"The $12.8 Billion Attack on Working Women" - 27 October 2025
How Brooke van Velden Became the Most Dangerous Minister Since Bill Birch
Kia ora koutou.
On May 5, 2025, Workplace Relations Minister Brooke van Velden ambushed 180,000 working women—cancelling 33 pay equity claims, gutting the Equal Pay Act, and pocketing $12.8 billion for her coalition’s budget (RNZ, 2025)(RNZ, 2025)(1 News, 2025). No consultation. No RIS. Under urgency. In the dark. The 28-year-old former lobbyist just delivered the biggest gender-based wealth transfer in a generation, and the business lobby that trained her is thrilled. This is what happens when Atlas Network ideology meets ministerial power—and Māori wahine, already earning 20.9% less than Pākehā men, get crushed hardest (PMN, 2025).
Background: The Whakapapa of Extraction
New Zealand’s war on workers didn’t start with van Velden—it started with her ideological grandfather, Bill Birch. In 1991, Birch’s Employment Contracts Act decimated unions, casualized the workforce, and sent Māori unemployment soaring to 25.4% by 1992 (Te Hao Rangahau, 2020)(Te Hao Rangahau, 2020). Māori household incomes languished 20% below the national average (Te Hao Rangahau, 2020). Union membership collapsed from 41.5% to 21.7% between 1991-1995 (ISO, 2016). The template was set: gut worker protections, call it “flexibility,” watch inequality explode, and when Māori suffer most, blame them for it.
Historical impact of neoliberal employment reforms on Māori workers, from the 1991 Employment Contracts Act to current conditions.
Van Velden’s 2025 pay equity massacre follows that script precisely. She cancelled claims worth $1.78 billion annually affecting predominantly female workforces—94,000 teachers, nurses, care workers, librarians, social workers—and redirected $11 billion in operating funds and $1.8 billion in capital to “frontline services” (RNZ, 2025)(RNZ, 2025)(1 News, 2025). Translation: women’s wages became the coalition’s piggy bank. Finance Minister Nicola Willis admitted the “significant budget savings” made Budget 2025 math work (1 News, 2025). David Seymour crowed that van Velden “saved the taxpayer billions” and “saved the budget for the government” (The Spinoff, 2025).
The international context matters. Van Velden’s mentor David Seymour trained at Atlas Network’s “MBA for Think Tanks” in 2008, working for Canadian think tanks Frontier Centre for Public Policy and the Manning Foundation—both Atlas partners (Bad News Letter, 2024)(Wikipedia, 2024). Atlas Network, funded to the tune of US$20.2 million annually, coordinates 600+ free-market organizations globally to dismantle worker protections and indigenous rights (Astroturfing NZ, 2023)(Wikipedia, 2005). In New Zealand, Atlas partners include the New Zealand Initiative and Taxpayers Union (The Integrity Institute, 2025)(PSA, 2024)(Wikipedia, 2024). Alan Gibbs, ACT’s founding “godfather,” has pumped hundreds of thousands into the party (Reddit, 2024). This isn’t grassroots—it’s astroturf funded by billionaires.
The Issue: Deconstructing van Velden’s Assault
Smoking Gun #1: The Pay Equity Heist
Van Velden’s May 5 announcement was a masterclass in neoliberal doublespeak. “I believe in pay equity,” she told Midday Report, while simultaneously making it nearly impossible to achieve (RNZ, 2025). The Equal Pay Amendment Act 2025 raised the threshold for female-dominated work from 60% to 70% women employed for 10 years minimum (RNZ, 2025)(Kaitiaki Nursing NZ, 2025). It cancelled 33 in-progress claims—including the largest ever claim covering 90,000+ teachers—forcing restart under harsher rules (RNZ, 2025)(RNZ, 2025). It stripped review clauses from settled claims, denying thousands of women wage adjustments for a decade (Kaitiaki Nursing NZ, 2025). It gave employers effective veto power over comparator selection (NZ Herald, 2025)(Kaitiaki Nursing NZ, 2025).
