Roche Denise: Minimum Wage Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Roche Denise: Minimum Wage Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 29 August 2012. Volume:683;Page:4935. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DENISE ROCHE (Green) 
: 
Tena koe Mr Speaker. Tena koutou ki te Whare. The Green Party will be supporting this bill the Minimum Wage Amendment Bill. A $15 minimum wage is actually our stated policy and our policy also includes attaching the minimum wage to the average wage so that it is 66 percent of the average wage. The first minimum wage was introduced in around about 1945 and at that time it was about 80 percent of the average wage. Currently the average wage is $27 an hour and the existing minimum wage is $13.50 which is about 40 percent of the average wage. If this bill is successful and a $15 minimum per hour rate is set that would take it up to a mere 55 percent of the average wage. 
Today in New Zealand 300000 workers earn $13.50 an hour the minimum wage. As we have heard from the Expert Advisory Group on Solutions to Child Poverty there are 270000 children in New Zealand living in poverty and two out of five of them come from families where at least one of the parents is in work. We heard again today from the Minister for Social Development Paula Bennett that the best way to raise these children out of poverty is for the parents to enter paid work and we agree. But it has to be work that is paid for at a decent rate and $13.50 is not it. 
Parents struggle to feed house clothe educate their kids and keep them healthy when they are earning $13.50 an hour. Before tax that is $540 a week and yes these families can access the in-work tax credit which is a discrimination against the non-working poor but this does not lift wages. It makes low-paid workers dependent on the State. The in-work tax credit is a subsidy to employers and it allows them to continue to pay wages that are simply too low. It is a subsidy for employers another deal for the well-off. 
We have heard that increasing the minimum wage to $15 is hard on employers that they cannot afford it. Well we heard that argument in the 1970s when equal pay was introduced and guess what—the world did not come to a halt. We heard it again when paid parental leave was introduced in the last decade and again the economy did not crash to a halt. The fact of the matter is that wages have not kept up with the cost of living and we cannot afford to keep our people poor because it becomes an increasing drain on our economy. It is uneconomic in terms of health outcomes in terms of education outcomes and in terms of crime and antisocial behaviour and we all pay for that. 
Employers should be paying a decent pay rate. Over the last decade productivity—the rate that workers are working at in New Zealand what they are producing and how much the employers are gaining from them—has increased dramatically but wages have not increased at the same level. We are working harder than ever but we are not being rewarded. We have not kept up with the cost of living. In the  
Dominion Post  
today they are predicting price increases linked to the drought in the US which has an impact on the wheat crops which means that in the coming months and years bread prices will be skyrocketing. 
This bill is very modest. The call for an increase in the minimum wage is really very timely because tomorrow the Service and Food Workers Union along with faith-based organisations and community organisations are launching the Living Wage campaign. They will be calling on employers to commit to paying workers a living wage basically. We do not know what that is but in the  
National Business Review  
last week they suggested that a living wage was something like $17.70 an hour. We know that on the minimum wage as it is at the moment workers—