Mallard Trevor: Minimum Wage (Mitigation of Youth Unemployment) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Mallard Trevor: Minimum Wage (Mitigation of Youth Unemployment) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:662;Page:10364] 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Labour—Hutt South) 
: 
 For the second time in a day I find myself in the unusual position of following the speech of a National member of Parliament on industrial relations legislation and just about agreeing with it. I think I can agree with the vast majority of what my colleague David Bennett from the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee—and Tau Henare; the pair share a hairdresser—said on the Minimum Wage (Mitigation of Youth Unemployment) Amendment Bill. David Bennett is right. He has got it. If I were Sir Roger Douglas I would be slightly insulted that a junior backbencher was sent to the House to deliver the Government’s position; the tradition is that a Minister takes the first call on this sort of legislation to state the position for the Government. A Minister is part of the Government and a backbencher of course is not. I know that procedural niceties are not as important as that as far as this Government is concerned and I think that Sir Roger is not as sensitive as that anyway. He probably would not realise that Kate Wilkinson is a Minister at the moment. 
Hon Ruth Dyson 
: Who is? 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: Kate Wilkinson I understand is the Minister of Labour and the Minister of Conservation. 
I ask Sir Roger Douglas what happened to his principles. He knows he does not believe in minimum wages at all. Why did he bring into the House something that he thinks is a half-cocked halfway approach? Why did he not stand up in the House and say what he really believes which is that there should not be any minimum wages for anyone? That is what he believes. He believes that it does not matter whether the people who come in to clean up the pig farm are adults or kids he should set their rate—he as an employer should decide what the rate should be. That is his position. He believes in the total power of the employer rather than having a fair and balanced employment relationship. 
There are a few fairly simple arguments against this bill. One is that we are all waiting for the evidence from Sir Roger that massive problems have occurred as a result of the introduction of youth rates. That evidence just has not come. The reason it has not come is that he could not find evidence that problems have occurred. There is a clear argument in equity for paying people properly and most people in New Zealand accept that. Most New Zealanders believe that all people should be paid in a dignified and proper way for their labour and it does not matter whether it is a younger person an older person or a person in the main section of the workforce. I say again to Sir Roger that a few of us would have thought more of him if he had come down to this House and said what he really believed and if he had told the full truth as to ACT’s opinion on the minimum wage rather than the half-truth or part-truth approach that he took with this bill. Most of his colleagues funders and mates in the Business Roundtable actually would not agree with him but I am certain that Mr Kerr and others who helped draft the legislation would say that from their perspective this is not the best approach. 
The final point I make is that I do not think that National went far enough. My view is that having decent wages forces employers to train. They have to make their workers productive and earn their money. It forces them to invest in proper capital equipment because if they are paying someone a decent wage they need the right gear in order to make sure they get the return. We have a choice in New Zealand: do we want a high-wage high-skill economy or do we want to compete at the bottom end with India and a number of countries like that? Roger Douglas wants our wages to go down; Labour wants them to go up; and National says it wants them to go up but in real terms it is keeping them down.