Woodhouse Michael: Minimum Wage and Remuneration Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Woodhouse Michael: Minimum Wage and Remuneration Amendment Bill — In Committee 
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MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National) 
: 
 I am delighted to take a call in the Committee stage of this debate on the Minimum Wage and Remuneration Amendment Bill. I was so keen to take a call that I actually turned down drinks to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the ascension of Margaret Thatcher to power in the United Kingdom. The forty-ninth Parliament has been a pretty civilised place. On the one hand we have a Government with a strong mandate and on the other an Opposition that opposes as a good Opposition should while the Government gets on with passing legislation. 
Chris Hipkins 
: Tell us more about Margaret Thatcher! 
MICHAEL WOODHOUSE 
: I will get on to her in a minute. Most of the debate has been without too much controversy has it not? The Opposition teases us for having bills on the Order Paper that are theirs. We tease them for those bills languishing for the last 9 years but pretty much it has been a tame affair. 
So it is fascinating that it has taken a member’s bill for the gloves to really come off. In the second reading in particular the gloves really did come off for colleagues on this side of the House and boy the attack has been pretty full-on. But what is really interesting is that it has not been the members born with silver spoons whom members opposite attack the ones from Remuera Fendalton or Maori Hill. It is not the so-called “hollow men”. The sharpest claws are actually out for the Tau Henares the Aaron Gilmores the Nikki Kayes and even perhaps the Mike Woodhouses—that is whom they go for. They do not say it in so many words but the hackles rise every time National caucus members rise to talk on this bill and on why this bill is bad for low-income workers young workers employers and an economy that is already labouring under the weight of low productivity. 
I ask why members opposite are so affronted by these members because these members are not the ones with silver spoons in their mouths. They are not the ones who have had the privilege or the head start that members opposite believe somehow disadvantages others. The members I name had to work damned hard to achieve the success that they have had academically in business in their communities and eventually in this House. The Opposition might even see those members as traitors to their own upbringings. Some of them have even come from Labour backgrounds. Some of the Opposition members who have spoken in support of this bill—not all of them but a few—really object to that sort of so-called “class hopping”. 
I will now do something that few if any National members have done in this House. I will quote the left-wing commentator Chris Trotter to make a point. 
Hon Tony Ryall 
: Oh we all used to quote him. 
MICHAEL WOODHOUSE 
: Oh good; well it is something members will be used to. I think Mr Trotter might have had something of an epiphany since the last election when he wrote an opinion piece on aspiration. This is what he said. I think members opposite should listen very carefully. 
He said: “Are we socialists in our drive for an absolute equality of outcomes really willing to descend to the level of a certain species of crab which will when collected in a bucket seize and haul back into the doomed mass any individual that attempts to escape its fate by climbing out? … Is that why so many other New Zealanders raised in state houses voted against Helen Clark’s Labour-led government [in the last election]? Because somehow they had got it into their heads that she would be happier if they never left them? Never climbed out of the bucket? Or God forbid that Labour’s social-democratic state was actually about seizing them in its claws and dragging them back down into it?”. 
That is really the essence of this bill is it not? This is what the bill is all about. It is about keeping people down. I am very happy to support a Government that aspires for all its people that passes policies and laws that will encourage people to aspire to do better that provides a safety net—a generous minimum wage which was recently introduced—and then gives them the tools to aspire to do better. That is what this Labour Opposition objects to. Like crabs in a bucket it hauls them back to the doomed masses. I think if Labour members really really believed in the bill it would have been on the previous Labour Government’s agenda. It had 9 years to pass it and now that Labour members know the bill will not get passed they are all standing up and crying for it.