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Newsroom
2 days ago
- Politics
- Newsroom
Anne Salmond: Freedom, for whom?
The debate over the Regulatory Standards Bill has been illuminating. New Zealanders have learned a great deal about how our society is being run at present, by whom and for whom. In this bill, a small libertarian minority is attempting to use the law of the land, past and present, to uphold the priority of private rights and property over all other values, including care for the environment, the just treatment of minority groups and the public good. A recent Post article by Andrea Vance casts light on how the Regulatory Standards Bill was conceived and drafted, and by whom. The New Zealand Initiative, a right wing think tank, with its predecessor the Business Round Table, has been trying to get such a bill passed for the past 25 years. After the last election, while the coalition Government was being formed, the Act party with just 8.6 percent of the vote negotiated the inclusion of the draft Regulatory Standards Bill in the coalition agreement, with the Treaty Principles Bill and many other measures. The Government was formed in late November 2024, with the leader of Act appointed Minister for Regulation with a new ministry, and as Deputy Prime Minister for the second half of the parliamentary term. The draft Regulatory Standards Bill was sent out for public consultation. The period for feedback was brief and included the Christmas holidays, a timing that aroused resentment. According to the Post article, during this time the New Zealand Initiative was deeply engaged in backroom discussions with the government. A primary architect of the Bill, a senior fellow of the New Zealand Initiative, was constantly in touch with the Act leader as Minister for Regulation and the CE of the new Ministry throughout, consulting on the bill. The impression one gains from the written correspondence, now in the public arena, is of a lack of wider discussion within the ministry, with critics of the draft legislation (including myself, with almost every other commentator) being dismissed in the most patronising and jaundiced terms – the opposite of a democratic exchange of ideas. In the event, and despite the unhelpful timing, 23,000 New Zealanders submitted on the draft Regulatory Standards Bill, with only .33% in favour. Nevertheless, in May 2025 the bill was brought to Parliament for its first reading, which was held under urgency, and sent to a select committee. During the consultation period, which ended in late June, a reported 150,000 New Zealanders sent in their submissions on the bill, the vast majority opposed to its measures, with 16,000 citizens asking to be heard by the select committee. Meanwhile, as Minister for Regulation, Deputy Prime Minister and Acting Prime Minister, the leader of the Act party authorised an online 'Victim of the Day' campaign, designed and delivered by staff using the logo of the Parliamentary Service on their social posts. This featured the portraits of a series of academics (including myself) and others, describing them as 'Victim of the Day' and 'deranged' for criticising the bill, and decorated with the parliamentary insignia. This effort to silence critics by online trolling, not just by the Act party but from Parliament and the highest office in the land, provoked a petition that has attracted over 24,000 signatures to date. This petition calls on the Prime Minister to uphold the requirement in the Cabinet Manual that ministers 'behave in a way that upholds, and is seen to uphold, the highest ethical and behavioural standards.' In early July, the select committee on the Regulatory Standards Bill began hearing submissions, over just 30 hours in total with no MPs in the room. Of 16,000 individual citizens who had asked to submit in person, only 208 were allowed to speak, and then for 5 minutes each. This was a further breach of the rights of citizens to have their views about legislation before parliament heard and weighed in the balance. Throughout the deliberations on this bill, in the name of individual freedom, the rights of individual New Zealanders to speak their minds and think differently from a small libertarian minority have been thwarted. This applies across the political spectrum, including many who might be described as 'conservative' in their values. New Zealanders who uphold ideas about civic responsibility as well as individual rights and property, including care for the environment, the just treatment of minority groups, Te Tiriti and legislative