Brooke van Velden has resigned as Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety, and the occasion demands considerably more than the polite eulogy that ministerial departures typically attract. Her tenure was, by any serious accounting, one of the most regressive periods in New Zealand's modern labour history. To permit it to dissolve into the news cycle without further examination would be a profound disservice to the hundreds of thousands of workers whose livelihoods and legal protections were stripped away while she held the portfolio.
Let's start with the overnight demolition of pay equity protections for working women. In August 2024, the government rushed amendments to the Equal Pay Act through under urgency, extinguishing the legal mechanisms by which workers in female-dominated industries could pursue pay equity claims.
The affected workforce, predominantly women employed in aged care, early childhood education, and health support, had in many cases invested years in building claims through the proper channels. Those claims were voided at speed. Subsequent estimates placed the number of affected workers at well over 300,000, including nurses, teachers, support staff, hospice workers, and caregivers, with warnings of care sector breakdowns and skilled workers leaving for Australia.
On 19 March 2025, RNZ reported:
How a crucial 45-minute meeting between ministers took pay equity claims away from tens of thousands of women
Those choices formed the backbone of the government's overhaul of the once "world-leading" Equal Pay Act - retrospectively stripping nurses, teachers, carers and other female-dominated workforces of the right to pursue pay equity claims under the existing law.
Within five weeks of that meeting, Parliament had passed the Equal Pay Amendment Act under urgency - a move the people's select committee last month described as "a flagrant and significant abuse of power".
The legislation was announced then passed all stages of Parliament within three days in May, meaning the public had no opportunity to make submissions through the usual select committee process.
Dozens of in-train claims were stopped. The rules governing future claims were significantly tightened. And $12.8 billion originally earmarked to fix decades of systemic gender discrimination was instead returned to the Crown's Budget allowances.
The government's justification, that the framework was too costly and legally unpredictable, amounted to a frank admission: the rights of low-paid women were to be weighed against fiscal convenience and discarded. Van Velden offered this argument with the characteristic breezy confidence of someone who has never had to worry about whether her wages reflected the gendered undervaluation of her occupation.
Van Velden even proudly stated that she had saved the Budget by axing pay equity. She said this as though stripping hundreds of thousands of women of the right to fair remuneration was a sensible line item to balance, rather than an act of deliberate economic harm to the most vulnerable workers in the country.
On 24 March 2026, RNZ reported:
ACT Party deputy and minister Brooke van Velden retires from politics
On the decisions she's made in government, van Velden said she's proud of all of them, including the highly controversial changes to the pay equity regime.
"I hand on heart believe that the decisions I made and the actions I took were in the best interests of the country, and ultimately I saved the Budget."
This is where the gaslighting becomes particularly galling. ACT has always presented itself as a party of individual freedom and fairness, the great liberators of the citizen from state interference. Yet when working women sought to use a legal framework to secure fair pay, the party moved with extraordinary speed to shut that framework down. The freedom ACT champions is, in practice, the freedom of employers to continue paying women less. Everything else is rhetoric.
That hypocrisy runs deeper still when one examines ACT's own internal culture. In June 2024, reporting by Stuff journalist Tova O'Brien revealed a picture of the ACT Party campaign operation that bore little resemblance to the party's libertarian self-image. At least six staff members and volunteers had quit following the 2023 general election, citing allegations of intimidation and unfair treatment of women.
Sources described a culture of fear, comparing the campaign environment to the Hunger Games. The party's own board faced a vote of no confidence. Candidates and volunteers were left in tears. This is the organisation whose deputy leader was entrusted with protecting New Zealand's workers from exploitation and harm in the workplace. The irony here is profound.
On 7 June 2024, RNZ reported:
Tears and resignations after ‘train wreck’ ACT Party election campaign, sources claim
Allegations of a culture of fear
Several people close to the party spoke to Stuff on the condition of anonymity.
The divisions between "Mission Control" and "HQ" were at the heart of the ructions, they said.
"HQ became a bit like a military hospital," one source said. "Mission control, were shooting their kneecaps out faster than HQ could patch everybody up.
"It wasn't unusual to be at HQ and see people in tears, be it candidates or supporters, just sitting down saying I can't do this anymore."
Things got worse when problems started arising with candidates - one compared vaccine mandates to concentration camps, another compared the vaccine to drownings and another referred to Covid as "mass hysteria".
"There was a culture of fear in the party when the wheels started coming off around candidates, anyone that stuck their head up above the parapet was seen as dispensable."
Then there is the minimum wage manipulations. For nearly three consecutive years under this coalition, minimum wage increases have failed to keep pace with inflation. In real terms, New Zealand's most vulnerable workers have gone backwards every single year. This isn't economic bad luck. It is the predictable consequence of a government that regards minimum wage increases as an inconvenience.
Van Velden happily presided over each of those inflation-adjusted wage cuts, invoking, as ACT ministers often do, the spectre of small business hardship.
On 26 October 2025, the NZ Herald (pay-walled) reported:
Meet Brooke van Velden – the minister loathed by unions and loved by business
Van Velden has been the most polarising minister of labour or workplace in the past 50 years for unions and workers.
