Anne Salmond: She won’t be right, mate

When I first enrolled at the University of Auckland, there were no female professors. The first was not appointed until 1975. There was no childcare, and no proper pathways for some of the most intelligent people in this country, because of their gender.

There were no Māori or Pacific professors either. Many women academics served as tutors, not lecturers – including Dame Cath Tizard, a future Governor-General. Pay equity was a fiction. The coalition Government seems to think that was an ideal state of affairs.

Pay equity and equal opportunities go hand-in-hand. During the 1980s, an Equal Opportunities committee was established at the university, followed in 1985 by a committee to report on the status of academic women.

This was chaired by Dame Jenny Gibbs, now a key funder of the Act party, whose Deputy Leader Brooke van Velden was responsible for introducing the Equal Pay Amendment Bill to Parliament on Wednesday.

Back in the 1980s, there were 94 male professors at the University of Auckland, and only four female professors. I served on that committee, raking through old university calendars to compile a chart of the percentages of female academics since the 1930s.

As we wrote at the time, “Given the average rate of increase of academic women on the staff over the past 50 years (1.6 percent per decade), population parity for academic women at the University of Auckland would be achieved in 225 years (ie. 2211AD).”

Later I served as Pro Vice Chancellor (Equal Opportunities), for a time alongside Pro Vice Chancellor (Māori) Jim Peters, whose brother Winston Peters now rails so loudly against the policies Jim advanced.

Why were these initiatives necessary? Because of ancient, irrational myths about the relative merits of different ethnic groups, and men and women, underpinned by antique stories including the Genesis account of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and the Great Chain of Being.

In the Great Chain of Being, a medieval idea, God sits at the top followed by archangels and angels, a divine sovereign (the origin of sovereignty), the ranks of aristocrats and commoners, with men over women, and civilised people over barbarians and savages, followed by sentient and non-sentient animals, fish, insects, plants and rocks. Everything further down the Great Chain is a ‘lower’ form of life, and expected to offer up tribute and service to everything higher up.

This antique belief has proved strangely resilient, no doubt because it is self-serving – for some. It has helped to justify authoritarian rule, the 1 percent over the 99 percent, sexism, racism, and extractive economics, with the earth offering up ‘ecosystem services’ to human beings. It is a myth, pure and simple, with no scientific justification.

As in Trump’s America, it helps to explain why autocracy, elitism, sexism, racism, extractive economics, contempt for the environment and fundamentalist religious beliefs so often go hand-in-hand.

This is a toxic mix, however, and deeply destructive. At present, authoritarian rule, extreme inequality and divisive politics based on hatred of ‘others’ (immigrants, other ethnic or religious groups, or genders), extractive economics, climate change and biodiversity losses are putting human survival at risk.

Here in New Zealand, the same lethal mix is emerging. Witness the coalition Government’s ‘War on Nature,’ with its low grade wheeling and dealing with mining, industrial fishing and forestry and other extractive industries; the Fast-track legislation; Act’s Treaty Principles bill and its Regulatory Standards bill, and now the pay equity amendment, passed under urgency in one afternoon and evening. This is not what New Zealanders asked for at the last election. The only parties that advanced these kinds of policies won a very small share of the vote.

This latest assault on our democracy is a despicable piece of legislation, aimed at over half of the population of this country, without giving them any chance to scrutinise or debate it. Having declared war on the environment, the Government is now declaring war on women.

Do none of the male MPs who voted for this legislation have daughters, sisters or mothers? As for Christopher Luxon, who as chief executive of Air New Zealand worked to ensure a fair representation of women in the senior executive – where is his moral compass?

And what about the female MPs who supported this bill? Do none of them remember those who fought for the privileges they now enjoy? Why are they unwilling to extend these privileges to others?

Judith Collins, for instance, who scoffed when the Labour government tried to defer pay equity back in 2017, “What we’re seeing today is that this new Labour-led government is happy to say to New Zealand women, ‘Go take another two years, honey. Go take another two years because you’re not going to be man enough to stand up for yourself.’ How can she look in the mirror?

Or Nicola Willis, who proudly said when the Equal Pay Amendment bill was introduced in 2020, “This is an important moment. Equal pay matters. We all, I believe, want to live in a country and a world in which men and women have equal opportunities, are equally rewarded for their work, and are able to progress and fulfil their own potential.”

Or Erica Stanford, who declared, “The dreams I have for my daughter and my grandchildren – one day, when I have them, hopefully – is that they will grow up in a country where the work that they do is equally valued and compensated equally to that of their male counterparts. This bill sets out the framework that we will achieve that outcome.”

Do any of these people have values they stand by? Who can trust them from now on? Like so many other women who fought hard for these gains, I am incandescent with rage at this Government’s cynicism and dishonesty. They are trashing our democracy, and destroying so much of what is good about New Zealand.

This country is not the United States. Christopher Luxon has none of Donald Trump’s weird charisma. There is no Bible belt in New Zealand. Our Supreme Court and judiciary is not corrupt. As in Canada and Australia, those who try to import Trumpian politics to this country will get what they deserve, sooner rather than later. They are not straight, or fair. It’s a case of good riddance to bad rubbish.

For those who seek religious guidance, there is better advice to hand. Christopher Luxon has just attended the funeral of Pope Francis, who wrote:

“We need, in society as in the Church, to listen to female voices; we need diverse forms of expertise to cooperate in the formulation of an extensive and wise reflection on the future of humanity; we need all world cultures truly to be able to offer their contribution.

I see ideas formed from their experience in the periphery, reflecting a concern about the grotesque inequality of billions facing extreme deprivation while the richest one percent own half of the world’s financial wealth.

I see an attentiveness to human vulnerability; a desire to protect the natural world by seeing pollution as a cost that must be offset against the balance sheet.

I see a concern for economies that allow all who can to access work, and that place a higher value on work that generates not just wealth for shareholders but also value for society.

I see thinking that is not ideological, which moves beyond the polarization of free market capitalism and state socialism, and which has at its heart a concern that all of humanity have access to land, lodging, and labor.

Read this, then look at the Equal Pay Amendment Bill and this coalition government, with its poverty of spirit, and weep.