Belich said she found the arguments against the bill 'interesting,' as it was specifically designed so businesses would not need to spend money to change their contracts.
'If we'd said you cannot have a pay secrecy clause in your contract, or pay secrecy clauses are now illegal to have even in an employment document, there'd be thousands of employment agreements throughout the country that would need to be changed, that would cost money, that would take legal advice. It would be a burden on business.'
The bill still needs to go through the Committee of the Whole House stage for any further tidy-ups, and then a third reading, though Weenink did not foresee any major changes.
'It took a long time to bash some of these things out, and I think we've got it to a really good place.'
Acknowledging National is a 'broad church' and there had been strong discussions about the bill amongst the caucus, she did not expect any changes to the party's position at the third reading.
– RNZ
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NZ Herald
7 hours ago
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Supermarkets plead guilty to pricing errors, Consumer NZ calls for penalties
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Scoop
8 hours ago
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Representation Versus Reality; Reaching A Low Point
Have you noticed how, in New Zealand news items and weather reports, Nelson and Marlborough are called the "top" of the South Island rather than the 'north' of that island. We also get phrases such as the "lower North Island" and the "upper North Island". And New Zealand's narrators regularly refer to New Zealand as being at the "bottom of the world". These phrases reference the (conventionally portrayed) map of the world, not the world itself. Rotate the map 180°. Nelson-Marlborough will still be the north of the South Island. But they will now be at the bottom of the top island! (And noting that the Roof of the World is the Tibetan Himalayas, not the North Pole. The South Island is at a higher latitude than the North Island; eg 44°S rather than 38°S. And Upper Egypt is south of – lower than? – Lower Egypt.) Another really annoying aspect of a similar problem – in this case, the problem of colloquial jargon – is the propensity of financial journalists to refer to 'up' as 'north', as in "the stockmarket is heading north". An even more egregious example I heard on RNZ on 29 May (Reserve Bank cuts OCR 25 basis points) was the Acting Reserve Bank Governor (Christian Hawkesby) referring to the 'North Star' as the 'target' of arcane monetary policy. Especially problematic was when he said "if you knew your North Star was much further south". A bit 'woo woo' new age, if you get my meaning. Is the Reserve Bank trying to navigate the stormy seas where myth and reality meet, as in the search for Moby Dick? (Irish navigators 4,000 years ago could always return from a trip to Spain by following the North Star. Being in the 'lower world', Maui and Kupe faced more complex problems.) Does the Reserve Bank make policy decisions based on Tarot Cards? Indeed, astrology did guide policy formation for most of human history. The lesser problem is that 'bottom' has a pejorative meaning; a meaning that has been transferred to the word 'south' (which means 'poor' in the label 'Global South'). The more substantive problem is the diminishing ability of 'modern man' (or at least homo sapiens in the Global North) to think abstractly. A diminishing abstract capacity allows us to conflate the reality of the planet Earth with its representation in the form of a map. And once too many of us see the representation as the same thing as the reality, the ongoing repetition of that framed construct self-reinforces; we give in to the narrative for the sake of mental peace and quiet. The imputed 'reality' of the conventional map becomes hard-wired; the map becomes reality, hardware rather than software. Other examples of incongruent representation follow. Knowledge Rich 'Knowledge rich' is a label that doesn't match the package; refer Govt's curriculum changes come under fire RNZ 22 July 2025. The phrase 'knowledge rich' appears to be an example of vacuous bureaucratic weasel words, to use a bit of idiomatic anti-jargon; a label useless except for obfuscation purposes. We would expect that the term 'knowledge rich' would mean something like 'emphasising the acquisition of knowledge'; ie the more understanding of reality the better. When asked to define 'knowledge rich', the senior bureaucrat interviewee said in that RNZ interview: "really well-structured, clear content, the things that we want young people to know [my emphasis] and the things [skills?] that we want them to know how to do; we want them to learn … in nice sequential and … coherent learning pathway… structured ways … and that teachers need clarity on what needs to be taught and what students should be learning at any particular point on the pathway". That's actually reasonably clear for a bureaucrat put on the spot, but it's not in any way the meaning of 'knowledge rich'. This definition is about structure and constrained knowledge acquisition; it's about young people learning what the state wants them to learn, only what the state wants them to learn, and in the ways the state wants them to learn. The label contradicts the reality, possibly