A year after pay equity was stripped from women, we are seeing – again – how this country relies on women’s unpaid and underpaid labour: caring, birthing, leading communities, and holding people together. When women demand fair pay for work society cannot function without, we are still met with the same excuse: equality is “too expensive”. The truth is simple – inequality is what costs lives.
For Māori women, this injustice is intensified by colonisation, which systematically attacked Indigenous women’s authority, leadership, and economic power. Today, Māori women are over‑represented in caring roles where cultural labour, advocacy, and whānau support are expected as standard – yet rarely recognised, resourced, or paid. That is not “extra”; it is essential work, and it must be valued and not invisibilised.
I see the same pattern inside NZNO: a predominantly female workforce whose voice is being sidelined in a system that is broken, inequitable, and unfair. Nursing is being worn down in real time – by austerity, by restructuring, and by decisions made without us. Nursing hasn’t lost its worth; it has been pushed further from the tables where power sits. And if we are not in the room, women’s work is treated as optional.
Over time, national nursing leadership in Aotearoa New Zealand has suffered a steady, significant loss of authority, standing, and day‑to‑day influence across the health system. Nursing is the largest health workforce and the backbone of care delivery, yet our role in national governance has been reduced to “advice” while others hold the levers of funding, policy, and accountability. When nurses are kept advisory, women are kept powerless.
Members, we are at a turning point. This government has made it unmistakably clear: if we want pay, equity, safe staffing, and dignity for our patients and whānau, we must organise and act as a political force. We are not “just carers” - we are women workers with rights, and we will not be quiet while those rights are rolled back.
In earlier years, Members worked within tight rules about staffing and about how far we could go to protect patients and whānau. Even then, the system was – and remains – structurally designed to produce inequitable outcomes for Māori and for women. But a social contract held: Government would properly fund a public health system, and voters would defend it at the ballot box. That promise has been broken. And when it breaks, women - nurses, caregivers, mothers, aunties - absorb the damage first.
As power has been pulled away from the front line, Members have been pushed further from decision‑making. We are told to “justify” our value to management while competing for shrinking roles and resources. Successive governments - and too many voters - have treated our professions with growing disregard and have normalised the slow erosion of public health. This is what the rollback of women’s rights looks like in practice: women’s labour is squeezed, our voices are dismissed, and our communities pay the price.
We will not stay passive while governments make choices that harm our patients, our communities, and our profession - and while women’s rights and pay equity are treated as negotiable. We will speak, organise, and demand change.