Logical Fallacy: False Equivalence. Van Velden claimed librarians comparing themselves to transport engineers proved claims were “muddied” (RNZ, 2025). But pay equity law explicitly requires comparison across gender lines to expose historic undervaluation. Dismissing valid comparators as absurd is the reductio ad absurdum fallacy—she’s attacking the methodology to avoid addressing systemic wage theft.
Dog Whistle: “Genuine gender discrimination.” By requiring proof that differences are “due to sex-based discrimination or other factors,” van Velden creates impossible evidentiary burdens (RNZ, 2025)(RNZ, 2025). The phrase implies current claimants aren’t experiencing “genuine” discrimination—gaslighting 180,000 women while appearing reasonable.
Omitted Context: The 2017 care worker settlement Van Velden’s reforms undermine cost $2 billion over five years for 55,000 workers, raising wages 15-49% (RNZ, 2017)(NZ Herald, 2024). These weren’t handouts—they corrected decades of paying women poverty wages for essential work. Care workers max out at $29.10/hour (RNZ, 2025). Disability support workers—over 90% women—earn so little they forage for wild vegetables between shifts (RNZ, 2023). Van Velden axed their claim too (RNZ, 2025)(RNZ, 2025).
The Coalition Government’s $12.8 billion budget windfall from cancelling women’s pay equity claims and gutting the Equal Pay Act.
Smoking Gun #2: The Pike River Betrayal
Van Velden wants to “reduce stress” for businesses afraid of WorkSafe (1 News, 2025)(RNZ, 2025). Her solution? Shift the regulator from enforcement to guidance, let industries write their own safety codes, and “focus on reducing death and serious injuries before we sweat the small stuff” (RNZ, 2025)(RNZ, 2025). Officials warned this risks “repeating the deadly failures” of Pike River, which killed 29 miners in 2010 due to weak enforcement and broad guidance that created prosecution loopholes (RNZ, 2025). The 2013 Royal Commission and 2015 Health and Safety at Work Act—passed with bipartisan support—were designed to prevent exactly this (RNZ, 2025)(RNZ, 2015).
Logical Fallacy: Appeal to Emotion. “Businesses feel really stressed... they feel like they’re being told that they’re the bad guys, quite a lot, but they’re the good guys,” van Velden said (NZ Herald, 2025). This is the argumentum ad misericordiam—manipulating sympathy for stressed business owners while ignoring 73 workers who die annually in New Zealand workplaces (RNZ, 2025).
Data Manipulation: Van Velden cites her “roadshow” with 600 people in 11 towns as evidence businesses want change (NZ Herald, 2025). But she didn’t survey workers, unions, or victims’ families. Bernie Monk, whose son Michael died at Pike River, called it “an insult to the memories of our guys” (RNZ, 2025). Sonya Rockhouse, who lost her son Ben, said the same (RNZ, 2025).
Smoking Gun #3: The 90-Day Trial Con
Van Velden extended 90-day trial periods—allowing employers to fire workers without cause or legal recourse—to all businesses in December 2023 (RNZ, 2025)(MDR One, 2024)EMA, 2024). She claims trials give “struggling job-seekers” a chance and reduce business risk (RNZ, 2016). Treasury research obliterates this. A 2016 Motu study found no economically significant effect on hiring, no evidence trials helped disadvantaged jobseekers including Māori and Pasifika under 25, and no reduction in benefit receipt (RNZ, 2016)(RNZ, 2016). What it did find: businesses use trials as they please, and 75% of challenged trial periods between 2015-2023 were ruled invalid by courts due to employer non-compliance (EMA, 2024)(The Law Association NZ, 2024).
Borrowed Rhetoric: “Foot in the door” language comes straight from 2009 Kate Wilkinson talking points when National first introduced trials for small businesses (RNZ, 2016). The 2011 expansion claimed it would create 13,000 jobs (RNZ, 2016). It didn’t. By 2016, then-Minister Michael Woodhouse admitted “the policy wasn’t put in place to materially increase the number of jobs” (RNZ, 2016)—contradicting eight years of government spin. Van Velden is recycling debunked promises.