with political intent. A Humanitarian City The Israeli government has rightly been described as 'Machiavellian' (refer Machiavelli) when it represents its planned concentration zone in Rafah (Southern Gaza) as a 'Humanitarian City'. (Refer 'Humanitarian city' would be concentration camp for Palestinians, says former Israeli PM, The Guardian, 13 July 2025; and Israel turning Gaza into 'graveyard of children and starving': UNRWA chief, Al Jazeera News, 11 July 2025. And the new Israeli-American terror unit operating in Gaza is masquerading as the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation; refer What is the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, and why has it been criticised? Al Jazeera explainer, 20 May 2025. It is clear that the Israeli government is exploiting the increased naivete of the western news audience; a state of entrenched naivety that – as noted above – has become hard-wired in too many of our brains, thanks to the ongoing use of language which presents representation as reality. We should also note that, in Germany in the 1930s, Adolf Hitler was able to gain a groundswell of popular support through his representation of Jews as cunning and Machiavellian disrupters; it does not serve Israel well for their present-day leaders to give any semblance of support to Hitler's portrayal. Holocaust Through a relentless multi-decade campaign, it has become hard-wired into too many western brains that there was little more to World War Two than The Holocaust; ie that WW2 was essentially a battle between 'Hitler' and 'The Jews', and that it was resolved by white knights in the form of Churchill and Roosevelt and Truman coming to the rescue – albeit too late – by dealing to Hitler and giving (as compensation) Palestine to The Jews. In the process, most other narratives in that war are by now largely forgotten. World War Two was of course far more complex. Further, the label Holocaust is an inaccurate portrayal of those catastrophic events. One strength of the English language is its capacity to borrow from other languages. The correct label for this greatest of catastrophes should be that from the victims' own language; their label, the Shoah. The word holocaust, correctly used, has connotations of fire and brimstone (especially raining from the sky); the best-known biblical example being the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah 'documented' in Genesis. We may note that part of the divine and the diabolical intents of both the biblical holocaust and of the Shoah was to eradicate homosexuals. World War Two has a number of ready-made examples of true holocausts; many perpetrated by the Allies, starting with Operation Gomorrah which incinerated Hamburg in 1943, and ending with the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945. The Holocaust obscures the holocausts, and much else. Inadequate representation indeed misrepresents the Shoah as a biblical spectacle, whereas it was really a coldly cynical mix of operations conducted in the then shadows. Was the Shoah a bigger catastrophe than Gomorrah? Probably yes. Genocide and Terrorism Earlier in the 2020s, people such as Paula Penfold and Liz Truss tried to represent the Chinese government's persecution of the East Turkestan (aka Xinjiang) Uyghurs as "genocide". They were 'weaponising' the g-word, part of a wider cross-partisan opportunity to demonise China during the Covid19 pandemic. In the light of recent events in the Levant, an obvious and unmistakeable genocide which too many people refrain from calling a 'genocide', those anti-China representations look rather silly. It is perfectly possible that people using the same identity label can be both victims of genocide and perpetrators of genocide; most likely at different places in different times. Most petty of all, this 'is it a genocide?' has become an elitist word-game. Anyone who thinks that if what is happening in Palestine does not meet some English-language definition of 'genocide' is morally bound to come up with an alternative word or phrase – presumably a somethingelse-icide – that more accurately conveys their assessment. Myself, I think that these events may be even more than a genocide; such as philosopher historian AC Grayling's term culturicide (from Among the Dead Cities) which expresses what – for example, the Morgenthau Plan – looked to impose on post-war Germany (seeking to reduce Germany, with a pre-war population of 80 million to an impoverished 'pastoral' nation of 30 million). Cultural erasure is more than genocide. Genocide is an unfortunate reality, a human propensity which has occurred in the past, is occurring in the present, and will occur periodically (unless finished by the 'final genocide', or biocide) in the future. Trying to weasel our way around it through an absence of language is a trait which has hard-wired itself, through denial and distractive fig-leaves, into elite cultures of complicity and impunity. Another such word is 'terrorism'. Winston Churchill and his bomber commander Arthur Harris had no doubt about the meaning of that word. So did the victims of their fiery terror, in Hamburg and many other cities. Now the representation of 'terror' through this word is restricted to a selected subset of resistance organisations. Winston Churchill understood that meaning of 'terrorism', too. His friend – Walter