While coalition partner NZ First ties itself in knots defining women, National seems to just be cottoning on to the fact that women exist.

Mum was the word at the Hippo playground in Botany, where Christopher Luxon was positively glowing. “Fantastic, good to see you,” he beamed to the throng who had gathered on Sunday at the cutting edge of “entertainment and professional Cafe food”. The National Party leader’s eyes sparkled, his grin stretched, his skin was luminous. He had that new mum radiance – not from becoming one himself, but from a recent groundbreaking discovery that mums, and indeed women, may actually exist. 

Flanked by not one, not two, but four real-life women, Luxon said it was “really awesome” to be joined by Nicola Willis, Nicola Grigg, Katie Nimon and Nancy Lu to announce that, if re-elected, National will extend paid parental leave to 30 weeks by 2029. “National has a plan to support mums and dads with greater financial flexibility, to give them the choice of spending more time with their baby at home,” he said, uttering “mum” a further seven times in three minutes. 

With Willis, Grigg, Nimon and Lu nodding vigorously throughout, Luxon added that National would also bring back a policy that would allow both parents to take paid parental leave at the same time. But wait, there’s more! National would also protect changes in the Employment Leave Act to prevent holiday pay being reduced for those who have recently returned from parental leave. “Overwhelmingly, it is working mums who face that penalty,” he said solemnly. 

The policy announcement came off the back of a huge week for National and their treasured working mums. Just three days prior, then-NZ First candidate Stuart Nash was revealed to have complained (erroneously) that National MP Katie Nimon took “nine months off on full pay, went back for a week, then took another month off” after she had her baby, additionally calling her the “laziest MP I have ever come across” and a “nice woman, but ill-suited to the rigours of being an electorate MP”.

Luxon declared Nash, who eventually apologised and resigned his candidacy, would never be a minister in a government he led. Many of National’s male MPs also got in on the act, posting heartfelt messages of support for Nimon on Facebook. Simeon Brown issued a joke apology for his own laziness while taking parental leave after the births of his four children. Chris Bishop shared a photo with Nimon and her baby out in the electorate, as did James Meagher from his first visit to see “mum and bub”. 

Combined with Paul Goldsmith’s policy announcement about updating consent laws arriving “as if from thin air” the previous weekend, this sudden laser focus on issues that primarily affect women feels a little bit suss, like Sam Uffindell boasting about occasionally doing the grocery shopping or Simon Court bravely solving poverty with menstrual cups. And it surely has absolutely nothing to do with what The Post journalist Andrea Vance calls a “haemorrhaging” of support among women aged 35-54.

The pivot has also come in for scrutiny from Labour. Just as National was accused of being disingenuous in not making changes to our consent laws sooner, with Labour MP Camilla Belich claiming the party “walked away” from cross-party legislation to make its own announcement, Luxon was also challenged yesterday about National blocking an extension to paid parental leave back in 2016. “I’m sorry, I only came to politics in 2020,” he told RNZ. “I don’t know what happened in the past.”

I get it, we all have a hard time remembering anything from before 2020, be it parental leave legislation, shutter shades, or ‘The Harlem Shake’. So if we just look at what the National-led government has actually done for women voters this term, what do we find? In terms of justice issues that predominantly affect women, there’s been the criminalisation of stalking, now punishable by up to five years in prison, as well as the scrapping of character references for sex offenders. 

It’s also been good news for boards, pipelines and toolkits – three things I can confirm all ladies absolutely love. In June, Nicola Grigg announced that women hold 50.2% of public sector board and committee roles (although this is the sixth consecutive year women’s representation has met the 50% target). In July, Grigg announced a BoardConnector pipeline to further grow governance representation for women, adding to her previous Toolkit for calculating gender pay gaps. 

But we also can’t ignore the more dubious moves, such as the crusade against trans women, led by NZ First and often pitched as essential in protecting cis women (exclusive comment: we’re all good). Where’s National been on this? Mostly silent, but still supporting its coalition partner’s move to define a man and woman and fight what Peters calls the “woke ideology that has crept in over the last few years, undermining the protection, progression, and safety of women”.

Then there’s the sledgehammer taken to pay equity, which scrapped dozens of live claims affecting more than 180,000 people and made it much harder for workers in female-dominated fields to fight for more pay. Unions described it as a “shameful attack on women”, former MPs found it to be a “flagrant and significant abuse of power” and even the United Nations have heard about it. Act’s Brook van Velden is credited with gutting the programme, but according to David Seymour at least, it saved National finance minister Nicola Willis’s 2025 budget.

But wahoo for women, right? National loves women, mothers, mums and bubs. Just yesterday Luxon led his post-cabinet conference reiterating the importance of supporting mums and dads, babies and families with their FamilyBoost scheme. It’s almost as if he too was once just a baby who even possibly came from a mother, a mummy, or even a mum. Then again, he only got into politics in 2020, so we don’t necessarily know what happened in the past.