Walker Holly: Minimum Wage (Starting-out Wage) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Walker Holly: Minimum Wage (Starting-out Wage) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Sitting date: 14 March 2013. Volume:688;Page:8595. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
HOLLY WALKER (Green) 
: 
 Last night this House took a significant step towards ending discrimination and eliminating a serious inequality in our law. That of course was passing the second reading of the Marriage (Definition of Marriage) Amendment Bill. Many of those who supported that bill including many Government members talked about the message it would send to young people about their importance their value their human rights and their mental and emotional well-being to remove that discrimination. It was a great moment in this House and it made me very proud to be a member of it. But in that context it is particularly distressing that the very next day after sending such a positive and affirming message to young people about their value and their future we are undermining that message with this discriminatory and damaging Minimum Wage (Starting-out Wage) Amendment Bill which sends exactly the opposite message to young New Zealanders. 
What this bill says to young New Zealanders is that they are not worth as much as older New Zealanders that their work and their labour even if employed doing exactly the same job as an older counterpart or managing them—[ 
Interruption 
]—that is right is not as valuable as that older person’s labour and that their needs their expenses and their rent food and living costs are not as important as those of older workers—that their rights are not as important as those of older workers. 
It is no wonder that young people are disengaging in droves from politics and Parliament and voting when this House passes legislation like this that disempowers and discriminates against them en masse just when we might have convinced some of them of our relevance our value and our commitment to them and their future with the marriage equality bill last night. If you looked around the gallery here last night it was young people whom you saw. Just at that point we slam them with this bill and undermine all of that good work. 
The discrimination inherent in this bill is not acceptable in just the same way that it is no longer acceptable to pay women less than men for doing exactly the same job—although arguably that does still take place in some cases—and just as it is not acceptable to pay workers of one ethnicity less than workers of another ethnicity. When these things occur and they come to light we are rightly outraged we prosecute offending employers we shake our heads we tut-tut and we talk about discrimination. Yet here we have a Government that is prepared to introduce comparable discrimination against young people into our employment law. 
On the basis of human rights and discrimination alone this bill should be dead in the water but as this Government has demonstrated with a number of other pieces of legislation—like the current welfare changes which impinge on the rights of women young people and children—rights-based arguments do not have a lot of impact on this Government. So let us have a look at its own economic rationale for this bill and see how it stacks up. This Government says that this bill will support young people entering the workforce and encourage employers to take on young workers. What a joke! Combined with its other discriminatory policy against young workers of 90-day trial periods this legislation means that at most young people can expect to be hired at below subsistence wages for 3 months and then flicked on in favour of another new cheap young worker. 
I was not on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee but I have heard that it heard no evidence that introducing youth rates would decrease youth unemployment. In fact there was conflicting evidence from Government departments and economists on exactly that point. Even two submissions from employers did not think that the bill would actually help with youth unemployment. What the bill will do is incentivise employers to keep wages low keep New Zealand a low-wage economy and continue to encourage the 50000-plus New Zealanders every year who leave permanently for better wages and opportunities overseas. If this Government really cared about youth unemployment it could invest in skills training and apprenticeships more than it has. It could improve access to student support. It could support the manufacturing sector and it could look at what is working in places like Otorohanga with the mayors task force. But it has not done that. 
This bill does not make economic sense it will not help youth unemployment it is discriminatory and it sends a terrible message to young people about the value that this Parliament places on them. I am ashamed of this House for passing it.