Brooke van Velden's philosophical indifference to the welfare of ordinary people was perhaps most vividly exposed in her now-infamous comments about the value of human life. Appearing on Q&A with Jack Tame, she appeared to reconfirm that New Zealand had placed too high a value on human life during the COVID pandemic, stating that the country completely blew out what the value of a life was and that she had never seen such a high value on life.
The comment was not a gaffe. It was a window into the worldview that animated her entire tenure as the minister responsible for worker safety. That attitude to life ultimately followed her into the significant portfolios her mentor David Seymour attained for her in the right-wing coalition government.
Just like the covid response saving lives was not a bad thing for the economy, the evidence shows that higher minimum wages do not destroy jobs in the way Brooke van Velden and the ACT Party's ideological tradition has always insisted they will.
The rewriting of contractor law sits alongside these failures as a reform that will outlast the headlines. The changes narrowed the tests by which workers could establish that they were employees rather than contractors. In practice, this shifts power decisively toward the multinational platform companies, logistics operators, and labour hire firms that have always preferred contractor arrangements precisely because they eliminate sick leave, holiday pay, and the protections of the Employment Relations Act.
Uber drivers, transport workers, construction workers, cleaners, security staff, and labour hire workers all had protections removed, stripping their rights to minimum wage protection, extended leave entitlements, unfair dismissal protections, and their employer's superannuation obligations. The language of worker choice and flexibility was deployed to obscure what was, in substance, a gift to corporate interests.
On 24 March 2026, Emily Writes reported:
So, Brooke Van Velden, this is your life...
Van Velden removed protections for all of these workers by allowing them to be classed as contractors despite their actual work situation. This removed their rights to minimum wage protection, extended leave entitlements, unfair dismissal protections and their employer's superannuation obligations. Her Employment Relations Amendment Bill essentially rewrote employer-employee relationship obligations into a form never before seen in the modern working world.
All of this has occurred against a backdrop of accelerating economic destruction that the coalition has done nothing to address. Heinz Wattie's announced the closure of three factories in Auckland, Christchurch, and Dunedin, affecting around 350 jobs. The McCain processing plant also shut its doors, leaving Buy NZ Made to warn that these closures reflected broader structural challenges facing New Zealand manufacturing, with almost half of surveyed producers citing slow demand.
In Nelson alone, the closures of Kitchen Things, the Eves Valley sawmill, Proper Crisps, and Sealord's coated fish factory saw over 500 jobs vanish in the space of three months. In the first half of 2025, 1,270 businesses shut down, a 12 percent increase on the same period the year prior.
On 31 August 2025, E tū reported:
Manufacturing in crisis: Closures hit hard in 2025
It's been a devastating year for manufacturing workers around the motu, with major closures gutting local economies and leaving thousands of skilled workers out of a job.
...
These aren’t isolated incidents, but symptoms of a deeper failure. The Government has no clear plan to protect the country’s manufacturing base. While other countries invest in green tech, domestic supply chains, and set proper industrial strategies, Aotearoa is letting decades of expertise and infrastructure slip away.
This is the economic environment in which van Velden was weakening worker protections, cutting real wages, attempting to gut health and safety regulations that were passed in the wake of the Pike River disaster, and handing legal advantages to employers. Families and survivors of the Pike River tragedy described their meeting with van Velden as a waste of time: She seemed to be focusing all the time on the employers, said Sonya Rockhouse.
One might have expected a Minister for Workplace Relations to ask what impact her policy agenda was having on workers already confronting redundancy, casualisation, and economic insecurity. There is no evidence she did.
Then came the parliamentary theatre. In May 2025, in response to a Labour question referencing a Sunday Star-Times column by journalist Andrea Vance that had used the C word against the female ministers who dismantled pay equity, van Velden became the first MP to use that word in the debating chamber, framing her outburst as a defence of women against misogynistic language.
The performance was characteristic: theatrical indignation deployed to reframe a debate about the stripping of women's rights into one about parliamentary decorum. It succeeded, briefly, in changing the subject, but the 300,000 women who lost their pay equity claims remained without recourse.
On 14 May 2025, RNZ reported:
Brooke van Velden drops C-word in Parliament
I do not agree with the clearly gendered and patronising language that [national affairs editor for the Sunday Star-Times] Andrea Vance used to reduce senior Cabinet ministers to girlbosses, hype squads, references to girl math and c****," van Velden said.
What we are witnessing, and have been witnessing since 2023, is the consequence of allowing ACT's neoliberalism to function as the ideological operating system of a government nominally led by the National Party. National, once a broad church capable of restraint and pragmatism, has been progressively colonised by ACT's worldview, an economic doctrine with a long and distinguished record of failure that stretches from the 1980s reforms Roger Douglas inflicted on New Zealand to its various iterations elsewhere. It treats labour as a cost to be minimised, regulation as an imposition to be dismantled, and workers as mere market actors who need only be freed from protection to flourish.
Van Velden leaves office with a record that should not be quietly filed away. It should be studied, in detail, as a case study in what happens when personally held beliefs outrank evidence, and when the interests of multinational corporations are accorded a higher priority than the dignity and security of working people.