Alison Byrnes (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations. What is the Albanese Labor government doing to help Australians deal with the cost of living by getting wages moving after a decade of stagnation?

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Cunningham and acknowledge her commitment in particular to closing the gender pay gap, which is part of getting wages moving in this country.

If there was a statistic last night that really stuck out for me—and there are a lot of statistics floating around on budget night—it was this fact: real wages are lower today than they were 10 years ago. Real wages are lower today than they were 10 years ago. That's the impact as a direct result of a government that deliberately wanted to keep wages low. Then you go through the occupations where, to this day, wage growth is still at its lowest. With wage growth already, you look at the inflation figure that's just come out and put that against the wage growth figure at the moment, the WPI, which is 2.6 per cent. But then look even lower than that, in particular occupations. What do these occupations have in common? Retail trade, accommodation and food services, education and training, health care and social assistance: all of them low paid, all of them predominantly women—every one of those. And that's the story of low wage growth in Australia.

The Fair Work Act, when it was established—and those opposite did not seek to amend these sections—had always envisaged that there would be multi-employer bargaining. There were three different streams of bargaining dedicated to multi-employer bargaining, but they haven't worked. For example, with some of the barriers that turned out on the way decisions went, early childhood workers were denied a pay rise on the basis that they couldn't compare their work to the work of engineers. Low-paid workers weren't able to enter the low-paid stream. Think of who these workers were. Nurses, aged-care workers and security guards weren't able to enter the low-paid stream. To those opposite, if you want to question whether or not multi-employer bargaining and opening it up will make a difference to getting wages moving, look no further than the quote from, and I hate that it's the same person again, the shadow Treasurer. The shadow Treasurer was asked by Laura Jayes about his attitude to why they were opposed to multiple-employer bargaining. He answered with this, 'It pushes up wages.' He went on with more, saying, 'This is a bad place to go.' By the end, he was saying, 'This is exactly what they shouldn't be doing.' In terms of having an impact on wages, it will, but if you're a government that wants to get wages moving, these are the sorts of decisions you take, and we'll be introducing it to the parliament tomorrow.