Logie Jan: Minimum Wage (Starting-out Wage) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Logie Jan: Minimum Wage (Starting-out Wage) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 18 October 2012. Volume:684;Page:6021. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
JAN LOGIE (Green) 
: 
 I feel a tad weary standing here this afternoon to talk to this bill the Minimum Wage (Starting-out Wage) Amendment Bill. It is another bill that demonstrates a lack of understanding of the hardship in our communities and it is based on an economic vision that seems almost Dickensian to me. This is another bill that seems to be part of this Government’s drive towards a low-wage economy this time directly targeting young people. 
My colleague Holly Walker as well as David Bennett Jackie Blue and Paula Bennett have all spoken so eloquently on the real evils of this bill so today I would really like to just tell a story that I was told recently of a young woman who lives in Hamilton because I think it is quite informative and I hope everyone in the House listens. 
This young woman is Stephanie. She is making a living—or trying to make a living—by cleaning. She earns what is soon to be the adult minimum wage of $13.50 an hour. Like many other young people she is underemployed but she is working really hard to stay off the dole. At present she works 25 hours a week and to work these hours she has to travel from site to site in the evenings to do her cleaning work. She has been trying for a year to get more hours of work or to find a second job but as everyone knows in this labour market and without access to a computer when you are new to a city that is really hard. 
For 25 hours a week at $13.50 an hour she gets $337.50 before tax a week to pay her bills. Out of this she has been able to pay the rent for her small flat power food and a prepay cellphone. There is little left over to save for emergencies like she faced earlier this year. After a year of cycling from site to site—a good green young woman—her bike broke and it was going to cost her $90 to fix it. This meant that she had to walk from site to site while she saved to fix it. How responsible is this young woman? She is amazing. But you know there are consequences of that—two pretty big negative ones. One is that quite often at night while walking she would get harassed by men driving past her which is a pretty scary experience for a young woman in a new city. Secondly she wore big holes in her shoes so big that it was not safe to wear those shoes to work and she knew that if she did she would get turned away from her job. 
Does this remind you of Dickens or not? Stephanie was forced to make a choice. She had to get new shoes so that she could work and this meant not paying for something. I would like to ask everyone in this House what you would give up to pay for those shoes. This is a young woman in work whose income if this bill goes through will be significantly lower than that. Somebody who is having to give up food or paying for her power to pay for shoes to get to her job—that is what we talking about with this bill. 
I think the question before this House should be: how can we better support young people to actually be able to live their potential and work and be able to have a life as well as that job? If low-wage work lifted people out of unemployment and into well-paid jobs hey we would be fine with this but the evidence shows that it does not. For the member across the House to say that “They are better off than being on a benefit so really hey that’s great.” is treating them as if they are charity cases rather than workers. It is saying that they should be grateful for a job and take whatever they are given. That is offensive. 
If this Government was serious about addressing youth unemployment then there are lots of things it could do. It could reverse the 2010 tax switch which cost $2 billion in just over 18 months. It could put this money into supporting small and medium sized enterprises to take on young staff create jobs and it could support the member’s bill that was drawn from the ballot today; a Labour member’s bill about committing to a high-wage economy and supporting young people’s employment rights.