measures in the public interest, for instance, are dismissed as 'misinformed,' or even incapable of rational thought. If most Kiwis realised that when the bill talks about freedom for 'persons,' it's talking about freedom for corporations (which in law, are defined as legal 'persons'), not just citizens, they'd see why its backers are so keen to annihilate its critics. Individual freedom and rights sound appealing, until you understand the bill is also seeking freedom for corporations as legal 'persons' to make profits with minimal restraints. In the event, the submitters who spoke in front of the select committee were overwhelmingly opposed to the draft bill. Incisive, authoritative analyses of its flaws and negative consequences if enacted were offered from many different vantage points. In a healthy democracy, one would expect that given this kind of feedback, a select committee would recommend to reject the bill, or at least significantly revise it. A few days ago, however, an article in The Herald by Thomas Coughlan revealed that the leader of the Act party has threatened to break the coalition unless the Regulatory Standards Bill is passed as drafted. This would be another breach of the right of citizens to be heard by those in power, and for their views to be taken into account when legislation is enacted. While the Deputy Prime Minister and other advocates continue to argue this bill is simply a technical measure, aimed at smoothing the legislative process, this is clearly not the case. No political party in a coalition would threaten to bring down the Government over a trivial matter of that kind. On closer analysis, passionate rhetoric about individual rights and freedoms by Act and its supporters emerges as 'double speak,' talk that disguises an opposite intention – in this case, to force others to adopt libertarian values about the primacy of private property and the rights of corporations as legal persons, using the law to do it. This includes imposing libertarian versions of 'freedom of speech' on universities, alongside efforts to control the media in New Zealand, including the internet. Rather than the pursuit of freedom of speech, this is a fundamentally authoritarian project, underpinned by a sense of intellectual superiority. Anyone who thinks differently from the Act party, its think tanks and its backers is misguided or a fool, and must be made to pull the forelock and bow the knee, by law. 'Closed' rather than 'open' minds, backed by the exercise of political power. Faced with this kind of imposition, most New Zealanders would tell its proponents to get lost. Democratic values, a care for others and the land are still strong in this country, if not in some political parties. Distilled to its essence, that is the message coming from the electorate about the Regulatory Standards Bill – and the attempts by the same fringe party to subvert academic freedom, for instance. The majority in Parliament would be wise to listen. Act's libertarian stunts are a self-serving distraction from other, more urgent challenges – the health crisis, the energy market, resilience to climate change, and the hordes of Kiwis leaving the country, for instance. They're fiddling with old, passé ideas while the world is drowning, or burning. At the heart of the matter, a bill that requires the primacy of private property and the rights of 'persons' in all law making in New Zealand will inevitably privilege those who have 'property' and power over those who don't. While many Kiwis hold fast to ideas of 'a fair go' and a decent society, since the 1980s neo-liberal philosophies have dominated governance in this country, so that the top 1 percent in New Zealand now hold 23 percent of the wealth. Productivity suffers when there's not enough to eat at home and children go to school hungry; housing is poor or lacking altogether for many families; and low-paid workers are penalised to allow tax breaks for landlords and other wealthy interests, as in the Act-driven changes to the Pay Equity Act. The World Bank, the OECD and Nobel prize winners have all concluded that radical inequality works against sustainable prosperity. The Regulatory Standards Bill, with its privileging of libertarian ideas, will make inequality even worse, with widespread child poverty, low paid, insecure jobs and social misery. No wonder so many New Zealanders are leaving the country. Its time for National to agree to disagree with Act, and start making a positive difference for New Zealanders, or as Peter Dunne has warned, face the electoral consequences.
