The c-bomb heard around the media. Photo: RNZ Mediawatch
Anyone watching the 6pm news bulletins on TVNZ 1 and Three simultaneously last Wednesday might have been tempted to call jinx.
"This pay equity issue isn't going away is it?" Simon Dallow asked TVNZ political editor Maiki Sherman on 1News.
In reply she said the row about it would roll on right up to the Budget.
"The pay equity debate is showing no signs of abating," said Lloyd Burr on ThreeNews.
It was true. The story was sticking around almost as stubbornly as the gender pay gap.
Pay equity has been on almost every homepage, front page, and news bulletin for the better part of two weeks. A lot of that coverage - particularly early on - was negative to downright angry.
On Newsroom.co.nz, Dame Anne Salmond said she was "incandescent with rage" over the halting of 33 existing pay equity claims which would have to start again under a new, more stringent scheme.
In an opinion column for The Post, Stuff's national affairs editor Andrea Vance accused six senior female MPs of acting like a word beginning with 'c' - a word still at number two on the BSA's list of terms New Zealanders rate as most offensive.
The column last Sunday that caused a storm in the House - eventually. Photo: Sunday Star Times
Disability support worker Jo-Chanelle Pouwhare was equally blunt on 1News.
"They can kiss my fat arse," she told Sherman when asked what she would say to the female MPs who supported the law change.
"Kate Sheppard will be rolling in her grave over this," Three Gals One Beehive podcast co-host Esther Robinson told listeners.
The living weren't too hot on the move either.
"What the f***?" was Robinson's co-host Georgina Stylianou's response to the political management of the issue.
Maybe the government's handling was a bit WTF because it wasn't quite anticipating such an intense barrage of bad press. It took a few days to come up with some messaging in response. But once it did, it really hammered it hard.
"All we have done is fix the law that was unworkable and also unaffordable and that compared librarians to fisheries officers," Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said under questioning in Parliament.
"The problem is Labour designed a pay equity regime that was so loose and unworkable it resulted in social workers being compared to detectives, librarians with fisheries officers," senior Cabinet minister Chris Bishop said on X.
"If you look at the comparators that were being used to determine whether it was work of equal value, for example, female admin workers were being considered with male mechanical engineers, or female librarians with male fisheries officers," said social development minister Louise Upston, in an Instagram reel recorded in a car.
ACT was even more concise, posting a female librarian and a male fisheries officer with an equals sign in between them to X, along with the words "this is what pay equity looks like under Labour".
That sparked a round of fact-checking (including from Hayden Donnell).
Three Waikato University lecturers teamed up on The Conversation to explain why comparisons between quite different sectors were a feature, rather than a bug, of the former pay equity legislation.
"Pay equity seeks to make visible and fix the deep, structural inequalities that have historically seen women's work undervalued compared to men's work. It's about ensuring jobs that are different but of equal value are paid similarly, as a way to achieve gender equality," their article said.
Lawyer Fiona McMillan told RNZ's Nights finding jobs of different-but-equal value in male-dominated fields sometimes meant comparing roles that were dissimilar at first glance.
"Parties weren't looking for odd comparators for the fun of it. But often comparators weren't close to home because either they didn't exist - or those close to home were female-dominated anyway, so it wasn't of assistance."
But these explanations barely had time to clear the political windshield before more mudslinging messed it up again.
For a while, journalists were distracted by a lengthy argument between National and Labour over who was lying about what. Lloyd Burr's ThreeNews video editor did a great job of making duelling accusations delivered at separate times in different places into a coherent conversation.
Burr also wrote an explainer which went through the political back-and-forth, before pointing out this semantic debate risked taking the story away from its central facts.
"The truth of it is this: women who were in the process of a pay equity claim with the government will get a pay rise under the new system, but it won't be as much and it will take much longer to get."
Despite all of this, the plight of those women remained in the headlines until Wednesday afternoon, when ACT's Brooke van Velden denoted a c-bomb in Parliament.
"I do not agree with the clearly gendered and patrionising language that Andrea Vance used to reduce senior Cabinet minister to girl bosses, hype squads, references to 'girl math' and c****," she said, with reference to Andrea Vance's controversial opinion piece.
In politics, there's something called a dead cat strategy. If you're in trouble, the wisdom goes, just throw a dead cat on the table. Pretty soon everyone will have forgotten what they were talking about originally and start discussing the dead cat.
In this case, cat could be replaced with another slightly less savoury word beginning with c.
At the very least, we know van Velden's historic entry into Hansard was pre-planned. It came as a response to a notified written question from Labour's Jan Tinetti, which referenced a section of Vance's scathing article for The Post.
RNZ's political editor Jo Moir confirmed the ACT MP had done some groundwork before making her response.
"It was a really bizarre decision by Labour yesterday... thinking it would be some sort of ammunition in the House - and to put it on notice so that Brooke van Velden had more than a couple of hours to think about how she was going to respond to it," she said.
"It meant she had time to go to the Clerk of the House and check whether she could use the c-word in the House."
Dead cat distraction
If this was a media distraction tactic from the government, it worked impeccably. Every major news website in the country led with Van Velden's c-bomb. It was the lead story on 1News. ThreeNews delivered a bulletin-opening play on words.
"To C or not to C - that was the question for parliament when workplace relations minister Brooke van Velden chose to use the c-word in full today," said presenter Samantha Hayes.
The following morning, TVNZ's Breakfast brought in a language expert to discuss the nuances of calling someone the c word.
That interview was interesting but, as Moir noted on RNZ, it was also a sign that the coverage had strayed quite a long way from the original topic - pay equity for low-paid women.
"Now everyone's stopped talking about the issues that Labour had been on this - and are now talking about what language is appropriate or inappropriate and whether a former minister of women was right in raising remarks from a column that many believe was misogynistic."
Labour MP Kieran McAnulty echoed that lament while sitting shoulder to shoulder with Chris Bishop on TVNZ's Breakfast.
"The billions of dollars earmarked for future settlements that would have gone to women workers isn't going to now. That is the issue we really want to focus on. There's been a few distractions and attempts to point the finger elsewhere and 'hey, look over here', but those things remain and matter to millions of New Zealanders."
They do matter, though it might have helped if Labour's own MP and former minister for women hadn't brought up Vance's column in a written Parliamentary question.
The past week has been a lesson in how both how forceful and single-minded our media can be - and how easy it is to divert them. There's no easy solution. When someone dumps a dead 'c' on the table in Parliament it's hard not to talk about it.
But in the end a debate about media ethics is probably not the most important thing in this story. That would be the thousands of low-paid women who won't be getting a pay rise they were counting on, at least in the near future. Even if new - and potentially sweary - developments arise, their story doesn't go away.
Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
