Keynote address to National Council of Women Conference 2006

Rau rangatira mâ, tçnei te mihi ki a koutou i runga i te kaupapa o te râ – mana wahine. Tçnâ koutou, tçnâ koutou, tçnâ râ tâtou katoa.

Thank you for the invitation to address your conference on your 110th Anniversary as an organisation that has made such a significant contribution to the advancement of women’s rights in New Zealand. I have three partner organisations: NCW, Maori Women's Welfare League and Pacifica. Each gives me access to the best possible sources of information in my role as Minister of Women's Affairs and that is from women themselves.

I mention this because your theme this year is one of access and it is a recurring theme throughout your 110 years as an organisation and even before that when some of your founders played such a significant role in earning New Zealand the status of the first country to grant women the right to vote.

When the leaders of New Zealand's women's movement, the NCW, gathered in my home town of Christchurch on the 13 April 1896, they understood that gaining the vote was only a first step towards equality.

Resolutions passed at those early meetings of the NCW demanded that the law be made equal for men and women in areas such as marriage and employment. They urged that women be able to be elected to Parliament and to be appointed to public offices, such as the police, and to be able to serve on juries.

They argued for free and longer education for children, and they advocated universal old age pensions, prison reform, and the abolition of capital punishment.

113 years later all these demands have been met, although some, such as equal pay, took more than 80 years to get on the statute books and are taking much longer to achieve in practice.

We owe a huge debt of gratitude to these women. Their vision anticipated the ongoing struggle, but they were also women of an era that believed that women had an innate morality and that our ‘maternal instincts’ could overhaul politics and bring about a better world.

I asked NCW to send me an updated list of the kinds of remits that have been passed over recent years and it is great to see the government has been able to listen to many of those concerns and address them. I am preparing a response to the other issues that you have raised that I have not yet had the chance to discuss with you directly. However, the exercise has made me acutely aware of how important it is to maintain a good dialogue as matters are addressed. The key issues you have raised are all work-in-progress from addressing the needs of kinship carers, travel costs for home-based carers, overseas development aid, to specific education and health issues. All of them have had some progress, partly as a result of the concerns raised by NCW, but also as a result of a genuine coincidence of interest in these matters by the government.

The list itself also identifies how significant the interest is from NCW on such a broad range of matters. I hope you have a kept a record of the results of remits over the 110 years, because I am sure that the results will look good.

I also don't know if anyone has kept a record of how many submissions NCW has made to select committees on legislative proposals ranging from business law reform all the way through to the section 59 debate.

What I like about the NCW is the fact that your membership allows for what is often the moderate voice of reason to emerge to lead debate on what can be quite controversial matters – especially when others are portraying the issues in a particular way in order to stifle genuine debate. Even when you cannot reach consensus, you present your arguments for and against with integrity and it is always a valuable contribution.

My own awareness of feminist issues arose in the 1980s when I became involved in the union movement, and the debate around the Working Women’s Charter. We grappled with the issue of access to childcare. We grappled with the issue of women returning to the workforce after having a family and we grappled with an issue I describe today as gender segregation, but in those days just meant women got all the low paid jobs. I remember when early childhood workers got a pay increase only when the minimum wage was increased.

I attended one of the nationwide series of workshops in Christchurch that led to the establishment of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs by the 4th Labour government. Our concern as union women was that the needs of low-paid women might be lost in debates about issues like job-sharing, because there wasn't much to share when you were earning a little over $5 per hour.

I did not imagine that I would one day be the Minister of Women’s Affairs, although the fact that the selection meeting when I was first selected to stand for Parliament did not finish until 2am the following morning, meaning I was selected on Women’s Suffrage Day, should have been a premonition of what was to come. That occurred 16 years ago and it seems like a lifetime.

I came to Parliament unexpectedly and was immediately devastated by the tyranny of an absolute majority that made a mockery of the gains we had made for low-paid women workers in the 1980s.

If anyone wants to understand why I am such a strong supporter of MMP then read any one of the speeches I gave during the debate on the repeal of the Employment Equity Act, the introduction of the Employment Contracts Act, the legislation that cut benefits and any one of the legislative changes that came out of the 1991 Budget. The impact on women of all of the changes was overwhelming.

Although I did not ask to be Minister of Women’s Affairs, I believe it is my responsibility to remind women of how easily gains that have been made can be taken away with the stroke of the legislative pen. Having seen it happen before, I am determined that it will not happen again.

Besides which, there is more to be done. If we as women have to stand our ground just to protect what we have, then how are we ever going to advance our cause? I am thinking here of issues such as equal pay for work of equal value; of occupational segregation; and of New Zealand’s intolerable record of family violence, the vast majority of the victims of which are women and children.

These are issues that demonstrate that simply changing the law does not, in itself, change the attitudes and behaviours that gave rise to the discrimination in the first place, and which continue to underpin ongoing discrimination.

The Equal Pay Act was passed in 1972 and implemented in annual steps to 1977. At that stage – nearly 30 years ago – most of the legal barriers to pay equity were removed; yet last year, women’s average hourly earnings were still 18 percent lower than those of men. The fact that a gap remains – and that it is narrowing at such a slow rate – highlights how hard it is to address an issue with such complex causal and influencing factors.

