Former MPs release scathing review into the Government’s pay equity law changes

Tuesday, 24 February 2026

The People's Select Committee on Pay Equity has released their report into the pay equity changes enacted by the Government last year.

The group of 10 former female MPs - who served in National, Labour, NZ First and the Green Party - created an informal “select committee” to hear submissions on changes to the Equal Pay Act, which the coalition Government rushed through ahead of the 2025 Budget.

There was no public consultation on the change and Parliament debated the amendment under urgency.

Now, the People’s Select Committee have found the Government’s passage of the Equal Pay Amendment 2025 was “a flagrant and significant abuse of power”.

Former National MP Professor Marilyn Waring said the Committee found no evidence to support the Government’s suggestion that claims had been able to progress without a proper basis, but instead found the previous system was “world-leading”, “full of checks and balances” and “a highly sophisticated, rigorous and meticulous system”.

When asked about the report hours after its release, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said he was sure he would read it “in due course”.

Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety Brooke van Velden declined to be interviewed on the report, but said in a statement that “members of the public - including former MPs - are free to hold their own opinions and publish their own material”.

“As I said at the time, equal pay is here to stay, and a pay equity system remains. The new law … makes the regime simpler and more robust, focused squarely on sex-based discrimination, and sets out a transparent process through which employers and employees can negotiate questions of equal value.”

The 177-page report was split into eight sections. Here’s an overview of what it says.

The 2025 amendment was a model of bad law-making, Committee found

When the coalition Government announced changes to the equal pay regime last year, their reasoning was outlined in a Cabinet Paper: “The permissive settings in the Act have resulted in the pay equity framework not working as intended. This is particularly as a result of the low entry threshold and insufficient guidance in the Act for comparator choice and comparison methodology.”

But according to the Committee, they were unable to find any evidence to support these claims.

Instead, “33 pay equity claims commenced under the pre-existing legislation were discontinued, significant barriers have been put in place for future claims, and review provisions of settled claims have been rendered ineffective,” the Committee found.

Their final report noted that submissions overwhelmingly supported the view that the bill was actually passed under urgency to find savings for the Government’s Budget, and criticised the Government for passing it without any public consultation.

The Committee found the cancellation of pre-existing claims to be particularly egregious, with former National Party MP Belinda Vernon saying on Tuesday that it “destroyed trust and confidence in government and in the concept of negotiating in good faith”.

“[We] agreed unanimously that the cancellation of claims lodged legally under the law at the time was not fair, was not justified and it was not just,” she said.

Pay equity ‘a human right’

According to the Committee’s report, the passage of the Equal Pay Amendment Act 2025 “wilfully breached New Zealand law, and the country’s international human rights obligations”.

An analysis of Cabinet papers revealed that “no Cabinet Minister was ever fully briefed on the measure’s human rights consequences”.

While the Committee reviewed documents from various meetings and briefings that did take place between Ministers, Crown law and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the lead up to the amendment law, any potential advice on these matters was redacted.

From what they did see, “there is no evidence that any Minister ever sought detailed advice on human rights,” the report said. “It is clear that human rights considerations were not a focus of the briefings. The overriding priority was achieving budgetary savings to spend elsewhere.”

How women experience the labour market

The Committee also pulled together personal experiences from individual submitters to understand how women experience the labour market.

According to the submissions, women are experiencing turnover and burnout to such an extent that it reduces service quality and productivity, women are staying in low-paid roles due to a sense of compassion or duty - rather than adequate reward, and underpayment is discouraging training so badly that industries are losing skills.

These conditions “reveal that large parts of New Zealand’s service labour market operate with increasing fragility” and make a workable pay equity framework necessary, the Committee concluded.

Māori, the Treaty and Pasifika voices

According to the Committee’s report, “Kaupapa Māori submitters viewed the Government’s changes to the Equal Pay Act as a deliberate roll-back of hard-won rights, a breach of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and an assault on intergenerational equity for wahine Māori, their whānau and communities.”

Submitters argued that the changes were both a breach of the Treaty partnership (because Māori were completely excluded from any consultation on a law that disproportionately affected them) and a failure to ensure equity.

The Committee’s report also noted that the pay equity amendment disproportionately affected Pacific workers, who are highly represented in under-paid industries.

“The claims were expected to lift incomes and living standards; their cancellation also meant the loss of real, genuine opportunity to make a future claim for meaningful and fair remedy for the inequity suffered throughout Pacific workers’ careers,” the report read.

Ethnicity, race and colour are not grounds for making a claim under the Equal Pay Act, but submitters argued that racial and ethnic equality are fundamental human rights which should be included.

One submitter said the changes “cancelled existing progress and entrapped Pacific workers again in underpayment”.

The employers’ perspective

The Committee spoke to the country’s “largest funded-sector employers” and found the Government engaged in delaying tactics amid previous pay equity claims, the report said.

Tracey Martin, chief executive of the Aged Care Association (and a former NZ First MP), told the Committee that the organisation was a member of BusinessNZ, but that they had never been asked for their opinion on pay equity.

According to Martin, the ACA willingly participated in a pay equity claim that was lodged in July 2022, but “employer parties and peak bodies in our sector spent close to or over half a million dollars gathering information for that claim, much of it at the request of government”.

While they were doing that, the Government was already moving behind closed doors to to end all current pay equity claims, she said.

The report said “employers told us that they opposed the changes that the Government claimed were in their interests”.

“Employers were acting in good faith. The changes invalidated years of work and undermined the relationships and trust built between employers, unions and the workers they represent.”

Comparing Jobs

One of the big issues touted by the coalition Government in 2025 was the comparisons used in pay equity claims.

Basically, before the 2025 change, comparator groups were identified or help benchmark pay in the group advancing a pay equity claim. Those comparator groups did not necessarily have to do the same work.

The 2025 change introduced a hierarchy of comparators, and excluded any from different industries or sectors.

But according to the Committee, the nature of the work did not matter. “The work [was] selected for the skill, experience, responsibility, effort and working conditions that were potentially comparable.”

Through its research and work with submitters, the report found there was “no evidence to support the Government’s suggestion that ‘claims have been able to progress without strong evidence of undervaluation’.”

Instead, they found the previous regime was “a world leading human rights vehicle, with a robust pay equity assessment methodology with incredible research integrity”.

A review of the documents revealed that “no bureaucrat demonstrated they knew how the system worked, and no one asked for it to be explained,” Waring said on Tuesday.