RNZ News
24-05-2025
- Politics
- RNZ News
Mediawatch: Political rows and newspaper column blur focus on pay equity
The c-bomb heard around the media. Photo: RNZ Mediawatch Anyone watching the 6pm news bulletins on TVNZ 1 and Three simultaneously last Wednesday might have been tempted to call jinx. "This pay equity issue isn't going away is it?" Simon Dallow asked TVNZ political editor Maiki Sherman on 1News . In reply she said the row about it would roll on right up to the Budget. "The pay equity debate is showing no signs of abating," said Lloyd Burr on ThreeNews . It was true. The story was sticking around almost as stubbornly as the gender pay gap. Pay equity has been on almost every homepage, front page, and news bulletin for the better part of two weeks. A lot of that coverage - particularly early on - was negative to downright angry. On Dame Anne Salmond said she was "incandescent with rage" over the halting of 33 existing pay equity claims which would have to start again under a new, more stringent scheme. In an opinion column for The Post , Stuff's national affairs editor Andrea Vance accused six senior female MPs of acting like a word beginning with 'c' - a word still at number two on the BSA's list of terms New Zealanders rate as most offensive. The column last Sunday that caused a storm in the House - eventually. Photo: Sunday Star Times Disability support worker Jo-Chanelle Pouwhare was equally blunt on 1News . "They can kiss my fat arse ," she told Sherman when asked what she would say to the female MPs who supported the law change. "Kate Sheppard will be rolling in her grave over this," Three Gals One Beehive podcast co-host Esther Robinson told listeners. The living weren't too hot on the move either. "What the f***?" was Robinson's co-host Georgina Stylianou's response to the political management of the issue. Maybe the government's handling was a bit WTF because it wasn't quite anticipating such an intense barrage of bad press. It took a few days to come up with some messaging in response. But once it did, it really hammered it hard. "All we have done is fix the law that was unworkable and also unaffordable and that compared librarians to fisheries officers," Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said under questioning in Parliament. "The problem is Labour designed a pay equity regime that was so loose and unworkable it resulted in social workers being compared to detectives, librarians with fisheries officers," senior Cabinet minister Chris Bishop said on X . "If you look at the comparators that were being used to determine whether it was work of equal value, for example, female admin workers were being considered with male mechanical engineers, or female librarians with male fisheries officers," said social development minister Louise Upston, in an Instagram reel recorded in a car . ACT was even more concise, posting a female librarian and a male fisheries officer with an equals sign in between them to X, along with the words "this is what pay equity looks like under Labour". That sparked a round of fact-checking (including from Hayden Donnell ). Three Waikato University lecturers teamed up on The Conversation to explain why comparisons between quite different sectors were a feature, rather than a bug, of the former pay equity legislation. "Pay equity seeks to make visible and fix the deep, structural inequalities that have historically seen women's work undervalued compared to men's work. It's about ensuring jobs that are different but of equal value are paid similarly, as a way to achieve gender equality," their article said. Lawyer Fiona McMillan told RNZ's Nights finding jobs of different-but-equal value in male-dominated fields sometimes meant comparing roles that were dissimilar at first glance. "Parties weren't looking for odd comparators for the fun of it. But often comparators weren't close to home because either they didn't exist - or those close to home were female-dominated anyway, so it wasn't of assistance." But these explanations barely had time to clear the political windshield before more mudslinging messed it up again. For a while, journalists were distracted by a lengthy argument between National and Labour over who was lying about what. Lloyd Burr's ThreeNews video editor did a great job of making duelling accusations delivered at separate times in different places into a coherent conversation. Burr also wrote an explainer which went through the political back-and-forth, before pointing out this semantic debate risked taking the story away from its central facts. "The truth of it is this: women who were in the process of a pay equity claim with the government will get a pay rise under the new system, but it won't be as much and it will take much longer to get." Despite all of this, the plight of those women remained in the headlines until Wednesday afternoon, when ACT's Brooke van Velden denoted a c-bomb in Parliament. "I do not agree with the clearly gendered and patrionising language that Andrea Vance used to reduce senior Cabinet minister to girl bosses, hype squads, references to 'girl math' and c****," she said, with reference to Andrea Vance's controversial opinion piece . In politics, there's something called a dead cat strategy. If you're in trouble, the wisdom goes, just throw a dead cat on the table. Pretty soon everyone will have forgotten what they were talking about originally and start discussing the dead cat. In this case, cat could be replaced with another slightly less savoury word beginning with c. At the very least, we know van Velden's historic entry into Hansard was pre-planned. It came as a response to a notified written question from Labour's Jan Tinetti, which referenced a section of Vance's scathing article for The Post . RNZ's political editor Jo Moir confirmed the ACT MP had done some groundwork before making her response. "It was a really bizarre decision by Labour yesterday... thinking it would be some sort of ammunition in the House - and to put it on notice so that Brooke van Velden had more than a couple of hours to think about how she was going to respond to it," she said. "It meant she had time to go to the Clerk of the House and check whether she could use the c-word in the House." If this was a media distraction tactic from the government, it worked impeccably. Every major news website in the country led with Van Velden's c-bomb. It was the lead story on 1News . ThreeNews delivered a bulletin-opening play on words. "To C or not to C - that was the question for parliament when workplace relations minister Brooke van Velden chose to use the c-word in full today," said