Roche Denise: Minimum Wage (Starting-out Wage) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Roche Denise: Minimum Wage (Starting-out Wage) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 19 March 2013. Volume:688;Page:8629. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DENISE ROCHE (Green) 
: 
 We seem to have this attitude that we are a benign country that we love our kids that we will help our kids. But actually what we are hearing from this Government and with this bill the Minimum Wage (Starting-out Wage) Amendment Bill is that we will not. What we are hearing with this bill is that we think our young people are worth less than others. With this bill we are saying that young people are worthless. Mr Sabin who just spoke earlier actually said that he has heard that young people have no skills—they have no work skills. Well if that was the case then they would not be employed in the first place—no young person would be—but they are. They certainly are. 
We are not investing in our young people. In these sorts of circumstances what we are trying to do is we are trying to give them the worst starting-out work experience we possibly can. We are putting them into places where the employer has an incentive to employ them certainly and to pay them less than any other worker to pay them at a wage that they can hardly live on. We are saying that that is OK if we pass this law. 
Forcing young people into dead-end jobs just because they have been on a benefit is designed only to get them off the benefits so the unemployment statistics look better when we know that the way you address unemployment is to create jobs. This bill is not going to create jobs. We have seen no evidence of that and we have seen it in the past as well. Reducing the wages for young people does not create jobs. There seems to be no other reason for forcing the wages of young people down except to make them cheaper—except to make employers able to exploit them easier. 
I find it interesting that we are doing this to young people. We are focusing on them having lower wages but we never ever seem to attack those who are much older who are also on benefits. When you consider that we have a universal benefit that is applied to people over the age of 65 where they get 66 percent of the average wage and that this Government never attacks that one has to think why. I suspect that it is because those who are over 65 are well organised and they tend to vote for this existing Government actually. 
Tracey Martin 
: Not all of them. 
DENISE ROCHE 
: No some of them do not. A lot of them vote for New Zealand First. But if you think about it young people have as many expenses as older people. They do not eat less food. They do not use less electricity. They do not wear fewer clothes. They do not pay less for their expenses in transport. They are paying the same so why should they be penalised? 
Already 16-year-olds 17-year-olds 18-year-olds and 19-year-olds are able to be paid a training rate. We have already got that in legislation. They can be paid a training rate for a total of 3 months. This bill does not allow a sensible relationship between an employer and an employee. What it allows is for a worker to be employed at lower rates for up to 6 months with no guarantee that they will continue their employment. Then they go to the bottom of the scale again when they are re-employed by another employer if they get another job. This opens up young people to being exploited. 
We believe that if we are sensible and if we are serious about addressing youth unemployment there is a lot more that we should be doing in terms of education and investment in youth. There is a lot more we could be doing in terms of training. There is a lot more that we could be doing in terms of getting them to a point where they are work-ready. We are not seeing that type of compassionate approach with this Government. This bill certainly does not go any of the way there. 
We believe that the same work should be valued the same. We have been through this discussion before with women.