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Two Current Issues

Entry 2396, on 2025-05-08 at 14:41:22 (Rating 3, Politics)

There are two current issues in New Zealand politics which interested me this week, and I would like to comment on them here. The first is the controversial change to the pay equity legislation, and the other is the proposal to limit social media use for people under the age of 16.

So let's look at the pay equity thing first. There is a lot of confused information out there about this (some might say misinformation) so this will be my interpretation, which might or might not be 100% accurate. Anyway, if you see any errors, leave a comment!

Pay equity in this context refers to the lack of equal pay for jobs typically done by women versus those typically done by men. It does not refer to lesser pay for women doing the same work as men. Paying less for the same job, based on a person's gender is illegal, and as far as I know, there is no evidence of this being a problem.

The Act party gave this example: librarians (a female dominated occupation) required more pay because they currently get less that fisheries officers (a male dominated job). These jobs are very different and there is no evidence that the lesser pay for librarians is because of their predominant gender. It's hard to see how this can be seen as a genuine problem worthy of government intervention.

Of course, Act probably chose one of the more ridiculous examples, just to make a point, and there are probably other jobs where the difference in pay is harder to justify, but it does show how regulation can be misused and often extends to ridiculous extremes.

Act would say, let the market decide what pay is offered for different jobs. As I said on my post "Pragmatic Libertarianism" from 2025-01-30, I don't think the market provides the best solution in every case, but we need to be very careful with government controlled interventions and regulations because they inevitably result in outcomes beyond their initial scope, and often follow political fashions and ideologies.

There are a lot of women training in areas such as women's studies and a lot of men in engineering. Which should we suspect will have the better prospects for higher pay? So I'm suggesting here that many cases of pay inequity are the result of decisions of the person, rather than societal bias.

Now let's look at the second issue: restrictions on social media for young people. From what I understand, this is not an official policy (although the PM indicated some support for it) and would need to be drawn from a ballot in order to even be debated, so it is far from certain that this will ever be law, but is it even a good idea?

There is no doubt that social media can be psychologically harmful to its users. There is also no doubt that some social media sites deliberately push controversial content to people. I know these things because I use a lot of social media myself: mainly Facebook, X, and YouTube, where younger people tend towards Instagram and Tik Tok, but the principle is the same.

If I was a sensitive and immature child instead of a rational and responsible adult (you believe me, don't you) I can see how this could be a problem. I could block a lot of the material I find problematice but I don't do that unless it is obviously spam, material generated by a bot, or someone being deliberately unreasonable or abusive. I like to see contrary opinions, even when they are abusive, and sometimes that might even result in me changing my opinion.

Material which makes specific and credible threats, or contains information which would reasonably be thought of as private, is different, but that is already illegal and it doesn't seem that any extra regulation is necessary, although maybe better implementation of current laws would be helpful.

This really gets back to a philosophical preference that us libertarians often cite: that is, if a problem with a service affects some individuals and not others, give those individuals help in overcoming it instead of putting a ban on the serice for everyone, or for everyone in a certain demographic group.

People don't have to use social media, and if they do use it, they can block problematic content. So why is the answer just stopping it for everyone, including the vast majority (I am presuming) who do not suffer from major trauma from using it? The ban for young people is a very "nanny state" solution, and in general I disagree with those.

I know that there are already age-based restrictions on other activities like driving, drinking alcohol, voting, etc, but just because these already exist it doesn't mean we can justify more. The fewer restrictions imposed by government the better, in my opinion, so we should be looking for ways to make society less restrictive, not more.

The Act Party is also involved here (it seems that they, and sometimes NZ First, are the ones producing the genuinely interesting new ideas on the right) and they say that regulation of social media is a job for parents, not the state. I can see how that idea could be rejected, but it also has some merit.

So in both of these situations I say to the government: get out of our lives and leave us alone. We had far too much government overreach with the previous mob; we don't need more with this one.

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