Who Benefits: Not Māori workers. Māori face implicit bias leading to higher taser and arrest rates by police, higher workplace injury rates, and unemployment double the national average (NZ Herald, 2025)(The Spinoff, 2024). Trials give employers legal cover to discriminate for 90 days—”she wasn’t a good fit”—with zero accountability. Young Māori women under 25 have 23.6% unemployment (Victoria University, 2020). Trials don’t help them—they exploit them.
Analysis: The Network Behind the Minister
Financial Networks: The Lobbying Pipeline
Van Velden’s career began at Matthew Hooton’s Exceltium, a lobbying firm representing corporate clients from Auckland Transport to Meredith Connell, Vodafone, and iwi in land disputes (The Paepae, 2020)(Politik, 2015)(LinkedIn, n.d.)(The Integrity Institute, 2025). Hooton, a self-described “completely squeaky clean” operator, charges clients to gain political access (The Spinoff, 2019). He helped launch van Velden’s political career through ACT’s 2020 campaign. After university, she had jobs at a light fitting manufacturer and marine parts warehouse—then straight into lobbying, then Parliament at 28 (NZ Herald, 2025). Zero private sector management experience. Zero union experience. Zero years in the female-dominated workforces she now controls.
Business New Zealand and the Employers and Manufacturers Association (EMA) back her reforms enthusiastically (RNZ, 2025)(RNZ, 2025). In the Mood of the Boardroom survey, she ranked 8th best performing minister—ahead of Seymour at 11th (NZ Herald, 2025). That’s not public service—that’s service to capital.
Financial flows from business interests to the coalition parties driving workplace deregulation and Treaty attacks.
Personnel Networks: The ACT Ecosystem
David Seymour hand-picked van Velden for Workplace Relations—a portfolio explicitly designed to deliver ACT-National coalition commitments (RNZ, 2025)(Beehive, 2025). Those commitments track Atlas Network ideology: deregulation, individual contracts over collective bargaining, employer flexibility über alles. Seymour’s Atlas training shows. After denying any Atlas connection on Waitangi Day 2024 (Bad News Letter, 2024), he was exposed: his 2021 Waitangi speech referenced “my old friends at the Atlas Network” (Bad News Letter, 2024)(Wikipedia, 2024). He featured in their 2008 magazine (Wikipedia, 2024). His Canadian think tank employers were Atlas members (Bad News Letter, 2024).
Van Velden delivers Seymour’s agenda with ruthless efficiency. When Cabinet asked her to ram through pay equity changes “in a very different time frame than I expected,” she complied: “I’m a team player and I did what I was asked to do” (NZ Herald, 2025)(1 News, 2025). No consultation with affected workers—contradicting ACT’s supposed principle of “better regulatory standards” (1 News, 2025). Ideology trumped process.
Ideological Networks: Atlas to Aotearoa
The Atlas Network doesn’t directly fund ACT—it funds the ecosystem that trains ACT’s people and legitimizes ACT’s policies. The New Zealand Initiative, an Atlas partner since 2012, produces research advocating free markets and minimal government (The Integrity Institute, 2025)(Wikipedia, 2024)(NZ Initiative, 2024). The Taxpayers Union, another Atlas affiliate, campaigns against “wasteful spending”—code for public services (RNZ, 2024)(PSA, 2024). Hobson’s Pledge, led by Don Brash (ACT’s former leader) and featuring Casey Costello (now NZ First MP, former Hobson’s Pledge spokesperson), attacks co-governance and Māori rights (The Integrity Institute, 2025)(Astroturfing NZ, 2024)(Wikipedia, 2016). These groups trade personnel, share donors like the Gibbs family, coordinate campaigns, and create an echo chamber where neoliberal ideology appears mainstream (The Integrity Institute, 2025)(The Integrity Institute, 2025)(Reddit, 2024).
