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Speaker 1: The unofficial People Select Committee has released its Longer Way

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Speaker 1: to report on the pay equity changes, and unsurprisingly, it

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Speaker 1: has slammed the government. The report says the new law

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Speaker 1: breaches our human rights legislation and is a violation of

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Speaker 1: the rule of law. Former National MP Marilyn Wearing was

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Speaker 1: on the committee.

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Speaker 2: High Marilyn, good afternoon, Heather.

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Speaker 1: In what way was it a violation of rule of law?

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Speaker 2: The retrospectivity of it that should be used very very rarely.

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Speaker 2: And Dame Sylvia Cant made that point in her submissions.

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Speaker 2: The urgency that was accorded to passage of this legislation.

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Speaker 2: This wasn't an emergency war regulation, you know, it was

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Speaker 2: an equal pay amendment. It's just quite unnecessary. You don't

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Speaker 2: do that. And so it was all done simply for

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Speaker 2: the budget.

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Speaker 1: Oh, I think most of us would agree with that. However,

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Speaker 1: one of the arguments about the old pay equity law

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Speaker 1: was that the comparators were a little bit funny. Did

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Speaker 1: you look at whether the comparators were all fair?

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Speaker 2: In fact, three of us went and got trained and

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Speaker 2: how to do the comparator work, and we actually set

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Speaker 2: there and scored some real profiles. It's incredibly sophisticated. It's

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Speaker 2: full of checks and balances, and I think the thing

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Speaker 2: that people get wrong is it's about knowledge and skills,

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Speaker 2: and it's about responsibility, and it's about working conditions. I

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Speaker 2: think most people just went something like, oh, fisheries offices

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Speaker 2: have very different working conditions from librarians, as if that

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Speaker 2: was you know, what mattered. Whereas I just say to

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Speaker 2: people a year, try being a probation officer checking up

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Speaker 2: on a five h one.

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Speaker 1: Deporty one of their So is it true? I mean

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Speaker 1: there's been a lot of misinformation about this. So is

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Speaker 1: it true that cleaners were being compared with laborers?

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Speaker 2: No? I don't know that because cleaners weren't part of

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Speaker 2: the thirty three claims that were dismissed. So what happened

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Speaker 2: was to set up the comparators. Initially, the government was

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Speaker 2: able to say, well, look, customs officers, surveyors, fisheries officers,

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Speaker 2: air traffic controllers. There was at a whole raft of

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Speaker 2: occupations that were male dominated, and so just as the

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Speaker 2: claimants conducted hundreds of interviews to establish role profiles, there

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Speaker 2: were also many interviews conducted with the comparator groups. And

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Speaker 2: then the comparator groups. Role profiles were as were put

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Speaker 2: in the bank, you know, the comparator bank. As time

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Speaker 2: went past, government agencies became more and more resistant to

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Speaker 2: freeing male workers to undertake those interviews. And if you

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Speaker 2: were engaged in a claim, you could choose to and

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Speaker 2: obviously it was going to be faster and cheaper choose

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Speaker 2: comparators from the bank as it were that was already

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Speaker 2: sitting there, or look for new ones. But looking for

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Speaker 2: new ones was going to delay you even more. And

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Speaker 2: when we did the scoring based on the role profiles,

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Speaker 2: the checks and balances are enormous and it's extraordinarily sophisticated.

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Speaker 2: It was the best and most sophisticated pay equity regime

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Speaker 2: in the world.

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Speaker 1: All right Now, it's not as if the thing has

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Speaker 1: been scrapped without a replacement. There is a replacement there.

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Speaker 1: Women can still progress these claims. Are you unhappy with

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Speaker 1: the replacement?

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Speaker 2: Well, in fact, we expect that after Plunket and hospice

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Speaker 2: nurses whose claims were nearly complete right the comparators, everything

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Speaker 2: had been done weeks away from a settlement. So those

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Speaker 2: employers and unions for those two have chosen to continue, which,

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Speaker 2: of course gives the government the option of saying, well,

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Speaker 2: the new system works, will infect the old system worked

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Speaker 2: because it brought you up to this position. But the

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Speaker 2: issue is, you know, if they do actually get a

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Speaker 2: pay equtty settlement, unless the government increases the contract prices

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Speaker 2: to Hospice and to Plunket, they won't be able to

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Speaker 2: afford the change.

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Speaker 1: All right, Dan, Marilyn Wearing, thank you very much for

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Speaker 1: your time, People Select Committee on Pay Equity. For more

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Speaker 1: from Heather Duplessy Allen Drive, listen live to news talks

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