While coalition partner NZ First ties itself in knots defining women, National seems to just be cottoning on to the fact that women exist.<\/p>\n
Mum was the word at the Hippo playground in Botany, where Christopher Luxon was positively glowing. \u201cFantastic, good to see you,\u201d he beamed to the throng who had gathered on Sunday at the cutting edge of \u201centertainment and professional Cafe food\u201d. The National Party leader\u2019s eyes sparkled, his grin stretched, his skin was luminous. He had that new mum radiance \u2013 not from becoming one himself, but from a recent groundbreaking discovery that mums, and indeed women, may actually exist.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Flanked by not one, not two, but four real-life women, Luxon said it was \u201creally awesome\u201d to be joined by Nicola Willis, Nicola Grigg, Katie Nimon and Nancy Lu to announce that, if re-elected, National will extend paid parental leave to 30 weeks by 2029. \u201cNational has a plan to support mums and dads with greater financial flexibility, to give them the choice of spending more time with their baby at home,\u201d he said, uttering \u201cmum\u201d a further seven times in three minutes.\u00a0<\/p>\n
With Willis, Grigg, Nimon and Lu nodding vigorously throughout, Luxon added that National would also bring back a policy that would allow both parents to take paid parental leave at the same time. But wait, there\u2019s more! National would also protect changes in the Employment Leave Act to prevent holiday pay being reduced for those who have recently returned from parental leave. \u201cOverwhelmingly, it is working mums who face that penalty,\u201d he said solemnly.\u00a0<\/p>\n
LLM (Luxon Loves Mums)<\/p>\n
The policy announcement came off the back of a huge week for National and their treasured working mums. Just three days prior, then-NZ First candidate Stuart Nash was revealed to have complained (erroneously) that National MP Katie Nimon took \u201cnine months off on full pay, went back for a week, then took another month off\u201d after she had her baby, additionally calling her the \u201claziest MP I have ever come across\u201d and a \u201cnice woman, but ill-suited to the rigours of being an electorate MP\u201d.<\/p>\n
Luxon declared Nash, who eventually apologised and resigned his candidacy, would never be a minister in a government he led. Many of National\u2019s male MPs also got in on the act, posting heartfelt messages of support for Nimon on Facebook. Simeon Brown issued a joke apology for his own laziness while taking parental leave after the births of his four children. Chris Bishop shared a photo with Nimon and her baby out in the electorate, as did James Meagher from his first visit to see \u201cmum and bub\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Combined with Paul Goldsmith\u2019s policy announcement about updating consent laws arriving \u201cas if from thin air<\/a>\u201d the previous weekend, this sudden laser focus on issues that primarily affect women feels a little bit suss, like Sam Uffindell boasting about occasionally doing the grocery shopping<\/a> or Simon Court bravely solving poverty with menstrual cups<\/a>. And it surely has absolutely nothing to do with what The Post journalist Andrea Vance calls a \u201chaemorrhaging\u201d of support among <\/a>women aged 35-54.<\/p>\n The pivot has also come in for scrutiny from Labour. Just as National was accused of being disingenuous in not making changes to our consent laws sooner, with Labour MP Camilla Belich claiming the party \u201cwalked away\u201d from cross-party legislation to make its own announcement<\/a>, Luxon was also challenged yesterday about National blocking an extension to paid parental leave back in 2016. \u201cI\u2019m sorry, I only came to politics in 2020,\u201d he told RNZ<\/a>. \u201cI don\u2019t know what happened in the past.\u201d<\/p>\n I get it, we all have a hard time remembering anything from before 2020, be it parental leave legislation, shutter shades, or \u2018The Harlem Shake\u2019. So if we just look at what the National-led government has actually done for women voters this term, what do we find? In terms of justice issues that predominantly affect women, there\u2019s been the criminalisation of stalking<\/a>, now punishable by up to five years in prison, as well as the scrapping of character references for sex offenders<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s also been good news for boards, pipelines and toolkits \u2013 three things I can confirm all ladies absolutely love. In June, Nicola Grigg announced that women hold 50.2% of public sector board and committee<\/a> roles (although this is the sixth consecutive year women\u2019s representation has met the 50% target). In July, Grigg announced a BoardConnector pipeline<\/a> to further grow governance representation for women, adding to her previous Toolkit for calculating gender pay gaps<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n But we also can\u2019t ignore the more dubious moves, such as the crusade against trans women, led by NZ First and often pitched as essential in protecting cis women (exclusive comment: we\u2019re all good). Where\u2019s National been on this? Mostly silent, but still supporting<\/a> its coalition partner\u2019s move to define a man and woman<\/a> and fight what Peters calls the \u201cwoke ideology that has crept in over the last few years, undermining the protection, progression, and safety of women\u201d.<\/p>\n Then there\u2019s the sledgehammer taken to pay equity<\/a>, which scrapped dozens of live claims<\/a> affecting more than 180,000 people and made it much harder for workers in female-dominated fields to fight for more pay. Unions described it as a \u201cshameful attack on women<\/a>\u201d, former MPs found it to be a \u201cflagrant and significant abuse of power<\/a>\u201d and even the United Nations have heard about it<\/a>. Act\u2019s Brook van Velden is credited with gutting the programme, but according to David Seymour at least, it saved National finance minister Nicola Willis\u2019s 2025 budget.<\/p>\n But wahoo for women, right? National loves women, mothers, mums and bubs. Just yesterday Luxon led his post-cabinet conference reiterating the importance of supporting mums and dads, babies and families with their FamilyBoost scheme. It\u2019s almost as if he too was once just a baby who even possibly came from a mother, a mummy, or even a mum. Then again, he only got into politics in 2020, so we don\u2019t necessarily know what happened in the past.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While coalition partner NZ First ties itself in knots defining women, National seems to just be cottoning on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":546570,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[11508,31190,3556,111,43,139,69,2114,268617,135],"class_list":["post-546569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-christopher-luxon","tag-gender","tag-national","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-opinion","tag-pay-equity","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=546569"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546569\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/546570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=546569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=546569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=546569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Paul Goldsmith has also appeared in public with some women.<\/p>\n