Turner Judy: Minimum Wage (Abolition of Age Discrimination) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Turner Judy: Minimum Wage (Abolition of Age Discrimination) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
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JUDY TURNER (Deputy Leader—United Future) 
: 
 I rise on behalf of United Future to speak to the first reading of the Minimum Wage (Abolition of Age Discrimination) Amendment Bill. I have to be honest that when I first heard about this bill my gut reaction was: “Oh my goodness me the employers are not going to like this. As a consequence of them not liking this there will be fewer jobs available for 16 and 17-year-olds and therefore this is going to be very counter-productive.” I suspect from hearing some of the speeches tonight that other members reacted like that and have camped at that place. 
I took the time to read very carefully the bill put forward by Sue Bradford and I also did some research of my own and discovered that this is actually quite a sensible proposal. It is time we had this debate. United Future will support this bill going to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee so that we can have the discussions that need to be had. We will be able to hear from both employers and young people about their concerns in this regard. I do not think there is anything to be scared of by letting this bill go through. 
The first thing that impressed me was that this bill is not extreme. We are talking here about 16 and 17-year-olds. The current provisions that relate to 15-year-olds and under would still remain in place and maybe that is a discussion to be had on another day. I am kind of glad that we are focusing on a very specific age group of young people who have often been employed at least part-time for several years are quite competent at what they do and quite often are supervising older workers. Certainly my own children worked during their high school years. They learnt an amazing work ethic gained skills and were given responsibilities. It would have been offensive to them to work for less pay alongside adults doing exactly the same job. The employer they worked for did not make that discrimination and they were paid the same minimum rate as the adults working alongside them. They appreciated that consideration. 
My concern was how employers would react to this bill and when I did some research one of the things that interested me was that currently 44.7 percent of 16 and 17-year-olds who are employed are already on more than $9.50 an hour. Employers are already making some very good calls in that regard. This bill is not the major shock to employers that I had anticipated it would be. So the first fact that I found really interesting was what is actually happening in common practice out there right now. 
We are talking about quite a large number of young people. Something like 26400 16 and 17-year-olds who are employed either full-time or part-time are affected by this; we are not talking about small numbers. We have to think about what those young people are working towards at this point. First of all they want to get a track record of employment that looks very good on their CV as they apply for all sorts of jobs and tertiary training opportunities. They want a consistent work record that looks very good on paper. The second thing is that many of them are saving toward their tertiary education. They are responsible young people who are developing an early work ethic that should be applauded. When we start to undermine that development by saying that they do the same work but are not worth the same as anybody else we are sending some really strange messages. United Future believes that because of those kinds of considerations this debate is probably long overdue. We are very happy to support this bill’s passage to the select committee and we will watch with interest. 
We do have some concerns and we would like to see those addressed. I am sure that submitters will bring those up very loudly and clearly. We want to see what kind of responses come out of that. One of the concerns I have is about the training period that might happen. I guess we need to find out whether it takes longer to train 16 and 17-year-olds than to train more mature workers. Maybe there is a case to be made and maybe provisions need to be made for those kinds of considerations; I am very open to that kind of thinking. But I also take the point that possibly there is no difference. It will be interesting to see as the evidence comes out. 
We are very keen to see the bill progress. That was not our initial reaction but we did a bit of soul-searching on the issue. We looked at what was genuinely proposed here and we discovered that it was not as extreme as we first had anticipated. We commend the member for bringing the bill to the House’s attention.