So, Brooke Van Velden, this is your life...

Growing up I used to love a show called This Is Your Life. Journalist Mike Munro would hold a giant red book and lovingly ambush a well-known Australian. My favourite episode was about Steve Irwin. For an hour, Steve Irwin saw his impact on the world, on his community, on his family. He saw that he'd made the world a better place.

Steve Irwin, when met by Mike, looks at his feet humbled before they even begin to sing his praises.

Today, Brooke van Velden announced she was retiring from politics. What will her legacy be? I wondered what it would be like if Brooke was featured in a special edition of This is Your Life.

What would it be like if she was confronted by how she ruined lives and tried to make life unlivable for so many New Zealanders? What if she had to step outside her circle of yes-men and see what New Zealanders really think of her and her tenacious commitment to cruelty?

I thought I'd brainstorm a few things TVNZ could include in a Brooke van Velden special edition.

Audience participation is key on This Is Your Life. So here's some of the people that could be in the audience.

• 180,000 New Zealand workers who had pay equity claims scrapped overnight. Despite not knowing the difference between pay parity and pay equity, Van Velden chose to remove any chance at pay equity for 180,000 New Zealanders in just one 45-minute meeting. 
• 122,500 New Zealand minimum wage workers. Van Velden is one of the few, if only, ministers to ever suggest there should be NO increase to the minimum wage.
• People trafficked into modern slavery. Yes, really. Van Velden would not support legislation aimed at ending the most severe forms of worker exploitation.
• All workers who work in industries that have health and safety risks (which is all industries, which means this is all workers). NZ workers are more likely to die than in Australia or UK. So, Van Velden has tried to fast-track gutting work safety legislation that her own ministry says requires no regulatory changes.
• Taxpayers. The Business Leaders’ Health and Safety Forum has said that Van Velden's proposed removal of health and safety compliance requirements could result in higher rates of worker injury and increased costs for New Zealand. ACC believed the proposed reforms could drive up its costs too - poor health and safety cost $5.4 billion in 2024, which equated to 1.3% of New Zealand's GDP.
• Uber drivers, transport, construction, cleaning, security and labour hire workers. Van Velden removed protections for all of these workers by allowing them to be classed as contractors despite their actual work situation. This removed their rights to minimum wage protection, extended leave entitlements, unfair dismissal protections and their employer's superannuation obligations. Her Employment Relations Amendment Bill essentially rewrote employer-employee relationship obligations into a form never before seen in the modern working world.
• The families and survivors of the Pike River tragedy. They described their meeting with Brooke Van Velden as 'a waste of time'. "She seemed to be focusing all the time on the employers and I sat and listened to it for a little while and then I just couldn't stand it," Sonya Rockhouse said. Her 21 year-old son Ben was killed at Pike River.
• Workers, again. Van Velden would not even consider the idea that we should have a corporate manslaughter charge in this country. Even when those directly impacted by corporations killing their families begged her to just think about it.
• Gambling corporations. This Is Your Life needs balance, and Van Velden has been an excellent friend to online gambling parasites with the Online Casino Gambling Bill which proposes licensing up to 15 online casinos and allowing them for the first time to legally advertise their services in New Zealand. The total estimated social cost of gambling problems in New Zealand for the 2023/24 period was $4.219 billion.
• Firefighters. In April 2024, Brooke van Velden refused an increase to fire and emergency levies despite being warned they could not continue without funding. Instead, she said Fire and Emergency NZ should pay. She has also joined David Seymour and Simeon Brown in regularly criticising firefighters for striking for their safety and wages.
• Unions. Few people hate unions more than Van Velden, so union members should be in the audience too. She has tried since 2024 to weaken union power, including reinstating provisions into the Employment Relations Act to allow for pay deductions in response to partial strikes.
• Workers, again again. Van Velden removed employment protections for workers when they start in a new role.
• Road cone haters. Van Velden was instrumental in setting up a rapidly-scrapped "hotline" that cost $150,000 and barely managed to remove a single cone. Only 15 sites out of 250 inspected showed "excessive use of cones" and it's not clear that the hotline did anything at all.

So goodbye to a "girl boss." Goodbye to a woman who will in all likelihood be rewarded with a cushy position as a lobbyist or in the private sector, because she never stopped working for the private sector. She never served you, or anyone who actually worked a day in their lives.

C U Next Tuesday, Brooke. We won't miss you.