Guinness, 1st Baron Moyne – was assassinated in Cairo by fascist Lehi terrorists. (Re Lehi, see Stern: The Man, the Gang and the State, Al Jazeera 13 Aug 2024.) Appeasement This word may be used improperly, as a damaging misrepresentation of a political opponent, or avoided when it is most needed. (Grayling, in Among the Dead Cities, concludes that the Churchill/Harris holocausts on German cities, were in large part an ineffective appeasement of Josef Stalin.) Here's a correct recent use of the a-word: "With such uncontrolled power and aggressive posture, it seems Israel is seeking submission [in Syria and the rest of the 'Middle East' region]. The Trump administration's approach of solving crises by appeasing Israel will entrench this doctrine and push the region into further instability." (Nour Odeh, reporting from Amman in lieu of Al Jazeera ban by Israel, Al Jazeera News, about 8:05am NZ time, 20 July 2025. She 'hit the nail on the head'.) Could someone who has been represented as an 'appeaser' ever be a justifiable winner of a Nobel Peace Prize? I think the answer is a 'qualified yes'; just as good fishers sometimes have to appease their quarry before reeling them in. But, I think, neither an appeaser of Netanyahu nor Stalin could qualify for that prize. In reality, appeasement has to be done sometimes. New Zealand dairy owners have been routinely asked to appease violent robbers. And, in the movies, when someone points a gun at someone and says "hands up", the victim almost always appeases the gunner, regardless of their moral position. 'Appeasement' is a representation that's both underused and overused; a representation designed to construct a deception. If we cannot distinguish between representation and reality, label and labelled, then we stand to become victims to all kinds of mischievous narratives. Cost of Living The Government and the Opposition both frame the alleged "cost of living crisis" as a problem of inflation rather than deflation. Indeed, the linguistic minefield around economic policy is so problematic that a whole separate article is required to examine it. The key issue for us here is that the 'cost-of-living' framing – ie representation – in government circles is that the economy must be in an inflationary phase and therefore a deflationary policy is required. However, when the New Zealand public complain about the 'cost-of-living' they are saying that prices are too high compared to their incomes; it's an 'affordability crisis', not an inflationary crisis. And clearly the deflationary retrenchment policies – meaning policies to slow the economy down, to instigate a recession – pursued by the government are a critical part of the problem. The government's solution is to represent its actual class-war anti-growth policies as 'pro-growth' policies. And the Labour Opposition completely falls for the way the government frames New Zealand's structural recession as a 'cost-of-living' crisis. At present, New Zealand has near-record-high (north!?) 'terms of trade', only slightly below the record highs of 2022. New Zealand's terms of trade are now 50% higher than they were in 2000, and nearly 100% higher than the dramatic lows of the mid-1970s and early 1980s. As when Brian Easton wrote In Stormy Seas: The Post-War New Zealand Economy in 1997, the terms of trade represented the stormy waves, some bigger than others; and the favourable crests of those waves were when New Zealand expected (and generally got) economic good times. The troughs during the Muldoon years – not Robert Muldoon's fault; he never had the power to shift the tides of a stormy world – were very difficult times for Aotearoa New Zealand. In these terms the twenty-first century has been the 'best of times' for New Zealand, and the 2020s the 'very best of times'. Yet they are also the 'worst of times', to reference Charles Dickens. (Many of our most potent truths come from literature.) New Zealand, like other countries, has experienced economic cycles and economic shocks. Through my lifetime one consistent cycle has been the short 'trade-cycle', on average about 32 months. We are near the crest of that cycle now. The last quarterly growth peak, September 2022, led to an annual growth peak of 4% in the year-to June 2023. Based on the usual timing of the trade cycle, June 2025 will be the next quarterly peak. It will not be pretty, if that will be the best GDP data that we get on this government's watch. Any positivity when the next GDP figures are released in September, in colloquial jargon, may be characterised as a 'dead-cat bounce'. The government is undertaking structural retrenchment under the cover of a 'cost-of-living crisis' that means very different things to different people. Insinuating that New Zealand has a crisis of inflation – taken as a synonym for 'overspending' – when it has a very real crisis of structural recession and growing unemployment, is a particularly cynical misrepresentation of reality. Conclusion We too easily fall for these misrepresentations of reality; for representations that, in our minds, become a reality like treacle; sets of overlayed representations which play tricks on our minds. That makes us, and our political Opposition parties, quite unable to form coherent critiques of the too many misrepresented and problematic things that are happening to us. In New Zealand, although we are allegedly