Hide Rodney: Minimum Wage (Abolition of Age Discrimination) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Hide Rodney: Minimum Wage (Abolition of Age Discrimination) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:629;Page:1415] 
RODNEY HIDE (Leader—ACT) 
: 
 I rise on behalf of the ACT party to oppose the Minimum Wage (Abolition of Age Discrimination) Amendment Bill. I think people would be surprised if I did anything else. Let me make this point. It is all very well for people in the House to stand up and piously say that they would like 16 to 17-year-olds to be paid more and that they feel good about voting in favour of the bill. But of course members will not pay the price of the bill. Businesses that are struggling to pay or that cannot afford to pay workers their wages will pay the price of the bill. The second group that will pay the price of the bill will be young people themselves because there is no doubt that people will be priced off the labour market as a consequence of the bill and that they will struggle as a consequence of that to find work. One might say that that will not happen. But if it will not happen then why pass the bill? The only way that a minimum wage can work is by actually increasing the wage rate above the level that the market currently pays. If the minimum wage is below the rate that the market currently pays then it does not have any impact. If the minimum wage is above the market rate then it will have an impact on the numbers who are employed and the ability of people to get a job. 
I ask the people who are voting for the bill to contemplate the following. Of course everyone in the House wants higher wages for New Zealanders. But if it were as easy as passing a law in Parliament to give people higher wages why stop at $9.50 an hour? Why not make it $12.50 an hour? Why not make it $15 an hour? Why not make it $25 an hour? I heard Sue Bradford call out: “Why not?”. 
Sue Bradford 
: $12.50 would be good. 
RODNEY HIDE 
: Sue Bradford said that $12.50 would be good. What is wrong with $25 an hour? 
Darien Fenton 
: Nothing. 
RODNEY HIDE 
: So if we can make the minimum wage $25 an hour what is wrong with $100? I heard Ms Fenton call out that nothing is wrong with making it $25 an hour. But of course if the minimum wage were made $25 an hour not one person’s wage in New Zealand would go up. What would happen is that all the people who are currently earning less than $25 an hour would find themselves unemployed. That is why I do not understand why we think we can sit in Parliament and without regard to the cost to business and without regard to the cost to young people legislate for a wage. That is not how the world works. 
If we want to get wages up in this country we will not do so by passing laws; we will do so by increasing the productivity of the economy. At the end of the day the dairy owner the owner of the factory the owner of the trucking company and the owner of the retail store can afford to pay someone only what that person brings to the business. Employers cannot afford to pay more than that. The sad reality is that we have had a poor-performing economy for many many years and therefore people cannot command the high wages that we would like them to have. The answer to that problem is not to live in fairyland and pass a law that says that $25 an hour would be a good idea which is the figure that members of the Labour Party and the Green Party called out because unless people produce $25 an hour it does not work—in fact they would have to produce more than that because one has to cover all the costs that this Government has put on someone who employs them. 
The best thing that could be done for the wages of low-income people in New Zealand—and in fact for everyone’s income—is to make it a lot easier to employ people in the first place and to make it a whole lot easier to do business. And here is a novel thought: what about having them pay less tax? 
We put up wages at our peril because it will not be parliamentarians who carry the cost and it will not be civil servants. It will be businesses and young people who pay the cost and that will result in jobs and opportunities that we will not see. I ask members of the House to think about that. I am staggered that people in the Labour Party think we can legislate for a $25-an-hour minimum wage without that having any consequence. That shows the thinking behind this sort of legislation.