Fenton Darien: Minimum Wage Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Fenton Darien: Minimum Wage Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 29 August 2012. Volume:683;Page:4933. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DARIEN FENTON (Labour) 
: 
 It is a great pleasure to speak in support of my colleague’s bill the Minimum Wage Amendment Bill which would take the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 1 April next year. I found the previous speaker’s speech quite interesting and typical in a way. I would like him to explain to those miners in Huntly who have lost their jobs what raising the minimum wage has got to do with them losing their jobs. It has got nothing to do with that. It has got everything to do with the fact that this Government has absolutely no idea about how to create real well-paid jobs. It is just full of slogans full of plans full of targets and we are sick of hearing them. 
Tonight we have made history in this Parliament with the first reading of my colleague Louisa Wall’s bill the Marriage (Definition of Marriage) Amendment Bill. That bill is about an injustice that needs to be righted. The bill will go through the select committee process and I am sure it will come back and get through its third reading in the same spirit that we saw tonight. This bill is about an injustice as well. I want to talk about some real people who are on the minimum wage and actually they are not too far away from us. They are probably up in members’ offices right now or after midnight cleaning their offices. They are cleaning out their rubbish bins cleaning the toilets wandering around after members making sure that the mess that David Bennett left behind is cleaned up so that when he gets back to work the next day his office is sparkling clean. 
We met with those cleaners just a couple of weeks ago. Those cleaners 28 of them who work in this Parliament are on the minimum wage. That is shameful. 
Andrew Little 
: Embarrassing. 
DARIEN FENTON 
: That is embarrassing. This House of the people is satisfied to allow the cleaners of this place to remain on the minimum wage. What is more they get only 30 hours a week so it is not even a full-time job. Most of them are working more than one job. We talked to them. Their ambitions—apart from wanting to feed their families put food on the table and those sorts of things—are not for themselves but for their children. It is for their children’s education. Jane the Prime Minister’s cleaner who gets $14 an hour because she is the supervisor and she is in her 60s now works two jobs. She is really tired. She has now brought her son in to help her because of the hours and the work she has do. She talked about the ambitions that she has for her children and grandchildren and how she wanted to be paid $15 an hour so that she could meet those ambitions and help her children at school when they have to pay for things like sports and so on. She wanted to be able to help them with that. They are not being selfish about this. These are real people who work in this place and they are not the only minimum wage people in this place. Talk to one of the catering workers some time and see what they are paid. 
In a place where all of us are very privileged and we all get paid well tonight the National Government is about to vote down a bill that would give those cleaners and those catering workers—those minimum wage workers—$60 a week. For us $60 a week is not that much; for them it is a huge amount. We have spent a lot of time this week talking about poverty and inequality and we are seeing the impact of that. We know that inequality is growing. We know that there is poverty in many of our families and that actually two out of every five families that are working are living in poverty. Their children are living in poverty. Those families are working but they are not earning enough to make ends meet. This is a simple measure. This is a simple measure that would cost almost nothing to give the cleaners in this place $15 an hour. In fact it is something like $50000 a year. That is nothing. We could do this. We could do it in the spirit in which we passed the bill earlier in the evening where we saw an injustice that needed to be righted. Yes I know that it has got to go through the processes but the spirit of this place was really memorable. Unfortunately the spirit does not seem to continue when it comes to the National Government supporting low-paid workers and the cleaners who clean their office.