presenter Samantha Hayes. The following morning, TVNZ's Breakfast brought in a language expert to discuss the nuances of calling someone the c word. That interview was interesting but, as Moir noted on RNZ, it was also a sign that the coverage had strayed quite a long way from the original topic - pay equity for low-paid women. "Now everyone's stopped talking about the issues that Labour had been on this - and are now talking about what language is appropriate or inappropriate and whether a former minister of women was right in raising remarks from a column that many believe was misogynistic." Labour MP Kieran McAnulty echoed that lament while sitting shoulder to shoulder with Chris Bishop on TVNZ's Breakfast . "The billions of dollars earmarked for future settlements that would have gone to women workers isn't going to now. That is the issue we really want to focus on. There's been a few distractions and attempts to point the finger elsewhere and 'hey, look over here', but those things remain and matter to millions of New Zealanders." They do matter, though it might have helped if Labour's own MP and former minister for women hadn't brought up Vance's column in a written Parliamentary question. The past week has been a lesson in how both how forceful and single-minded our media can be - and how easy it is to divert them. There's no easy solution. When someone dumps a dead 'c' on the table in Parliament it's hard not to talk about it. But in the end a debate about media ethics is probably not the most important thing in this story. That would be the thousands of low-paid women who won't be getting a pay rise they were counting on, at least in the near future. Even if new - and potentially sweary - developments arise, their story doesn't go away. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
Otago Daily Times
21-05-2025
- Politics
- Otago Daily Times
Talking around the issues without the complete picture
If Andrea Vance in The Sunday Star Times had wanted to bring the media into increased disrepute she could not have done a better job than her contribution in that paper on May 11. Readers and listeners have been turning off politics (as presented by the media) in droves, although not quite so much the politics reported by the ODT , as it happens. Ms Vance calling a minister of the Crown the c-word was not merely a slip of the tongue in the heat of the moment. This was a column which was written, likely on Friday, and made it from Ms Vance past editorial scrutiny to the paper, both the written and the digital version, on Sunday. But perhaps as important as what is being written is what the media is not writing. The protection given to the media by democratic countries is given because the media is an integral part of a functioning democracy. We need a free independent news media to provide in-depth, factual information to inform political decision-making. We also need them as watchdogs against abuses of power and to offer a forum for the exchange of opinions and perspectives. Increasingly, we are receiving scant information about the issues being raised. The news media seems focused on interviewing each other and others in opposition to the government. The opinions being offered take the place of any useful in-depth information or analysis. For example, around the Treaty Principles Bill we heard there were hundreds of thousands of submissions, 90% of which were against. Anecdotally, it seems many were of the opinion that David Seymour was trying to deny the Treaty. The news media made no attempts to disabuse people of that view. There was no media discussion around whether it is a general view that Parliament is not sovereign in New Zealand. Or what it would mean for it not to be sovereign. The Pay Equity Amendment Act reporting made much of people with placards and aired appropriate concerns around the use of urgency. The news media gave us no information about whether this government has been using urgency more or less than previous governments. More importantly, it took a lot of researching to find out what the amendment would do, and why the government wanted to pass it. The media covered unseemly parliamentary debate on the subject, still without giving any idea of the legislation. Finally on Saturday, May 17 the ODT printed an opinion piece on the business page which gave a rundown of the Act. From most of the media there has still been no explanation of the hysterical response from such as Ms Vance. We heard it would save the government money. We heard it would set back the cause of equal pay for many years. What we should have had is information about what comparisons were being made between male- and female-dominated industries. We didn't hear that various industry bodies, including some unions, agreed that it was not working well and should be at least tweaked. We may have come to the conclusion on our own that this amendment was not to our liking. But we needed the background. Closer to home there is an issue with the Dunedin City Council around replacement of our landfill. There were over 700 submissions to the DCC long-term plan, many of them supportive. Yet the only issue which has received much of an airing is the Smooth Hill landfill submissions, which were less than 6% of the total. And the reporting on Smooth Hill has been notable by its absence of useful, informed background information, despite much information being provided by the DCC. There has been reporting provided about the views of those seeking office at the next election, and some who clearly have commercial interests, but little actual information on what choices councillors have made based on what information. What were the other 660 submissions about? What were the people of Dunedin wanting the councillors to consider in spending our rates for the next nine years? Instead we have a seemingly endless I think-you think conversation happening without any clear understanding of what is behind the choices being made. When the news media is doing little more than allowing views to be expressed without any clear understanding of what, if anything, is behind the views, the accusation of bias increases. Even information around polls seems to be biased, usually towards the left. Even RNZ's flagship Mediawatch programme is accused of bias. Chris McVeigh KC, writing for RNZ, recently talked of someone being asked if they listened to M ediawatch . The answer was: "If I want to have some self-righteous bastard preaching to me on Sunday mornings, I'll go to church thanks". hcalvert@ • Hilary Calvert is a former Otago regional councillor, MP and Dunedin city councillor.
