(Question 12)

Does your party support restoring or strengthening pay equity protections for aged care and disability support workers?

National

National will uphold the pay equity scheme, and we have a proud history of supporting pay equity. It was a National-led government that made the original pay equity settlement with care and support workers in 2017 for $2 billion. It was also a National government that introduced the original framework for assessing pay equity in 2017.

Greens

Yes. We will restore Pay Equity and prioritise delivering a pay equity settlement for care and support workers. We believe in providing secure conditions for support workers that enable them to provide high quality, compassionate support.

Labour

Labour is committed to restoring a fair pay equity process and paying women what they are worth.

N Z First

As in (6) above.

Opportunity Party

Yes.

(Question 13)

What policies will your party implement to recruit and retain the aged care workforce?

National

900 doctors and 2,100 new nurses have been added to the frontline since National came to government. We’ve expanded nurse practitioner training, increasing places to 120 to support faster access to care and created incentives for GP practices to recruit 400 graduate registered nurses annually, improving access to primary care. We’ve also created better transitions from hospital to aged care, ensuring older patients receive appropriate community care while freeing up hospital beds.

Greens

Key focuses for a healthy workforce are working conditions and workers’ rights. The Green Party will strengthen worker bargaining power by changing employment law to default union membership. This means people automatically join a union when they start a new job, but can opt out later. This would also empower unions to hold employers accountable for working conditions, such as rostering and ratio. Additionally, the Green Party will restore pay equity and prioritise pay parity.

Labour

New Zealanders should be able to find secure work for themselves, here at home – especially in the areas where we have shortages or a stretched workforce. We’re committed to protecting these jobs and ensuring our aged care workforce is sustainable now, and into the future.

The current government has been one of the most anti-worker in living memory. They’ve cut women’s pay, weakened health and safety protections, brought back 90-day trials, scrapped fair pay agreements, gutted thousands of jobs from the public service and are cutting sick leave for part-time workers.

N Z First

As in (6) above.

Opportunity Party

Aged care loses staff to hospitals and to Australia because the same work is paid differently depending on the employer and the setting. We would support work towards a national framework for nursing remuneration, so that pay reflects a clinician’s qualifications, skills and responsibility rather than which setting they happen to work in. Beyond pay, the sector offers almost no senior clinical career path, so experienced staff who want to progress have to leave to do it: we would build those roles, widen the range of services aged residential care is funded to deliver, and set transparent safe-staffing benchmarks. On supply, we would fund more training places and graduate placements into community care, remove the district-by-district barriers to postgraduate study, and make registration quicker for internationally qualified professionals.