Katene Rahui: Minimum Wage (Mitigation of Youth Unemployment) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Katene Rahui: Minimum Wage (Mitigation of Youth Unemployment) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:662;Page:10368] 
RAHUI KATENE (Maori Party—Te Tai Tonga) 
: 
 The Maori Party has a longstanding concern about the specific issue of youth unemployment. In particular we have been devastated by the grinding consistency of the rate of Maori unemployment which tends to be approximately 2.3 times the non-Maori rate and by the fact that Maori have lower labour-force participation rates than non-Maori. But we take great heart from the strength of our people who never give up and who remind us of the need to keep fighting the fight to ensure that the potential of our young people is enabled and that they are empowered to thrive. 
It was for that reason that the Maori Party duly recognised the significance of our co-leader Tariana Turia being delegated responsibility for Maori and Pasifika employment a challenge that she has taken on at full steam. It is within this context that Minister Turia has pioneered the Community Max programme which has been immensely successful in its short duration. In fact at last count some 3200 positions had been filled and of those approximately 1900 were taken up by young Maori. That has been an incredible endorsement of the success of the programme. It is an endorsement that we see and hear about right throughout our electorates. 
There have been two ground-breaking media releases in the last 10 days that give us room for hope although they have received very little media attention. Two days ago Minister Bennett announced there was an overall increase of 9.5 percent in job vacancies between January and March of this year. In the previous week we learnt that the number of New Zealanders receiving an unemployment benefit dropped by almost 4000 in the last month. Most significant of all in our mind was that 2500 Maori cancelled their benefits in March because they had found employment as did 546 people from Pasifika communities. That is great news and we hope to hear and see more of the same. 
We come to this bill with some cynicism about the allegation that 20000 young people have lost their jobs as a result of introducing minimum wages for young people. The explanatory note of the bill paints a grim picture that implies that because the youth wage rates were abolished and aligned with the minimum wage for adults mass unemployment would occur. It goes further and suggests that equitable pay for youth workers at the minimum wage for adults is detrimental to their employment prospects. Our concern is that we simply have no evidence or analysis to suggest that such spurious claims have any factual basis. The more likely reason is the global economic downturn that has ravaged the employment sector generally. 
I want to make it absolutely clear that the situation of job seekers is of immense concern to us in the Maori Party and it was in this context that we absolutely supported Community Max. The challenge for the Government however is to determine what the next step of engagement will be to ensure that those young people do not enter or return to unemployment. I know that every member of this House and every electorate has seen incredible progress in connecting young people to the positive work already going on in our communities through the Community Max scheme. The reason the programme was so successful is that along with receiving the minimum wage for 30 hours’ work a week those Community Max graduates achieved a great sense of self-satisfaction. 
The answer does not lie in short-changing our young people by giving youth a few extra dollars on an hourly basis when that amount does not even match the rate of inflation. We want solutions not bills that create more problems. The Maori Party will not be supporting this bill.