Many women I know are livid that the NZ coalition government’s Pay Equity Amendment Bill was passed this week by Parliament.[i] This has brought back Fair Pay Agreement processes, as previously laid out in the Equal Pay Act, to a grinding halt. The outcome is the cancellation of 33 claims being currently negotiated, along with several tighter restrictions making it much harder to make such claims in future.

We cannot understand the waves and forms of Palestinian resistance unless we understand the inter-generational effects of the initial forced displacement of Palestinians and the obliteration of all vestiges of Palestinian occupation of the land followed by a rewriting of history through a Jewish supremacist and anti-Arab lens.

A recent debate on The Standard about trans rights touched on a range of  issues – dead naming, the use of preferred pronouns, the actual incidence of sex self-ID related harm to women since the passing of legislation, access to toilets, and so on. If this was a 1960s British comedy, it would be titled Carry On Up The Cul-de-sac.
The issue of female-only facilities such as public lavatories1 changing rooms, domestic violence and rape crisis centres, hospital wards and prisons has to be placed in both an historical and a contemporary context.

Guardian Media Group

Listening Up For Women

On reflection, I’m happy that I drove the 120 kilometre round trip in last Thursday’s filthy weather, to hear Speak Up For Women present their arguments against controversial proposals for sex self-identification (Sex Self ID) in the Births, Deaths, Marriages & Relationships Registration (BDMRR) Bill at Wellington’s Michael Fowler Centre.