Atlas awarded US$75,800 to Australia/New Zealand projects in 2022 (Sage Journals, 2024). That’s seed money for think tanks producing reports, submitting to select committees, and getting quoted in media—manufacturing consent for policies that gut worker protections and indigenous rights. Van Velden’s reforms didn’t emerge from democratic deliberation. They emerged from a transnational network committed to corporate power.
Rhetorical Techniques: The Respectability Grift
Van Velden performs competence. Conservative dress. Controlled speech. “Analytical woman” who does “tough jobs” (NZ Herald, 2025). She weaponizes gendered expectations—positioning herself as the rational adult cleaning up Labour’s “muddied laws” (RNZ, 2025)(1 News, 2025). When Labour MP referenced a column calling her the c-word, van Velden reframed it as defending “right-wing women” against the “wrong kind of woman” stereotype (NZ Herald, 2025). Masterful victimhood inversion—she’s the bully calling herself bullied.
Her “high-trust model” where officials engage with Business NZ and CTU so she doesn’t need to meet them personally is pure managerial speak for sidelining workers (NZ Herald, 2025). The CTU met her once in 18 months before pay equity changes—a half-hour meeting where she refused to reverse the law, couldn’t name a pay equity claim she opposed, and couldn’t confirm she’d read the Pike River taskforce report (RNZ, 2025). “Frank,” said CTU President Richard Wagstaff. “We were demanding answers to the attack on workers” (RNZ, 2025).
Tikanga Violations: How Neoliberalism Destroys Māori Values
Whanaungatanga (Relationships/Kinship): Van Velden’s policies shred workplace relationships. Fair Pay Agreements—which would have set minimum standards across low-paid industries like care work, disproportionately employing Māori and Pasifika—were repealed (NZ Herald, 2025). The 30-day rule protecting new employees under collective agreements: gone (RNZ, 2025)(Beehive, 2025). Partial strike wage deductions without lock-out notices: restored, punishing worker solidarity (NZ Herald, 2025)(RNZ, 2025). Every change isolates workers, forcing individual negotiation where employers hold all power. Whanaungatanga requires collective care. Van Velden delivers atomization.
Manaakitanga (Caring for Others): Care workers—nurses, disability support workers, teachers—embody manaakitanga. They earn poverty wages caring for our most vulnerable. Van Velden cancelled their pay equity, extended their shifts without compensation, cut their sick leave if they’re part-time, and stripped ACC leave accrual (RNZ, 2025)(RNZ, 2025)(1 News, 2025). Sushilla Davi, a care worker, challenged Christopher Luxon to “come and change a dirty nappy” because he’s so out of touch (RNZ, 2025). These workers leave their own tamariki to care for others—and van Velden treats them as budget line items.
Kaitiakitanga (Guardianship): WorkSafe was created to guard worker safety after Pike River’s 29 deaths. Van Velden is dismantling that guardianship, shifting to voluntary compliance and industry-written codes (RNZ, 2025)(RNZ, 2025)(RNZ, 2025). Māori and Pasifika experience disproportionately high workplace injury rates—18% and 11% of manufacturing claims despite being 14% and 10% of that workforce (RNZ, 2025). ACT MP Laura McClure attacked ACC’s targeted injury-prevention program as “racist” because it named Māori and Pasifika (RNZ, 2025)(NZ Herald, 2025). Need, not race? The need is racial because the system creates racial disparities. Van Velden’s “guidance over enforcement” will kill more Māori workers.
Wairuatanga (Spirituality/Life Force): Work isn’t just wages—it’s mana, identity, contribution. The Employment Contracts Act 1991 didn’t just cut pay; it crushed spirits, breaking unions that gave workers collective mana (ISO, 2016)(Te Hao Rangahau, 2020). Van Velden’s 2025 reforms do the same. Teachers, librarians, nurses—these are callings, not just jobs. When you tell them they’re not worth equal pay, you attack their wairua. When you let employers fire them without cause for 90 days, you deny their dignity. When you force them to restart four-year pay equity claims from scratch, you say their labor has no value.
