Speech: Minimum wage - youth unemployment: Rahui Katene

The Maori Party has had a longstanding concern about the specific issue of youth unemployment.

In particular, we have been devastated at the grinding consistency that Māori unemployment tends to be approximately 2.3 times the non-Māori rate and that Māori have lower labour force participation rates than non-Māori.

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 the potential of our young people is enabled and empowered to thrive.

It was for this reason that the Maori Party recognised the due significance of our co-leader, Tariana Turia, being delegated responsibility for Maori and Pasifika employment – a challenge which she has taken on full-steam.

It was within this context that Minister Turia has pioneered the Community Max programme which has been immensely successful in the short time of its duration. In fact at last count, some 3200 positions have been filled, and of these approximately 1900 were taken up by young Maori.

This has been an incredible endorsement of the success of the programme, an endorsement which we see and hear about right throughout our electorates.

And although it has received very little media attention there have been two ground breaking releases in the last ten days that give us room for hope.

Two days ago Minister Bennett announced that there was an overall increase of 9.5 percent of job vacancies between January and March of this year.

And in the week previous we learnt the numbers of New Zealanders receiving an unemployment benefit dropped by almost four thousand in the last month.

Most significant of all in our mind was that 2500 Maori cancelled their benefit in March because they found employment, as did 546 people from Pasifika communities.

This is great news and we hope to hear and see more of the same.

So we come to this Bill with some cynicism about the allegation that 20,000 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 rates for wages were abolished and aligned with the minimum wage for adult mass unemployment will 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, Mr Speaker, 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 jobseekers 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 Government is, however, to determine what will be the next step of engagement to ensure that these young people don't enter or return into unemployment.

I know that every Member of this House, 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 this programme was so successful was that along with the minimum wage of thirty hours a week, there was the great sense of self-satisfaction these Com Max graduates have achieved.



The answer does not lie in short-changing our young people, in giving youth a few extra dollars on an hourly basis when it doesn’t even match the rate of inflation.



We want solutions – not bills that create more problems.



We will not be supporting this Bill.