Hide Rodney: Minimum Wage (Abolition of Age Discrimination)Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Hide Rodney: Minimum Wage (Abolition of Age Discrimination)Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:640;Page:10717] 
RODNEY HIDE (Leader—ACT) 
: 
 I listened to Hone Harawira’s speech and I am quite surprised given the Standing Orders that we are considering this bill because it is clear to me that the bill has been so changed in its purpose that it is a different bill. Technically we should bar it from consideration in this House it would seem to me. Obviously I am not right because I know that the clerks and the Speaker are very good on this. This is a bill that is designed to prohibit discrimination in the terms described in the bill but what has come back from the select committee is a bill that just perpetuates discrimination and that is why the bill had to have its name changed. 
Having said that I take issue with Mr Harawira’s point. He quoted Martin Luther King and his concept of discrimination. I should say that ACT opposed the bill at its first reading and opposes it still—however I understand it is a different bill now. I think the key point is this idea of discrimination and the concern that Martin Luther King had that people should be treated equally by the law and should be free. I believe that everyone in this House should support that. 
But in order to be free we have to be able to live as we choose and not have the Government telling us who we can work for and at what rate of pay. That removes freedom. If I am unable to pick raspberries for a price that I am willing to pick them for for someone who is prepared to pay for them I am not a free person. Someone is making the decision. In fact that is the situation that makes me a slave. The Government is saying that I cannot work. Rather than concentrating on what Martin Luther King said we have twisted it here today and turned it inside out. Let us think. 
Hon David Cunliffe 
: Dickens here we go. Dickens is back. David Copperfield. 
RODNEY HIDE 
: I know that David Cunliffe likes getting exercise. He is one of those MPs—and it is easy to do—who stands up in this House and says: “I care about poor wages. Let’s make a law about it to show how much I care.” David Cunliffe has never in his life actually employed anyone. He has never in his life been employed in the productive sector. He has always lived off the taxpayer. 
 I ask members to think about it. If this kind of legislation worked to boost wages why are we debating a piddling $12 an hour with New Zealand First? Why not make everyone rich and make it $100? Everyone thinks that is silly do they not? In fact why not make it $100 an hour for a 16-year-old? We are against slavery are we not—let us make it $100 an hour and let everyone get it and we will be rich. 
We know the consequence of doing that. Suddenly the House has gone quiet. We know the consequence of that—there will not be very many people working because for the minimum wage to have an impact it has to force wages above the going rate. That is the trouble with it: if members vote for a minimum wage yes it is good for those who have work but it excludes people from the job market. Where is the justice in that? Where is the fairness in that? How does that help a Maori youth wanting to get a job? Of course we want that Maori youth to have a job. If we want that we have to have the freedom to set a price. 
If we want wages to go up we cannot do it from this House. We cannot do it by passing a bit of feel-good law. We cannot sit around and pat ourselves on the back with self-satisfied smirks thinking we are helping the poor. No it requires hard work to drive up wages hard work from this place—from the Government. We need to be driving up wages and ultimately the only thing that can do that is a more productive economy. Passing a law in this place to set a price for labour does nothing to improve the productivity of this economy. Setting a minimum wage does nothing to improve the productivity of labour. If it is effective it actually excludes people from the market and makes our economy less productive and the very people we are trying to help will be poorer now and poorer in the future. 
We should be asking some basic questions: “What is it that enables people to get a job?”; “What is it that enables wages to go up?”; and “What is it that enables a country to prosper?” The answer is not in regulating prices it is not in regulating wages and it is not in sitting here with a self-satisfied smirk saying: “Hey look at us don’t we care.” 
I know that David Cunliffe is smarter than he appears by taking the mickey out of me for speaking out against minimum wages—he has been to Harvard; he knows the impact. He is just wanting to play a bit of politics by implying that I who am speaking the truth am suggesting that I am in favour of low wages. Of course not—someone who is speaking out against regulating prices is not in favour of a sweatshop. Someone who is speaking out about trying to regulate our way to prosperity is not a person who does not care. Someone who is speaking out against making a minimum price is not someone who says: “Let’s all help business and not care about the workers.” No that is someone who is addressing the issue of what we need to do in the New Zealand economy to help our young people not just today but tomorrow next week and in the years ahead. We should be looking at our economic circumstance— 
Hon David Cunliffe 
: The member cares about stakeholders about robber barons? 
RODNEY HIDE 
: Mr Cunliffe sits in a Government that is seeing interest rates driven up workers laid off and businesses shut down. He is in a Government that is unable to respond to that predicament. Solving the predicament is hard work. It requires a Government to take a good hard look at itself and not just sit there and play politics not just sit there and take workers’ hard-earned money and spend it to try to win votes. It requires a Government that says: “Hang on we do not need to spend this money here. It is nice to spend it here but it would be better to lower taxes so that everyone has more money in their pockets.” 
If we lower taxes we get more investment and therefore more capital and it is capital and technology—as Mr Cunliffe well knows—that drive up wages. Capital and technology are what drive up wages because they are what make us all more productive. That is why for example New Zealand workers cutting hair or driving trucks get paid more than workers in say Fiji or workers in South Africa. It is not that they work harder it is that they have more capital and more technology to work with. 
The danger is that we are falling behind; we are falling behind on the capital and technology fronts and it is because we now have a regime operating that is too highly taxed. There is a huge fiscal stimulus going into the economy and driving up interest rates and we have regulated ourselves so that people look at it and think it is all too tough. We in Parliament cannot understand the rules that confront small business. We cannot understand the rules and yet we expect people in small businesses whose job is not to understand the rules—that is our job—but to run their businesses to understand the rules that we cannot understand. 
That is what we are doing. What we should be doing is not piling up regulation upon regulation but doing the hard work to get this economy going. That is caring because to care we have to deliver results. I tell the House that putting in minimum wage laws and driving up the minimum wage do nothing to increase wages. Thank you very much.