RODNEY HIDE: Help! Parliament wants to define a woman, and the freezing works may never recover

Hat tip to Katrina Biggs. Her Substack, A B'Old Woman, waded into the select committee submissions so the rest of us didn't have to. She came back with treasure.

The Definition of Woman and Man Bill does something radical. It writes down in law what a woman is and what a man is. Every farmer, midwife and five-year-old already knows. Corporate New Zealand, it turns out, does not, and the news has hit hard.

Newsroom's Andrew Bevin rounded up three big names against the bill: Fletcher Building, Silver Fern Farms and Orion. Builders, meat processors and lines engineers. These are not workplaces with a safe space and a box of tissues.

Start with Fletcher Building. Its chief health and safety officer and its operations manager warn that "environments perceived as exclusionary, inconsistent, or uncertain are associated with reduced engagement and increased attrition risk".

Attrition risk. Picture the site. A gang is pouring concrete in the rain. Someone reads out the new statutory definition of "man". A chippie downs tools. "That's me out. I can't work under this uncertainty."

Next, Silver Fern Farms. Its submission came from the company's "rainbow community group", with the company's blessing. Defining women and men in law, it warns, "signals to a generation of workers, students and future citizens that New Zealand is not a place that values them".

This from a company whose entire business model depends on knowing the difference between a ram and a ewe.

Then Orion, the Christchurch lines company, about 90 per cent male. Its policy lead offered this:

"A rigid legal definition that excludes or overrides lived gender identity will both increase the likelihood of workplace conflict, exclusion, or psychological harm for workers and constrain an employer's ability to meet the Health and Safety at Work Act's core duty to ensure the health and safety – physical and psychological – of all workers, so far as is reasonably practicable."

I read it twice. Then I read it aloud to Patch, my son’s lamb. He looked as lost as I was.

As best I can make out, Orion is saying that if Parliament writes down what a man is, its workers may suffer psychological harm, and Orion may end up in breach of health and safety law. These are people who climb power poles in a southerly and work around live lines for a living. The thing that's going to hurt is Parliament saying what a woman is.

None of this sounds like builders, slaughtermen or linesmen. It sounds like what Katrina calls the lanyard class: the HR and diversity people, writing in a language spoken nowhere outside an HR department. She suspects the select committee spotted the copy-and-paste a mile off and had a good laugh. I hope so.

The bill doesn't threaten Fletcher's buildings, Silver Fern's lamb or Orion's power. It threatens only the people paid to make simple things complicated.

No wonder they're worried. A woman can be defined in a sentence. Their entire trade depends on its requiring a policy manual, a steering group, an external facilitator, two days at a lakeside lodge, and a follow-up survey on how everyone felt about it.

Rodney Hide is a former Minister and ACT Party leader