Healthcare? Anti-woke. Trans healthcare? Woke. (Photo: Getty Images, treatment: The Spinoff)

PoliticsYesterday at 12.30pm

A vision of two New Zealands: The ‘war on woke’ and a hīkoi for trans healthcare

Politics reporter

Healthcare? Anti-woke. Trans healthcare? Woke. (Photo: Getty Images, treatment: The Spinoff)

As hundreds marched to parliament to protest possible restrictions on gender-affirming care for youth, NZ First leader Winston Peters promised his party would continue to fight against the use of puberty blockers.

In his state of the nation speech in Christchurch on Sunday, Winston Peters used the term “woke” about 14 times – “wokeness”, the “woke agenda”, his “war on woke” – in an attempt to draw a line in the sand between a supposed “us” and a supposed “them”. The idea of the woke and the anti-woke is an idea that may also appeal to Peters’ coalition partner David Seymour, who has argued recently that there were two New Zealands, one that could see something going wrong and obsess over it (namely, school lunches) and one that could just get on with life.

Also on Sunday, an hour earlier and some 431km away, hundreds of those who Peters would likely deem most guilty of “woke social engineering” took a hīkoi through Wellington’s city streets to parliament to call for fairer access to puberty blockers.

It is an issue which, at its core, pertains to ensuring a specific demographic of children have access to a specific medication. As later emphasised by Peters, NZ First remain committed to “fighting against the use of puberty blockers for children”.

Being able to receive healthcare that is timely and personalised is an issue most New Zealanders would agree is integral to a meaningful experience of life. Add “gender-affirming” before healthcare, and perceptions begin to tip over from healthcare that is “common sense”, to healthcare that is “woke”.

A hīkoi protesting possible restrictions to puberty blockers marched through Wellington to parliament on Sunday (Photo: Lyric Waiwiri-Smith)

Alice, from hīkoi organiser Queer Endurance in Defiance, told the crowd in Wellington it took two and a half years from the time she was first referred to a doctor for hormone replacement therapy (HRT) to the time when she collected her first dose. “As those days ticked by, my body irreversibly and agonisingly changed further and further away from how I knew I needed it to be,” she said.

When she was finally able to access her medication, Alice said her endocrinologist prescribed her testosterone blocker at a dose eight times too high, and her oestrogen dose four times too low. She stayed on these “dangerously wrong levels” for more than a year, which has caused permanent liver damage and stunted her feminising development, she said, adding that she believed this amounted to medical malpractice. “I know from discussions with my peers that my experiences are far from unique, especially outside of the main centres,” said Alice.

The hīkoi was organised in response to a repeatedly delayed Ministry of Health report into the “safety and long-term impacts” of puberty blockers, released in November 2024. The report, ordered by the government, found that evidence of possible benefits or risks to treating gender dysphoria in young people with puberty blockers was limited.

It recommended puberty blockers be prescribed only by clinicians belonging to “an interprofessional team offering a full range of supports to young people presenting with gender identity issues”. Alice told the hīkoi she believed this would look like “the same interdisciplinary team framework that caused me all of these problems”.

A public consultation on whether additional “safety measures” should be put on puberty blockers closed on January 20. While prime minister Christopher Luxon has said little on the topic, his coalition partners have made their stances more clear. The Act Party supported the report’s advice on implementing restrictions, with minister for children Karen Chhour citing international concern around the safety of puberty blockers. “We should support young people to love themselves, not change themselves with experimental medication,” a statement from Chhour read, a position that conflicts with a sentiment chanted throughout the hīkoi: “We don’t need to live a lie to keep ourselves alive.”

Act has been sceptical of puberty blockers in the past, with David Seymour once criticising comments from then Labour health minister Kris Faafoi suggesting parents should not be able to deny their children access to puberty blockers. “The terrifying thing is, these people are making laws that affect our everyday lives,” a 2022 press release from Seymour read.

NZ First, meanwhile, had enshrined in its coalition agreement with National a promise to recognise the party’s policy against “non-biological women” competing against “biological women” in sport. As of June 2024, demands for Sports NZ to rewrite its transgender policy appeared to have been shelved, though Peters briefly stepped back into the ring when he falsely claimed Olympian Imane Khelif had “failed a gender test” during the 2024 Olympics.

In May 2024, meanwhile, Peters proposed a law to designate all new and publicly accessible toilets male, female or unisex, and make it illegal to use a toilet not designated for a person’s gender. This led Labour leader Chris Hipkins to tell media the country had “bigger issues to worry about than Peters’ homophobia or transphobia.”

Had Peters been outside his workplace on Sunday, he would have heard the experiences of young people saying they had been stripped of a medication integral to their experience of life, leading to low self-worth, self-harm, eating disorders, exposure to hatred and suicide rates far higher than those of their cis-gendered peers. He would have also heard that many trans children were already facing significant barriers to puberty blocker access.