Kotahitanga (Unity/Solidarity): Every van Velden reform attacks collective action. No Fair Pay Agreements. No automatic collective coverage for new hires. Wage deductions for partial strikes. Personal grievances capped at $180,000 salary (RNZ, 2025)(Beehive, 2025). The message: you’re alone, negotiate alone, suffer alone. Kotahitanga built the union movement. Neoliberalism destroys it. Māori workers, already facing bias and precarity, lose the solidarity that’s their only protection.
Rangatiratanga (Self-Determination/Sovereignty): Van Velden’s boss, David Seymour, leads the coalition’s Treaty Principles Bill attack. But economic sovereignty precedes political sovereignty. You can’t exercise rangatiratanga when you’re working three jobs at minimum wage, when your employer can fire you without reason, when your pay equity claim gets cancelled mid-process. Māori women earn 20.9% less than average males (PMN, 2025). Care workers max out at $29.10/hour after years of service (RNZ, 2025). Van Velden’s reforms entrench economic dispossession—the same extraction that’s defined colonization since 1840.
Aroha (Love/Compassion): There is no aroha in cancelling 180,000 women’s pay equity in the dark. No aroha in telling stressed care workers they don’t deserve equal pay. No aroha in extending trial periods that Treasury proved don’t create jobs but do create precarity. No aroha in risking another Pike River by weakening safety enforcement. Van Velden performs bureaucratic efficiency while practicing organized cruelty. This is the violence of neoliberalism—clinical, methodical, defended with spreadsheets.
The Hidden Connections: Five Revelations
- Matthew Hooton’s Exceltium trained van Velden in lobbying before she entered Parliament at 28 (NZ Herald, 2025)(NZ Herald, 2020)(NZ Herald, 2020)(LinkedIn, n.d.). Hooton’s client list includes corporates, government agencies, and iwi—teaching van Velden how to navigate political access for private interests. His firm represents “good guys” like the Auckland Rescue Helicopter Trust (NZ Herald, 2020) but also counsels on regulatory strategy. Van Velden learned from a master of “assertive” PR and emerged as ACT’s corporate whisperer.
- Alan and Debbi Gibbs fund ACT while Debbi chairs the Atlas Network globally (Reddit, 2024)(PSA, 2024). Alan Gibbs, ACT’s “godfather,” donated hundreds of thousands to the party in recent years (Reddit, 2024). His daughter Debbi runs the US$20.2 million Atlas operation coordinating 600+ think tanks worldwide (Wikipedia, 2005)(YouTube, 2024). This is dynastic power: family money funds the party, family leadership runs the international network supplying ideology, and ministers like van Velden implement the agenda.
- Property industry donors gave $2.5 million to National/ACT/NZ First since 2021—and van Velden’s Employment Relations reforms directly benefit property developers (RNZ, 2023). Removing the 30-day collective agreement rule, extending 90-day trials, capping personal grievances—these changes advantage industries with high turnover and low-paid workers, especially construction and property management. Follow the money: donors get policy.
- Van Velden sits on ACT’s coalition negotiating team and holds a constituency conflict of interest for citizenship and lottery funding in Tāmaki (The Integrity Institute, 2024). She’s not just a minister—she’s a power broker. Her Tāmaki electorate, won from National’s Simon O’Connor (an assisted dying opponent), gives ACT a second seat beyond Epsom (NZ Herald, 2025). Her dual role as negotiator and minister means she delivers coalition commitments, not public interest.
- The Council of Trade Unions met van Velden ONCE in 18 months before pay equity changes—while she met “regularly” with Business NZ through officials (NZ Herald, 2025)(RNZ, 2025). She claims her “high-trust model” delegates stakeholder engagement to bureaucrats. But officials answer to her. When CTU finally got their May 2025 meeting, van Velden refused every demand and couldn’t answer basic questions (RNZ, 2025). The fix was in. Business shaped policy; workers got ambushed.
