Marilyn Waring. Remember her?

Once an activist always an activist.

Marilyn took it upon herself to form her own select committee and she and a bunch of other MPs and interested parties opened their doors for submissions on pay equity and the changes the Government made that they didn’t like.

When doors like that get opened, people of like minds tend to wander through, and they sit around all agreeing with each other about how bad things are.

The ensuing report, which has just been released, tells you exactly what you would think it would.

The problem with pay equity is it's an unsolvable problem, unless you take on a North Korea/Cuba type view of the world and simply get the Government to make all the rules.

The simple truth of it is different jobs have different values.

Another truth is some women choose work that doesn’t pay as much as other work. Men do as well, but not as much.

Some of the work that doesn't pay as much is predominantly done by women.

The most famous case involved a woman called Kristine Bartlett and the aged care sector. Rightly or wrongly jobs of compassion and care tend to be done by females. I would argue that’s largely because they tend to be nicer people overall but that would probably lead to a charge of me being sexist, which I'm not.

What I am is a realist and you can see the issue. Should age care workers be paid more? Probably.

But if they were, who would foot the bill? The people paying the age care bills of course.

Could we artificially boost their pay? Well, that is where we got into dreadful trouble. They ended up comparing age care workers with mechanics and got a massive pay rise.

Trouble is it was always false. Mechanics are not age care workers any more than air stewards are. You can look for commonalities, twist logic all you want, but you either artificially mess with it, or you let the market be the market.

Most jobs have a rationale as to why they pay what they do and at all times, all jobs are open to all people, depending on desire and skill.

So essentially Marilyn and her mates have wasted their time.

Logic wins. The market wins. If you want more money, do a job that pays more of it, male or female.

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Mike's Minute: What's not being said about pay equity

The Mike Hosking Breakfast