The Government is going to investigate a ban on social media. The problem is real, but every problem has a solution that is simple, neat and wrong. That’s why no country has successfully blocked kids from social media. The first thing Erica Stanford should do is call for an open enquiry by a select committee. Get all parties around the table and find a workable solution. That’s what the ACT Party has challenged the Education and Workforce Committee to do, and we expect they will decide a course of action when they meet on Wednesday.

Pay Equity

Like any controversial topic, the Government’s pay equity changes have taken on a life of their own. It’s not real life, but one filled with madness. The madness comes from the opposition benches, but also from media commentators who are increasingly unhinged. Free Press worries the COVID years and media cuts are driving them over the edge.

This week, Free Press gives just the facts on pay equity, for those of us still on the level. The short version is One: nobody’s having their pay cut. Two: the Equal Pay Act (1972) is still in place. Three: it still contains a pay equity regime. Four: the regime’s more liberal than most countries’. Five: the Government will still be spending billions more on social services in years to come.

The long version starts with the Equal Pay Act being passed in 1972. That was a time when some employers really did advertise different pay rates depending on whether a man or a woman took the job. The law said equal pay for equal work – ****no discrimination. Needless to say, that part of the law hasn’t changed and never will. The Equal Pay Act is still in place.

Things changed in 2014 when the TerraNova case came out. Kristine Bartlett successfully argued that Terranova, a care provider, was not discriminating against any individual women, but paid all its employees less because they were in a female-dominated industry.

The Court’s basic finding was that sexism could be against an entire workforce, such as care workers, if they’re mostly female. They’re said to be paid less than, say, prison guards because the whole society is sexist and values women’s work less. Different supply and demand, such as fewer people wanting a job with serious physical danger? That was forgotten.

This set the Key Government of the day in a bind. TerraNova, like every other employer that’s been subject to a pay equity claim since, is ultimately funded by the Government. The Government had three options. It could do nothing and let the Courts award higher pay to Government funded employees. It could pass a new law saying that the Court was wrong and the Equal Pay Act only applied to people doing exactly the same job (what they should have done). Or it could choose the option it did.

The Government introduced (but did not pass) a law allowing a controlled version of the TerraNova case to play out if any more claims similar to TerraNova were brought. An entire framework was established setting out how an applicant could show that their workforce had faced sex-based discrimination. They would have to identify a male-dominated industry to compare themselves with, and show that the work was similar but the pay was different.

ACT opposed this at the time, for two reasons. One is that the whole idea of setting wages through such a bureaucratic process is madness. People should be paid based on what they bring to the table, not what some distant authority thinks about people doing your kind of work compared with some other sort of work.

Wages are a kind of price, set between an employer and an employee. The only way to find the right price is supply and demand in a market. This is not a new lesson. The Russians tried to set prices after the October 1917 revolution but they couldn’t get it right. In the 1920s they tried their New Economic Policy with some markets and prices. They joked (we think it was a joke) that the communist revolution should eventually spread everywhere except New Zealand. Why New Zealand? Because prices have to be set somewhere!

Reason two was that there wasn’t a real market anyway. In every case, the employer is the Government. Either directly or by funding a company to provide care, the Government can control the wages. If any Government really is a sexist employer, it should stop being sexist and budget to pay people equally. If the Government is not actually sexist but is simply paying enough to get people to show up and deliver services on behalf of the taxpayer, it should keep going. There was never a need for the madness of pay equity.

Then Labour was elected and made it much worse. In 2020 they expanded the whole scheme to make it easier to bring a claim and find comparators. That’s when the truly crazy comparisons between totally unrelated jobs started. Air traffic controllers were compared with social workers, and that’s not an outlier.

Fast forward to 2025, and the Government had to put a lid on this madness.

The Government hasn’t decided to remove pay equity. It has introduced new rules, such as a sector needing to be at least 70 per cent female for at least ten years. Previously it was only 60 per cent, recently. Now you have to be more of a genuinely female-dominated workforce to take a claim.

It has also stopped thirty-three existing pay equity claims, but those claims were only possible thanks to a crazy law. The Government hasn’t removed any rights, it has amended a law, and rightly so.

No country ever got rich by arguing with itself. People complaining about the Government’s pay equity changes and the new rules for pay equity cases say they’ve lost so much work. They’ve been ‘working’ for years on pay equity cases, getting all the evidence, proving the comparisons, etc. The problem is it’s not the kind of work that generates wealth, it’s the kind that divides it up.

At the end of the day New Zealand still has equal pay. It still has a pathway for pay equity claims that is actually more liberal than most countries. All current employment contracts and all existing pay equity settlements will be honoured and nobody will be paid less than they are now. It is also true that the Government will not have to set aside billions in case of mad pay equity determinations that could add huge wage costs but no value for the taxpayer.

There is one other result of the week. ACT’s Brooke van Velden has been unflappable getting the law through and handling often unhinged media personalities and keyboard warriors. One unhinged ‘journalist’ called female Ministers ‘c_*ts’ and her editor ran it. The Labour Party shared an image of Brooke in a Nazi uniform. In reality it was her Dutch grandfather who lived under Nazi occupation and escaped to New Zealand. Hence why David Seymour said she saved the taxpayer billions and saved the Budget for the Government. She deserves all our thanks for making New Zealand a better place last week.

We have strong reservations about the Social Media ban for juniors; it sounds like the state assuming the role that parents should have. —Eds