Brash Not Brash Enough!

Libertarianz Employment Deregulation Spokesman Warwick Malone cautiously congratulated Don Brash today for the former Reserve Bank Governor’s conclusions that so-called 'equal pay for equal work’ will be the next barrier to growth.

Malone says that Brash is right to question why a bureaucrat in Wellington should be allowed to determine whether a builder and a café worker should be paid the same. However, he says that Brash’s comment that “National supports pay equity when it means men and women with the same skill levels doing the same job” begs the question whether bureaucrats should be allowed to determine whether a man and a woman should also be paid the same.

“It’s the same question really,” points out Malone. “What Don appears to forget is that what an employer pays an employee is properly the business only of the employer and the employee. If Don is correct with his first example that a bureaucrat in Wellington should not determine pay levels (as he is) then he cannot be right with his second – it’s the same thing.”

Brash says that “pay rates should be determined by nothing more complicated than the laws of supply and demand” to which Malone heartily assents, adding: "More importantly, pay rates should be determined solely by the person paying the wages, to which an employee is free to agree or not. If that employer is irrational enough to pay people differently based on the employee’s sex, then that is their business - not the bureaucrats’, not the National party’s, and not Don Brash’s. The market leaves them free to make mistakes, and free to pay for those mistakes."

Warwick Malone confirms the consistency of this view, saying it entails the abolition of all workplace law including state-mandated Minimum Wages (as Don Brash once implicitly suggested), O.S.H., and so-called ‘Pay Equity’ law, and also the privatisation of A.C.C. “That will certainly remove the barriers to business," smiles Malone, who says Libertarianz are brave enough to advocate all the above. “I wonder whether National can say the same?”

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