Perhaps Peters’ response to them would have echoed the sentiment he shared in Christchurch: “Do you want to be part of the solution or do you want to remain part of the problem? If their choice is the latter – to be part of the problem – then our response is ‘get out of the way’.”

A stylised image featuring the distinctive rounded architecture of the Beehive and the classical columns of the Parliament House in Wellington, New Zealand. The scene is overlaid with blue and pink tones, and silhouettes of walking people are visible above.

Image: Getty Images; design The Spinoff

OPINIONPoliticsMarch 24, 2025

Going backwards for growth

Lyndy McIntyre

Guest writer

Image: Getty Images; design The Spinoff

The proposal to remove the living wage requirement from public sector procurement rules turns back the clock on a progressive step towards valuing essential workers, argues Lyndy McIntyre.

On April 1, workers on the minimum wage will get their annual pay rise, with their hourly rate moving from $23.15 to $23.50. That’s a 1.5% increase, 35 cents an hour. What does 35 cents buy in a cost of living crisis? Try a fifth of a litre of milk from Pak’nSave or a quarter of a loaf of the cheapest sliced bread.

The New Zealand living wage will be updated on the same day. The current living wage is $27.80 – $4.65 more than the current minimum. The living wage rate will increase by the average movement in wages.

While the minimum wage is a poverty rate, the living wage is a modest but decent rate, enabling workers and their families to live in dignity and participate in society. For our lowest-paid workers, this is life changing.

One of these workers, Mele Peaua, arrived in Aotearoa around 40 years ago. The 17-year-old came from Tonga looking for a better life, “like a dream”. But the reality of low pay and high living costs forced Mele to work three jobs: sewing during the day, working in an old people’s home at night and cleaning at weekends.

Over the years Mele kept working around the clock in minimum wage jobs. She and her husband, also a cleaner, had children. Mele says it was hard. “We didn’t have family time. I never went for school interviews with the kids. There was never enough money for sports and school trips. It’s just the limit of our life, how much we earn to survive and to feed our kids.”

But today Mele, and others employed via contractors to clean or provide security or catering in the core public service, are paid the living wage.

Since it was launched in 2012, a key goal of the Living Wage Movement has been to lift the wages of contracted workers. Contracting has always been a race to the bottom, where tenders are won on the basis of the lowest wage rates. The organisations that united around the goal of ending poverty pay set out to expose the injustice of low wages for workers like the parliamentary cleaners who worked all night; workers like Jaine Ikurere who, after cleaning the prime minister’s office for 20 years, was still on the minimum wage.

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The Living Wage Movement mobilised the broader community – unions, faith groups and community organisations – to secure commitments from politicians to lift the pay of the government’s contracted workforce. And that people power won, initially achieving the living wage for parliament’s own cleaners, catering workers and security guards in 2017, then for Ministry of Social Development security guards in 2020, and over time for more groups of contracted workers in the public sector.

In the last term of government, procurement rules for the core public sector were changed to reflect what was increasingly the norm, by including the requirement that the living wage be paid to contracted cleaners, security and catering workers.

Now the government wants to change these rules and take the living wage away from workers like Mele. Wearing her “growth” hat, Nicola Willis has proposed an “economic benefit test” that would “require government agencies to consider the wider benefit to New Zealand of awarding contracts to New Zealand firms when making procurement decisions”. The living wage requirement has been removed from the proposed rules. “This is part of the plan to increase jobs and incomes by shifting New Zealand to a faster growth track,” said Willis when announcing the proposal.

But this change would not increase jobs. It would take workers’ wages backwards. It’s a cynical move to push the cost of doing business onto our lowest-paid workers, and turn back the clock on a progressive step towards valuing essential workers, who work hard for New Zealanders every day. And it comes at a time when nearly $15 billion for tax cuts has favoured the few, including a $2.9 billion tax break for landlords, when food banks are forced to turn people away, homelessness is rising, and rents are sky high. This attack on the working poor will drive more New Zealanders into poverty.

E tū national secretary Rachel Mackintosh described the move as “disgusting and abhorrent”, saying: “If you’re on less than the living wage, people are having to trade off between food, power, petrol and rent. You cannot meet all those expenses if you’re not on a living wage.”

The fight’s on to save the living wage for contracted workers in the public service. Submissions to the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment are open and we can let MBIE know this is not fair, it’s not right. That it’s mean-minded and must be stopped. That New Zealanders want our government to set an example, to lead the way for other employers; that we don’t want contracting to be a race to the bottom, but a fair way to employ the invisible workforce of cleaners like Mele. That we want to keep the living wage in government’s procurement rules. That you can’t go backwards for growth.