RNZ News
21-05-2025
- Politics
- RNZ News
Midweek - Vance wins, Winston heckled, Stuff vs Stuff
After days being berated for deploying the c-word, Andrea Vance was named political journalist of the year. Meanwhile Stuff took on Stuff, and Winston Peters' pre-Budget announcement went off the rails at a railway station
RNZ News
17-05-2025
- Politics
- RNZ News
Mediawatch: Bad statistics and stereotypes boost bootcamp bid
The c-bomb heard around the media. Photo: RNZ Mediawatch Anyone watching the 6pm news bulletins on TVNZ 1 and Three simultaneously last Wednesday might have been tempted to call jinx. "This pay equity issue isn't going away is it?" Simon Dallow asked TVNZ political editor Maiki Sherman on 1News . In reply she said the row about it would roll on right up to the Budget. "The pay equity debate is showing no signs of abating," said Lloyd Burr on ThreeNews . It was true. The story was sticking around almost as stubbornly as the gender pay gap. Pay equity has been on almost every homepage, front page, and news bulletin for the better part of two weeks. A lot of that coverage - particularly early on - was negative to downright angry. On Dame Anne Salmond said she was "incandescent with rage" over the halting of 33 existing pay equity claims which would have to start again under a new, more stringent scheme. In an opinion column for The Post , Stuff's national affairs editor Andrea Vance accused six senior female MPs of acting like a word beginning with 'c' - a word still at number two on the BSA's list of terms New Zealanders rate as most offensive. The column last Sunday that caused a storm in the House - eventually. Photo: Sunday Star Times Disability support worker Jo-Chanelle Pouwhare was equally blunt on 1News . "They can kiss my fat arse ," she told Sherman when asked what she would say to the female MPs who supported the law change. "Kate Sheppard will be rolling in her grave over this," Three Gals One Beehive podcast co-host Esther Robinson told listeners. The living weren't too hot on the move either. "What the f***?" was Robinson's co-host Georgina Stylianou's response to the political management of the issue. Maybe the government's handling was a bit WTF because it wasn't quite anticipating such an intense barrage of bad press. It took a few days to come up with some messaging in response. But once it did, it really hammered it hard. "All we have done is fix the law that was unworkable and also unaffordable and that compared librarians to fisheries officers," Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said under questioning in Parliament. "The problem is Labour designed a pay equity regime that was so loose and unworkable it resulted in social workers being compared to detectives, librarians with fisheries officers," senior Cabinet minister Chris Bishop said on X . "If you look at the comparators that were being used to determine whether it was work of equal value, for example, female admin workers were being considered with male mechanical engineers, or female librarians with male fisheries officers," said social development minister Louise Upston, in an Instagram reel recorded in a car . ACT was even more concise, posting a female librarian and a male fisheries officer with an equals sign in between them to X, along with the words "this is what pay equity looks like under Labour". That sparked a round of fact-checking (including from Hayden Donnell ). Three Waikato University lecturers teamed up on The Conversation to explain why comparisons between quite different sectors were a feature, rather than a bug, of the former pay equity legislation. "Pay equity seeks to make visible and fix the deep, structural inequalities that have historically seen women's work undervalued compared to men's work. It's about ensuring jobs that are different but of equal value are paid similarly, as a way to achieve gender equality," their article said. Lawyer Fiona McMillan told RNZ's Nights finding jobs of different-but-equal value in male-dominated fields sometimes meant comparing roles that were dissimilar at first glance. "Parties weren't looking for odd comparators for the fun of it. But often comparators weren't close to home because either they didn't exist - or those close to home were female-dominated anyway, so it wasn't of assistance." But these explanations barely had time to clear the political windshield