February 24, 2026
The People’s Select Committee on Pay Equity release their findings at 10am today (February 24, 2026) at the National Library, Wellington.
The Committee of 10 cross party former women Members of Parliament received 1390 substantive submissions and held 3 months of hearings on the pay equity legislation enacted by the Coalition Government in May, 2025.
They describe the processes of planning for and enacting the Equal Pay Amendment 2025 as “a flagrant and significant abuse of power”.
The Committee found breaches of: the Regulatory Standards Act principles, the Legislation Design and Advisory Committee Guidelines, the New Zealand Bill of Rights, the Human Rights Act, ILO Convention 100, the International Covenants on Civil and Political, and Economic and Social Rights, CEDAW, the UN women’s Convention, and the Conventions on the Rights of People with Disabilities and the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD).
The Committee found the retrospective cancellation of existing rights and remedies was a serious violation of the rule of law. Funded sector employers, charitable organisations and unions spent millions of dollars and thousands of hours, with other resource consequences, on the 33 cancelled claims.
The Committee found that no evidence was produced in any of the accessible Cabinet documents, in press statements or in the parliamentary debates, to support the demolition of the world’s leading pay equity regime.
The Committee found that no budget savings were made in cutting pay equity – the funds were reallocated to other government expenditure and Coalition Government priorities.
No Minister, or briefing bureaucrat, and no speaker in the parliamentary debate, demonstrated any knowledge of how comparators (librarians with fisheries officers)and factor scoring work.
The Committee found that it is a sophisticated, highly rigorous process of co-research between worker and employer negotiators. The only evidence of attempts to game the system the Committee could see were in the behaviours of government agencies.
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The full report will be available on the PSCPE website at 10.00am February 24.
The event will be live streamed and can be accessed on the PSCPE website www.payequity.org
The Timeline of key moments in Aotearoa’s pay equity system - What changed, when, and why it matters - can also be accessed on the PSCPE website www.payequity.org
For more information please contact Pamela Fleming, 0274575677
