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

I thank the member for Boothby for the question. She is someone with a real commitment to getting wages moving in this country. For 10 years, low wages were a deliberate design feature of the previous government in their management of the economy and it was one of the few commitments they managed to deliver on. The pace of wage growth under the previous government, at 2.1 per cent, wasn't just slower than the decade before, or slower than the decade before that, it was the slowest pace of wage growth since the Second World War. And it was delivered quite deliberately by those opposite.

What do we have now? Instead of the 2.1 per cent that averaged over their decade, wages are now at 3.7 per cent. If you're on an award, the latest increase was 5.75 per cent. If you're on the minimum wage, the latest increase was 8.6 per cent. If you work in the aged-care sector, on top of those increases, there was a further 15 per cent improvement in your wages.

The party of robodebt didn't just go after people on welfare. They went after people on wages as well, and they succeeded. All those workers that I described are now getting more in their bank accounts for one simple reason—the government has changed.

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