before more mudslinging messed it up again. For a while, journalists were distracted by a lengthy argument between National and Labour over who was lying about what. Lloyd Burr's ThreeNews video editor did a great job of making duelling accusations delivered at separate times in different places into a coherent conversation. Burr also wrote an explainer which went through the political back-and-forth, before pointing out this semantic debate risked taking the story away from its central facts. "The truth of it is this: women who were in the process of a pay equity claim with the government will get a pay rise under the new system, but it won't be as much and it will take much longer to get." Despite all of this, the plight of those women remained in the headlines until Wednesday afternoon, when ACT's Brooke van Velden denoted a c-bomb in Parliament. "I do not agree with the clearly gendered and patrionising language that Andrea Vance used to reduce senior Cabinet minister to girl bosses, hype squads, references to 'girl math' and c****," she said, with reference to Andrea Vance's controversial opinion piece . In politics, there's something called a dead cat strategy. If you're in trouble, the wisdom goes, just throw a dead cat on the table. Pretty soon everyone will have forgotten what they were talking about originally and start discussing the dead cat. In this case, cat could be replaced with another slightly less savoury word beginning with c. At the very least, we know van Velden's historic entry into Hansard was pre-planned. It came as a response to a notified written question from Labour's Jan Tinetti, which referenced a section of Vance's scathing article for The Post . RNZ's political editor Jo Moir confirmed the ACT MP had done some groundwork before making her response. "It was a really bizarre decision by Labour yesterday... thinking it would be some sort of ammunition in the House - and to put it on notice so that Brooke van Velden had more than a couple of hours to think about how she was going to respond to it," she said. "It meant she had time to go to the Clerk of the House and check whether she could use the c-word in the House." If this was a media distraction tactic from the government, it worked impeccably. Every major news website in the country led with Van Velden's c-bomb. It was the lead story on 1News . ThreeNews delivered a bulletin-opening play on words. "To C or not to C - that was the question for parliament when workplace relations minister Brooke van Velden chose to use the c-word in full today," said presenter Samantha Hayes. The following morning, TVNZ's Breakfast brought in a language expert to discuss the nuances of calling someone the c word. That interview was interesting but, as Moir noted on RNZ, it was also a sign that the coverage had strayed quite a long way from the original topic - pay equity for low-paid women. "Now everyone's stopped talking about the issues that Labour had been on this - and are now talking about what language is appropriate or inappropriate and whether a former minister of women was right in raising remarks from a column that many believe was misogynistic." Labour MP Kieran McAnulty echoed that lament while sitting shoulder to shoulder with Chris Bishop on TVNZ's Breakfast . "The billions of dollars earmarked for future settlements that would have gone to women workers isn't going to now. That is the issue we really want to focus on. There's been a few distractions and attempts to point the finger elsewhere and 'hey, look over here', but those things remain and matter to millions of New Zealanders." They do matter, though it might have helped if Labour's own MP and former minister for women hadn't brought up Vance's column in a written Parliamentary question. The past week has been a lesson in how both how forceful and single-minded our media can be - and how easy it is to divert them. There's no easy solution. When someone dumps a dead 'c' on the table in Parliament it's hard not to talk about it. But in the end a debate about media ethics is probably not the most important thing in this story. That would be the thousands of low-paid women who won't be getting a pay rise they were counting on, at least in the near future. Even if new - and potentially sweary - developments arise, their story doesn't go away. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