at the 'bottom of the world', in the Far Southeast (fortunately not in the incorrectly named 'Middle East'!). We also pride ourselves as being in the West and in the Global North. What is genuinely true is that Aotearoa New Zealand is geographically very far from most of the rest of humanity. We could use that birds-eye bottom-of-the-world detached perspective to see past the labels, the frames, the self-serving narratives. We don't have to play 'silly buggers' when the rest of the world is so-doing; we can cut through the 'bullshit', to use some more colloquial jargon. We can be the North Star of the South. PS. With escalating geopolitical wars, and plenty of undertested nuclear weapons in the hands of numerous political sociopaths, being at 'the bottom of the world' may not be such a great place to be. All of us of a certain age remember British, American, and French nuclear testing in Oceania. Some, a bit older, remember nuclear testing in Japan. ------------- Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand. Keith Rankin Political Economist, Scoop Columnist Keith Rankin taught economics at Unitec in Mt Albert since 1999. An economic historian by training, his research has included an analysis of labour supply in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and has included estimates of New Zealand's GNP going back to the 1850s. Keith believes that many of the economic issues that beguile us cannot be understood by relying on the orthodox interpretations of our social science disciplines. Keith favours a critical approach that emphasises new perspectives rather than simply opposing those practices and policies that we don't like. Keith retired in 2020 and lives with his family in Glen Eden, Auckland.
1News
8 hours ago
- 1News
NZ passport redesign to have English words above te reo Māori
New Zealand's passport is being redesigned to place the English words above the te reo Māori text — with the new look being rolled out atl the end of 2027. Since 2021, newly issued passports have had the words "Uruwhenua Aotearoa" printed in silver directly above "New Zealand Passport". Internal Affairs Minister Brooke van Velden today confirmed the positions of the text would be swapped in future to reflect the coalition's commitment to using English first "as it is the language most widely spoken by the New Zealand public". She said the redesign – which would be unveiled later this year – was being done as part of a scheduled security upgrade, ensuring no additional cost to passport-holders. Passports with the new design would start being issued only after the existing stock of booklets had been used up. ADVERTISEMENT A spokesperson for Internal Affairs told RNZ the department was working towards an "end-of-2027 release date" for the updated passport. The ACT Party celebrated van Velden's move on social media, saying the change would "restore English before te reo Māori – without costing taxpayers". The Department of Internal Affairs, in 2021, promoted the passport's existing "unique design" as one to "be proud of" and highlighted the more prominent use of te reo Māori both on the cover and throughout the book. The change came as part of a deliberate push by the coalition to give English primacy over te reo Māori in official communications. New Zealand First's coalition agreement with National stipulated that public service departments had their primary name in English and be required to communicate "primarily in English" except for entities specifically related to Māori. It also included an as-yet-unfulfilled commitment to make English an official language of New Zealand. On Wednesday, NZ First leader and Foreign Minister Winston Peters objected to the Green Party's use of the term "Aotearoa New Zealand" during Parliament's Question Time. ADVERTISEMENT "No such country exists," Peters said. "The name of this country in all the documents, and the membership of the United Nations, is New Zealand. "We are not going to have somebody unilaterally – without consultation, without consulting the New Zealand people – change this country's name." Speaker Gerry Brownlee insisted Peters respond to the question in a "reasonable fashion" and pointed to his ruling earlier this year that it was not inappropriate for MPs to refer to "Aotearoa New Zealand". "The New Zealand Geographic Board also recognises and uses the term 'Aotearoa New Zealand'," Brownlee told MPs. "It would be utterly ridiculous for this House to ban such use if the Geographic Board itself is using that." Returning to the issue yesterday, Peters requested Brownlee reconsider on the basis that the Geographic Board had no jurisdiction to alter the country's name. But Brownlee was unmoved. ADVERTISEMENT He noted that the word "Aotearoa" was regularly used as a name of the country, including on New Zealand passports, which he said Peters would be familiar with — given his role as Minister of Foreign Affairs. "He would have – over some five years or more – presented the New Zealand passport at various passport stations around the world and never questioned the fact that our passport has the word Aotearoa on the front of it," Brownlee said. "I'd further say that through all of those years ... there has been not a syllable, not a sound, not a mutter, not a murmur, no condemnation whatsoever from a government he was part of. "That is the end of the matter."
