Fenton Darien: Minimum Wage (Mitigation of Youth Unemployment) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Fenton Darien: Minimum Wage (Mitigation of Youth Unemployment) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:662;Page:10366] 
DARIEN FENTON (Labour) 
: 
 I am thankful for the opportunity to speak on the first reading of the Minimum Wage (Mitigation of Youth Unemployment) Amendment Bill. I have to say how the worm turns! I was in the last Parliament under a Labour-led Government. We had this very same debate about youth minimum wages and National voted against it. It is really pleasing to know that National has seen the error of its ways and has actually accepted that what Labour was saying about youth minimum wages being discriminatory and not having any impact on youth employment was accurate. We have seen from the figures that the minimum wage makes no difference to youth employment. We can argue about research—and the member Sir Roger Douglas will argue about that—but the fact simply is that if someone is working it should not matter whether that person is young a Maori a woman or whatever he or she may be. Someone who is doing a job should be paid a decent wage for what he or she does. 
This bill seeks to return young workers to the scrapheap of the youth minimum wage and as I said that is not a new argument to have in Parliament. The arguments that Sir Roger Douglas has put for his legislation are well rehearsed. I know that the member was not here for the last Parliament but I tell him that we went through them then and they were rejected. They were rejected. We went through a select committee process and we heard from all kinds of people but the arguments were rejected because there was no evidence that increasing the youth minimum wage or young people’s wages has any impact on employment levels just as there is no evidence that increasing the wages of women has any impact on wages. I think we have seen arguments about that in the past. 
I do not want to be disrespectful to the member—I welcome him back to Parliament—but I ask him whether this is really what he came back to Parliament in order to do. I ask whether this is really what he came back to Parliament to do because I would be interested to hear a response on that. We had debates on this issue in the last Parliament but no one can remember what life was like in the 1980s when that member was in Parliament. No one can remember that actually. 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: I can; I can. 
DARIEN FENTON 
: Oh Mr Mallard can remember that but many of the young workers who would be affected by the provisions of this bill were not even born then. They were not even born when that member was last in Parliament. I am sure that he is genuinely concerned about youth unemployment as is everyone but I think that his economic arguments just do not stack up. I think we have moved past the economic rationalist arguments that we have seen from the Business Roundtable and from his supporters. 
We can look at the record of what happened under the previous Labour Government to New Zealand wages when we removed the youth minimum wage. We progressively moved the adult minimum wage upwards. When we came into Government in 1999 the youth minimum wage applied to young people under 20—I mean many of those people were not only holding a job but had family and other responsibilities—and we progressively moved the minimum wage upwards. There were significant increases to it but during that period the rate of youth unemployment kept falling as did the rate of unemployment for all workers. Everybody knows that the previous Labour Government moved the minimum wage significantly. 
So we can all come up with research on this issue but I think we have had enough time now in this Parliament to know—and certainly National acknowledges this—that moving the minimum wage does not actually have the impact on young workers that the member suggests. I know that the ACT Party’s position is that there should not be any minimum wage and that wage levels should be left up to the market. The member can correct me if I am wrong. I ask the member to correct me if I am wrong but that I understand is where that party is still at. 
For me the issue comes down to some simple things. If we look back in our history we see there was a time at the beginning of the last century when we discriminated against Maori workers. They were paid less than Pakeha workers. And there was a time up until the early 1970s when women were paid less than the minimum wage—less than men. Could anyone imagine that we would ever go back to that sort of discrimination? Would we ever do that? We cannot discriminate on the basis of gender or of race so can we discriminate on the basis of age? Well the member is proposing that we should. Should we discriminate on the basis of someone being older than other people?