The media frenzy over the selection of Paul Henry and the idea he will be an exciting candidate because he can be relied on to be loud and controversial seems to have ignored the question of whether his presence on the campaign trail will make Act policies any more or less palatable.
NZ First and Act traditionally attract a higher share of men voters than women, and maybe they just accept that will be their lot.
New Zealand First has trotted out a motley collection of mostly male escapees from other parties, some who were mediocre at best and others such as Stuart Nash and Michael Laws who left their previous parliamentary roles in controversial circumstances.
Mr Nash is a case in point.
It was hard not to laugh out loud when he repeated the plaintive refrain from his fellow recycled Labour members of Parliament that ‘‘we didn’t leave Labour: Labour left us’’.
Labour was keen to leave him because he had behaved badly, eventually sacked as a minister for disclosing confidential information from a Cabinet meeting to two former donor businessmen.
Perhaps the hope is voters have short memories.
How many women voters will have forgotten the ick factor of Shane Jones watching porn on the taxpayer dime or Stuart Nash’s crass description of what constitutes a woman?
More importantly, Act, National and NZ First may be gambling on around 180,000 women being willing to overlook their scuppering of their pay equity claims in shock legislation in May last year, which passed with indecent haste and no public input.
It is all very well for those parties to say a pay equity regime still exists and they are merely improving the process, but any claims under the new law will be harder to get off the ground and harder to maintain in the long term if they do pass go.
The high-handedness shown by all parties in the coalition over this has been breathtaking.
Nobody in the government, including the minister in charge of the Bill Act’s Brooke van Velden was willing to spell out which of the existing claims had no merit, preferring to divert attention with sound-bite mockery of the comparator process which conveniently ignored the facts around it.
It will be interesting to see on the campaign trail how all three of the parties involved in this shonky law-making will react to any pushback on it.
Already the unions are calling out NZ First leader Winston Peters for inaction after he said in a 2023 television interview it was a tragedy aged care workers were on minimum wages after 25 years in the job.
The parties will be hoping their other policies will be enough to sway women disgruntled about the law change, and even their families and friends, to vote for them.
At this point there is no way of knowing whether that looks like a winning strategy.
All parties still have policies to reveal, and as researcher, and one of the authors of the most recent New Zealand Election Study (NZES), Dr Sam Crawley points out there are no definitive lists of women’s or men’s issues.
However, as in most other countries, New Zealand women tend to lean to the left of men, and that had held across most of the past three decades of NZES data.
He describes the gender voting gap as real, but also small, so it can be overwhelmed in any given election, as it was in 2023 when National won women voters to cut across the usual patterns.
It is difficult to see that will be repeated this year.
How much the recent rise in the polls of the Opportunity Party might be due to disaffected women National voters is unclear.
In what is shaping up to be a tight election, all political parties need to realise the importance of appealing to as many women voters as possible.
