Beaumont Carol: Minimum Wage (Starting-out Wage) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Beaumont Carol: Minimum Wage (Starting-out Wage) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 19 March 2013. Volume:688;Page:8641. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
CAROL BEAUMONT (Labour) 
: 
 It is a great pleasure to rise to speak for the first time in this 50th Parliament. But of course the matter we are debating is not one that is a great pleasure. It is one that Labour opposes and I proudly join my colleagues in opposing this Minimum Wage (Starting-out Wage) Amendment Bill because it is discriminatory. At its very essence this is discrimination. 
I want to note the point that my colleague Dr Megan Woods made about unemployment and youth unemployment in particular. There is no doubt that there is a crisis in New Zealand around youth unemployment. It is part of a wider economic crisis we have in our country of low incomes of high unemployment and of high levels of underemployment. People want work and they want a decent standard of living. We have a crisis because we have a Government without any ideas. So what does it revert to? It reverts to type of course: straight-out discrimination. It is wrong for young people to be paid less for doing the same job. That is precisely what this bill does. 
Age is not a proxy for skills or experience. As the others have said there could well be 18-year-olds who have more experience than a 24-year-old doing the same job. Youth and age are not proxies for skills and experience. Why should it be that a young person working at a supermarket at the busiest time of the week gets paid less? So often in our supermarkets and anybody who does any shopping knows this—maybe across the other side of the Chamber people do not know about this—if you go in at a busy time in the evening or weekends you will see a lot of young people and that is also the busiest time. Our supermarkets are relying on their labour. Why should they be paid less at the busiest time? It is actually a double whammy. It is ridiculous. 
This is a discriminatory piece of legislation. It also has a nice little twist about punishing youth beneficiaries to boot. I just think this is an absolute disgrace and that the consequences of this are going to be some very negative effects. There are going to be displacement effects. The Government’s own research says this. Even if there are jobs created it will be at the expense of someone else. It will be replacing somebody with somebody who is cheaper not because people want to employ young people per se but because they will be able to employ somebody cheaper. 
What happens to young people when they become eligible for the full rate? Well of course they could well be replaced by somebody who is cheaper so older young people will be disadvantaged. In fact in combination with the wonderful “90-day No Rights at Work Act” you could see people on an endless treadmill of never reaching the full rate. 
The effects of this in tandem with other Government policies are really very troubling. I know for example that organisations like the National Council of Women are worried about the displacement effects for part-time women workers. Women workers who are in the workforce in part-time jobs—again maybe in industries like retail and hospitality where they can get the part-time hours because they need to balance their family responsibilities and their responsibilities in the paid workforce—will be replaced potentially by cheaper young people. So they are concerned about it from the point of view of women part-time workers. That is a displacement effect as well. 
 What about the hardship impact on young people? That is also an effect of this piece of legislation. Often now young people’s incomes are a vital part of family income so we are actually reducing family income. Often young people are also working to save to study—something that we would all applaud. We want young people in tertiary education. But again we are going to make it harder for them to get the money that they need or it will mean that in fact they have to rack up even higher student loans than they currently do—again another negative impact of this legislation. 
But what underlies this—and I want to acknowledge the contribution made earlier by Phil Goff on this—and what this is really about is the typical National Party approach to our workplaces and to workers’ rights which is actually around reinforcing the idea that cheapness is what is really at effect here that workers are actually expendable commodities and that we do not want to be ambitious about lifting incomes in New Zealand. We do not want to create better-quality workplaces. We do not want to have workplaces where in fact workers are treated with respect and where their ideas and innovation are what drives productivity. No we want to continue to have an approach that has been National’s approach now for decades—