Implications: Quantified Harm and Threats Ahead
Economic Harm to Women and Māori
180,000 women lost $12.8 billion in pay equity over four years (RNZ, 2025)(RNZ, 2025)(1 News, 2025). That’s an average of $71,000 per worker over the forecast period—not received as wage increases but diverted to government spending. For care workers earning $29.10/hour, that’s 2,439 hours of unpaid labor per worker—nearly two years of full-time work stolen. For Māori and Pasifika women, already earning 20.9% less than Pākehā men, this compounds existing gaps (PMN, 2025).
Care workers maxing out at $29.10/hour earn $60,528 annually full-time (RNZ, 2025). But many work part-time with unpaid travel between clients, using personal vehicles reimbursed at $2.35 for trips under 15km—well below IRD rates (RNZ, 2025). One worker’s colleague put 240,000km on a car in seven years, spending $3000+ annually on maintenance alone (RNZ, 2025). The new Holidays Act will cut part-time workers’ sick leave to proportional hours, further reducing income (RNZ, 2025)(RNZ, 2025)(1 News, 2025). This is death by a thousand cuts.
Workplace Safety Risks
Van Velden’s WorkSafe reforms shift focus from enforcement to guidance, letting industries write their own safety codes pending ministerial approval (RNZ, 2025)(RNZ, 2025). WorkSafe officials warned this risks loopholes where unsafe practices can’t be prosecuted (RNZ, 2025). With 73 workers dying annually, reducing enforcement pressure means more deaths (RNZ, 2025). Māori and Pasifika workers, concentrated in high-risk sectors like manufacturing, forestry, and construction, will die disproportionately (RNZ, 2025)(NZ Herald, 2025).
The Pike River Royal Commission explicitly rejected relying on broad guidance, recommending worker participation, union check inspectors with stop-work powers, and director-level accountability (Pike River Royal Commission, 2012). Van Velden’s reforms undo that. Bernie Monk, who lost his son Michael, and Sonya Rockhouse, who lost her son Ben, both called this an insult to Pike River’s 29 dead (RNZ, 2025). History repeats when we forget—or when we deliberately choose profit over safety.
Precedents for Further Attacks
If van Velden can cancel 33 pay equity claims under urgency without consultation and face no political cost, what’s next? The coalition’s 100-day plan included repealing Fair Pay Agreements (done), extending 90-day trials (done), and restricting personal grievances (done) (RNZ, 2025)(Beehive, 2025). Future targets include minimum wage freezes, further ACC cuts, and privatization of public services where Māori are overrepresented as both workers and users.
Internationally, Atlas Network partners in Australia successfully defeated the Indigenous Voice referendum in 2023 using coordinated disinformation (Bryce Edwards, 2023)(Astroturfing NZ, 2023). New Zealand’s Treaty Principles Bill follows the same playbook—Seymour, trained by Atlas, leads the charge with Hobson’s Pledge and Taxpayers Union support (Bad News Letter, 2024)(Astroturfing NZ, 2024)(Wikipedia, 2016). Economic dispossession enables political dispossession. Van Velden’s workplace attacks soften Māori resistance by ensuring we’re too broke, too precarious, too exhausted to fight back.
Mobilization Opportunities
But here’s the reckoning: they underestimated us. 180,000 women don’t disappear quietly. Within days of the pay equity ambush, thousands protested nationwide (RNZ, 2025)(RNZ, 2025). Five unions launched High Court action alleging Bill of Rights breaches (RNZ, 2025)(PSA, 2025). The UN Commission on the Status of Women opened an investigation, with a formal CEDAW complaint planned (LawNews, 2025). International Labor Organization scrutiny looms—New Zealand’s pay equity reversal violates Convention 100 on equal remuneration (LawNews, 2025)(Kaitiaki Nursing NZ, 2025).
Nurses, teachers, librarians, care workers, social workers—these aren’t passive victims. They’re organized, educated, and enraged. “We are not meek!” library assistant Suzie Moore told 1000+ protesters in Auckland (RNZ, 2025). “Let me tell you something about library workers. We are not meek!” PSA National Secretary Fleur Fitzsimons promised to leave “no stone unturned to achieve pay equity” (PSA, 2025). This is the ground war Atlas Network didn’t plan for—because they think tanks can defeat movements. They can’t.