The same is true of occupational segregation, whether it is at the board level – where little more than 7 percent of directors on our top 100 listed companies are women – or at grass-roots level, where only 8.5 percent of people in the Modern Apprenticeship Scheme are women.

And it is certainly true of family violence, where between 2000 and 2004, 54 women were killed by men with whom they had had an intimate relationship. For those that say that women are equally violent to men, then the comparative number is three. I am not saying that three deaths are acceptable, but no-one can tell me that domestic violence is not a gender issue.

These things are happening today in a country that has one of the most comprehensive sets of human rights legislation in the world. Of course there are things that government can do other than changing the law, and we are always looking for more effective interventions.

On the equal pay issue for instance we decided that the government sector had to itself show leadership as an employer. The government has committed to a five-year Plan of Action on Pay and Employment Equity to ensure that remuneration, job choice and job opportunities in the public service, public health and public education sectors are not affected by gender. Over the next three years every government department will undertake a pay and employment equity review and develop and implement an organisation-specific programme to address any issues found.

We are essentially putting our own house in order before we ask others to look at themselves, although that being said there are many companies that are already doing so in order to stay ahead of the game. Many employers have started to realise that work-life balance means as much to their male employees as it does to their female employees, especially when they are committed to equally sharing parenting and household duties. Family-friendly workplaces will be nothing more than a slogan if the roles of both parents are not respected.

We also have our own house in order on the issue of women on boards, where determination by this government, backed by a very effective Nominations Service run by the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, should see us achieve our target of equal representation of men and women on state sector boards and committees by 2010.

And we are addressing occupational segregation in the wider economy with both money and with education. The big increase in pay for nurses working in our public hospitals was a recognition that low pay rates are a feature of occupations dominated by women and are one of the factors that supports continued occupational segregation. And government is working hard to encourage more women into the Modern Apprentices Scheme through initiatives such as the ‘Give Girls A Go’ campaign that the Human Rights Commission launched earlier this month.

It was great meeting such enthusiastic young women who refused to see barriers to taking up apprenticeships in non-traditional fields. And it was great meeting employers who were equally as enthusiastic about the qualities the young women brought to their male-dominated environments.

At last week's Australasian Ministerial Conference, we were successful in gaining funding to commission the OECD to investigate the broader economic impacts of gender-based occupational segregation. Although the links with pay equity are clear, there may also be a significant correlation with productivity gains, labour market responsiveness (in light of skill shortages) and economic sustainability, (especially for low income women). The Australian government, state and territorial Ministers all supported New Zealand's request, which has made 50,000 Australian dollars available for the research.

Your conference theme of ‘access’ is well chosen because all the things I have mentioned are access issues. There are still significant barriers to women fully accessing economic independence, work-life balance, health and well-being, but increasingly the barriers are ones that government cannot address on its own. The barriers that remain are more about attitudes and behaviour, and I cannot legislate for attitudes.

The progress we make over the coming decades will increasingly be the result of much closer co-operation within government – the whole-of-government approach we have been promoting – and between government, non-government organisations such as NCW, and the wider community.

That is why the
Taskforce for Action on Violence within Families included the judiciary and the police, together with representatives of government and non-government organisations. It is a good example of what can be achieved with a very high level of co-ordination between government agencies and non-government organisations working in the area.

If there ever was an issue that needed all parts of society to work together for change, eliminating family violence is it, but the same kind of approach is needed for most of the issues we face. What we are still faced with is gender stereotyping and as I have said on more than one occasion, that is just as damaging to men's capacity to fulfil their potential as it is to women.

It is certainly no time to rest, or to assume that gains so recently made, and with so much effort, cannot be readily reversed. In international forums on the rights of women, New Zealand increasingly finds itself fighting to retain advances won in the 1980s and 1990s rather than having the opportunity to promote further progress. There is a type of conservatism influencing the international agenda that hides behind the banner of family values. These are values we are all committed to, but those of us who wish to advance the place of women, not see us regress, uphold family values in a form that is respectful of everyone's human rights, not just those of a privileged few.

The suffragists who fought for the vote in the 19th Century knew that the struggle was ultimately to change hearts and minds, and not just change the law. That struggle is still with us today.

On the eve of Suffrage Day this year, I had the pleasure of helping NCW’s Wellington Branch celebrate its 90th anniversary and I quoted this passage from a book they have had published on their history:

‘The mothers of the present need to impress upon our children’s minds how much the women of the past wrested and fought, suffered and wept, prayed and believed, and organised and won for them the freedom they enjoy today.’

Nellie Perryman said that in 1918 and it could just have easily been said today. This is our greatest collective responsibility, because if our rights are undermined or indeed lost, then access to them becomes redundant.

We must remind ourselves just how many of our rights have been gained in our lifetime and ensure that today's young women, who are growing up in a generation that has not had to struggle for those rights, learn the lessons of the past and take nothing for granted.

Thank you.