But if there's one thing you can take from these polls, which they both agree on, it's that the pay equity revamp hasn’t turned into the circuit breaker that the left clearly thought it was going to be.
The polls are almost identical in the proportion of people who oppose the revamp. The One News poll had 45 percent, the RNZ poll had 43 percent.
That is not big. It is absolutely a plurality - in both polls, more people oppose it than support it.
I’ve seen polls where 70 percent, 80 percent of people oppose something. Someone pointed out to me the polls that were done after Hekia Parata used Budget 2012 to announce class sizes would change - about 80 percent hated it. So 45 percent is nothing.
It certainly isn’t the circuit breaker and make-people-hate-the-Government moment that Labour and the Greens and the unions were hoping it would be.
Why? I don’t know. I thought it was a slam dunk for the opposition to run home but maybe people didn’t understand it enough to care.
Maybe the Government managed to claw back the narrative when it started properly explaining what it was doing, maybe Labour completely ballsed it up, maybe Andrea Vance distracted everyone by calling female ministers the c-bomb.
Or maybe people are just ideologically entrenched and not wanting to oppose anything the Government does because they voted for the Government - and so on.
I don’t know. But what is clear is that it’s not the moment it could’ve been - or was expected to be.
And the Government has not been damaged by this as badly as it could’ve been.
Heather du Plessis-Allan is a journalist and commentator who hosts Newstalk ZB's Drive show HERE - where this article was sourced.
10 comments:
Considering how little discussion has occurred it is surprising so many have views. One wonders what drove their instinctive reaction. I doubt if many realised the outcome would be more the result of legal debating skills than the actual situations. Or that it would trigger another round of serious inflation. Or that that matters. Or that it would extend yet another sinecure for the legal industry. Do men reject higher female wages as threatening? Do non working women reject out of jealousy? Do women in truly simple jobs without equal resist increase of other women's wage? The problem with polls and our voting system is that the seriously considered view is inseparable from the instinctive, programmed, irrational, fashionable, random etc.
I think there's a difference between what you disapprove of and what affects your vote. Most of those directly affected by the change would already be left voters; many of those opposed but not affected would be other women. The Coalition polls better among men than among women. Given all that, however, there'd be people who disapproved - especially of the underhand process - without this being a deal-breaker. The Marilyn Waring group will keep the issue alive, and that will probably have some effect. But to make inroads in the Coalition vote, this issue would need to be bundled with others in the lead-up to the election.
Robert - you should know that a lack of information or discussion never stopped anyone holding an opinion. Democracy doesn’t require an IQ test before entering a polling place ( or a poll) - sadly.
Pay equity incredibly complicated. I have a USA PhD, which takes at least three years more than a NZ PhD. Should I be paid more for those 3+ years? I can teach 10 different courses. Should I be paid more than somebody who only can teach 5 different courses? But we do the same job!
It'd depend where you're working. If it's in tertiary education, then the actual uni where you took your PhD will be more important than the years taken, as well as what you've published from it. And presumably the wider range of courses might be reflected in your starting grade and salary, and/or your rate of promotion, by comparison with colleagues. In any case, the areas where people regularly have PhDs tend not to be female-dominated.....
>" I have a USA PhD, which takes at least three years more than a NZ PhD"
Really? I have spent most of my life working in universities and have experience of both systems (British-derived/US) and find this statement hard to swallow. A PhD takes 3 years as far as I know, although this not infrequently spills over into 4. But it does depend on where you start counting. When I was an undergraduate in NZ 50 years ago, there were still 1-year Masterates in some disciplines so you could get a PhD 7 years after entering varsity (3 for Bachelor's then 1 for Master's then 3 for PhD). That was based on the English system but the Scottish system became more common as time went on and now the norm is 4 years for the first degree plus a 2-year Master's and then PhD, i.e. 9 years all up. (Note that all Bachelor's in the US system are 4 years.)
If you want to study medicine or law in the US you have to do a Bachelor's degree in just about any discipline (unrelated to medicine or law) and then get selected for medical school or law school. What a waste of time and money compared to the way we go about these in the British system. They call their first degrees in medicine and law 'doctorates' but in fact they are not (some people may be surprised to learn that the first degree in medicine here is a Bachelor's and the word 'doctor' does not appear on the degree parchment). These are of 4 years duration.
The continental European systems feature upper secondary schools that students stay in until age 19/20 by which time the academic level of study would be approaching second-year undergrad in the British system. European degrees compare more than favourably with British and US ones. Many to most Europeans do not really respect British and US Bachelor's degrees.
In short, comparisons based merely on how long it takes to reach a certain rung on the academic ladder are not very meaningful.
A USA PhD includes coursework and written exams--at least when I did it. I needed to pass four written exams in four areas, each took two hours. I think I took 10 classes as a PhD student. I needed to pass two foreign language exams. Then I spent 3 years writing a 100000 word dissertation. In USA one usually does a MA first, which also includes coursework and a 30K+ word thesis. In NZ and Oz one can do BA Hons and then a three-year PhD and then get an academic job as lecturer. Very little chance to get a USA academic job with a NZ or Oz PhD, particularly in the Arts. I think Canadian PhDs modeled on USA. nobody else. I think medical training also much longer in USA.
>"In NZ and Oz one can do BA Hons and then a three-year PhD"
Most PhD candidates go into a PhD programme from a 2-year Master's degree. (Where 1-year Masterates still exist, they tend to be terminating qualifications.)
>"I think medical training also much longer in USA."
The American MD takes 4 years - much less than our MBChB/MBBS of 6 years.
Not convinced yet that different uni programmes in different countries, or universities as employers, are relevant to pay equity in either its discarded or its new forms.
If people interested in varying degrees by country, simply google it, say stanford english phd requirements or choose any university or discipline. Top USA universities usually guarantee five years of funding with a competitive sixth year of funding possible. Why? Because 95% of the top endowed universities in the the world are in the USA. But the average PhD takes longer than 5-6 years. Re MDs, to be a GP is four year undergrad degree, usually a Science major, four years of Medical school, three years of residency. Probably the most qualified doctors in the world are pediatric heart surgeons trained in the USA or maybe Canada, some of whom have four year undergrad, four years med school, five years general surgery training, two or three years cardiothoracic training, one year pediatric training and sometimes one year transplantation training. Re pay equity, point is that educational standards and qualifications vary. A USA PhD in, say, English, could still mean that the academic is very average.
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