The Choice Before Us
The Māori Green Lantern Fighting Misinformation And Disinformation From The Far Right
Brooke van Velden is the human face of a system that values profit over people, markets over manaakitanga, individual greed over collective good. She didn’t invent neoliberalism—she inherited it from Bill Birch, refined it through Matthew Hooton, and deploys it for David Seymour’s Atlas-trained ACT Party. But she owns the consequences: 180,000 women robbed of $12.8 billion, workplace safety gutted, precarious work normalized, and Māori workers crushed hardest by every reform.
The network behind her—Atlas funders, property donors, business lobbies, think tank ideologues—operates in plain sight. They write the reports justifying cuts, donate to the parties, train the politicians, and implement the agenda. Alan Gibbs funds ACT while his daughter runs Atlas globally. Matthew Hooton trains corporate advocates who become ministers. Seymour coordinates internationally, then lies about it on Waitangi Day. They’re not hiding. We’re just not looking hard enough.
But now we see. The smoking gun isn’t hidden—it’s the $12.8 billion confession, rushed through under urgency, with Seymour celebrating van Velden for “saving the budget.” The evidence isn’t circumstantial—it’s Treasury data proving 90-day trials don’t work, WorkSafe warnings about Pike River 2.0, and Māori unemployment doubled by the same policies van Velden recycles. The pattern isn’t subtle—it’s 34 years from the Employment Contracts Act to the Equal Pay Amendment Act, attacking workers while claiming to help them.
Specific Actions:
- Support the High Court challenge. Five unions (NZNO, TEU, NZEI, PPTA, PSA) are arguing van Velden’s law breaches the Bill of Rights Act 1990. Donate. Share. Show up when hearings happen (RNZ, 2025)(PSA, 2025).
- File complaints with international bodies. The UN investigation is happening (LawNews, 2025). Support the CEDAW complaint. Pressure ILO to censure New Zealand for violating Convention 100. International shame works—governments hate looking like human rights violators.
- Target van Velden’s Tāmaki seat in 2026. She won by beating National—meaning Tāmaki voters aren’t rusted-on ACT supporters (NZ Herald, 2025). Organize every care worker, teacher, nurse, and library assistant in that electorate. Make her answer for the $12.8 billion theft at every forum, every street stall, every doorknock. Defeat her.
- Expose the Atlas Network’s NZ operations. Map every connection between donors, think tanks, and politicians. Name the Gibbs family’s funding flows. Trace Taxpayers Union and NZ Initiative personnel into government roles. Make the network visible. Sunlight disinfects.
- Build worker-led alternatives. The care worker settlement in 2017 showed collective action wins (RNZ, 2017)(NZ Herald, 2024). Rebuild union density. Organize unorganized sectors. Train Māori and Pasifika workers as organizers. Our collective power is the only counter to their organized capital.
This is class war. This is colonial extraction. This is patriarchal violence dressed in budget spreadsheets. Brooke van Velden is the soldier—competent, ruthless, unapologetic. But she serves generals funded by billionaires, trained by think tanks, and committed to a world where workers shut up, accept poverty wages, and die quietly when workplace safety fails.
We have a choice. Accept this, or fight back with everything we have—our numbers, our labor, our whakapapa, our fury. Van Velden thinks she’s untouchable because business loves her and Atlas backs her. She’s wrong. Every empire falls. Every unjust system breaks. Every minister who attacks working people eventually faces accountability.
Māori survived colonization, land theft, language suppression, and deliberate impoverishment. We’ll survive Brooke van Velden. And when we do, we’ll remember who stood with capital against us—and we’ll build a world where her ideology dies with her political career.
Kia kaha. Kia māia. Kia manawanui.
Support this mahi: If this research helps your organizing, and you have capacity, koha to HTDM: 03-1546-0415173-000. Times are tough—no pressure, just gratitude for those who can.
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