This graph from ACT’s Roger Douglas illustrates John Key’s duplicity in first helping to cause, then pretending to care about, youth unemployment.
National, Labour and the Greens — all parties bar ACT — voted down Roger’s bill to reinstate youth rates and get kids off the couch and into work.
By refusing to allow kids to be paid less than adults, Key deliberately allowed the number of young unemployed to double.
Now he’s offering a dollop of your money to any boss who pays a kid an adult’s wage.
Why not just let the boss pay the kid a kid’s wage, and let the kid work their way up — the way most of us did?
Excellent graph, whoever did this.
John Ansell 
Yep, it’s a good old trick. I’ve even had this one played on me by a new manager in the workplace.
Even trickier when you remember that the people he is most affecting with this are too young to vote.
Employers are never going to employ and pay a kid on an adult’s wage even if the Government helps out – with our money I might add!!. Why should they? Surely they can see the cynical move behind it all. John Key is beyond the pale. I just can’t get into his thought processes. I also think it is beneficial for a young person to be on youth rates at the start so they can then learn something of how to budget to get through until the next pay day. If they are given an adult wage right at the beginning, they will have money too much money too soon and probably waste it on goodness knows what. A gradual move to an adult wage would benefit them so much more in learning to budget I’m sure.
What has happened is scandalous and defies reason.I started on youth rates and in 3 months had a pay rise. To be denied the opportunity would have been a bitter blow. You shake your head and wonder some times what moral bankruptcy has got a hold of most politicians.
Oh where is Oliver Cromwell?
The crux is….the state is denying people their right to liberty by refusing to let them trade their own time and efforts for a wage mutually agreed upon between both parties…. that’s what’s outrageous and should be being trumpeted to Nationals,and others shame. Basically your life belongs to the state….. who’s standing for hat
Oh my God! Abolishing youth rates caused the global financial crisis! Look at the correlation! It’s obvious!
Helen, I agree with what you said about very young people being paid an adult’s wage: they’ll fritter it away in no time flat.
I sure did!
As have most of the others, boy and girl racers, cellphones, booze, sex and drugs.
Sounds like the sixties on steroids.
Which it has been. All of it wasted along with quite a few lives.
Judge, look at the graphs and tell us where the correlation between youth unemployment and mainstream unemployment depart… your current argument is ass about face, trying to tell us youth unemployment caused the GFC. What caused the GFC is kind of irrelevant in the context of this graph, because the GFC resulted in higher unemployment, disproportionately affecting the youth. The one protection youth had in order to weather the GFC was stripped away from them when youth rates were abolished. Put yourself in the shoes of an employer, you’ve got a workers livelihoods to protect by ensuring that your business keeps its head above water, your productivity requires you to employ 1 more person, who are you going to choose:
a) someone who is desperate for work to feed their family, or pay their bills and wants to make a good impression so they can keep the job and weather the storm
or b) a youth, even if s/he isn’t a hoodied mumbling numbskull who the school system has failed to equip with literate aptitude, but did manage to equip them with a sense of entitlement
A reasoned argument would good way to start to get us to think that you’re not simply a troll, pent up with red-envy, because your local government job is getting you no where, and you’re sick of all the moaning ratepayers who come in and abuse you and your colleagues for never managing to get anything done within specified time-frames, apart from issuing increased rates demands.
JA: I think Judge is being sarcastic, mort.(Again.)
The issue isn’t what kid’s do with their money once they’ve earned it – it’s theirs to spend how they like without anybody telling them they should or shouldn’t. The real concern is that they’ve been denied the opportunity to earn at all! It’s galling that a socialist like Key conspired with his comrades in Labour and the Greens to support this abandonment of our youth, and then suggest a solution that comes straight out of the soviet handbook by redistributing everybody elses taxes to offer corporate welfare and bribe businesses to ‘hire’ these youth at adult prices!
If there are 120 people who are employable, and only 100 jobs, what happens to the excess 120? They are unemployed.
OK, so let us assume that 17 of those 20 are under the age of 20, 3 (obviously) over the age of 20. Let’s allow youth rates to be paid.
What is likely to happen?
There are 105 employed, 15 unemployed. The unemployed under the age of 20 number only 5, the remaining 10 are over the age of 20. That is an increase of 300% in the number of family men out of work.
Ain’t numbers wonderful?
JA: Yours certainly are unusual. Why do you assume that all 10 of the unemployed are men, and that they are all fathers? I suspect the true number of family men is closer to 3/10. If so, you just overstated by 300%.
Sorry, first sentence “…excess 20…” NOT 120. Oh the shame!
Helen came closest. Kids have undeveloped brains. They have to learn somewhere. It’s an evil dis-ingenious leftard thing to treat kids like adults, but without any sort of repercussions. Fostering entitlement mentalities leads to what we saw in London recently… (in summary-it’s all part of the plan)
And now Don Brash is blaming Labour for getting rid of youth minimum rates but did National re-instal them? No they didn’t so they are just as bad as Labour and Don should acknowledge this. I’m worried that he is positioning himself as National’s coalition partner and won’t say anything pointedly against them.
JA: Me too, Helen.
UPDATE 1 September: Don has just called National too timid. That’s more like it.
If there are 120 people who are employable, and only 100 jobs,
what happens to the excess 120? They are unemployed.
They starve to death, and so there is no more unemployment.
Problem solved.
Two things about that graph,
1. the % figure for youth unemployment is wrong. According to the DoL, the actual rate is around 19% to 20% – not 30%.
2. The graph suggests that youth unemployment was sparked by abolishing youth rates. Nonsense. The worst recession since the 1930s is what hit NZ and the rest of the planet (Australia and China excepted) and doubled unemployment from 3.6% to 7% (actually – that’s more than a doubling).
So you rationale for bringing back youth rates doesn’t stack up, except as a cheap source of labour.
The problem is that there aren’t enough jobs at present.