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

I thank the member for Reid both for the question and for her advocacy to see more people in work and to see them better paid.

It's possible now to have a look at what the average figures were over that lost decade that the Treasurer referred to and compare them with what we're getting now. If you start with unemployment figures, the average unemployment figure over that lost decade, at the time those opposite were in office, was 5.6 per cent. If we had their average unemployment figure today, an additional 300,000 people would be out of work. Instead, this government has had the best first year of new jobs for any Australian government—that is, half a million people in work, half a million new jobs. And the majority of them, overwhelming—how many of them are full time? Eighty-five per cent of those jobs are full time, and the majority of those full-time jobs are held by women. But, not only are there more people in work, not only are there more people in full-time work, people in those jobs are now being better paid than they were under those opposite.

Under their time in office, wages grew at an average of 2.1 per cent; 2.1 per cent was the average growth in wages. If you applied that average wage growth to what workers have in fact received, you would see now that people on the minimum wage, had we kept their settings where low-wage growth was a deliberate design feature of their measures—and they knew our policy changes would produce increased wages; they even said that was why they opposed them; the Leader of the Opposition said that's why he opposed them; the shadow Treasurer said that's why he opposed them—minimum wage workers would be $45 a week worse off right now if we had kept those settings in place. On award wages, a retail worker would be $44 a week worse off if we had kept those settings in place. A hospitality worker would be nearly $2½ thousand a year worse off. And the strongest figures of the difference in the change of government in wages is for aged-care workers. An aged-care direct employee level 4, every week, would be $195 worse off if we had kept their settings in place.

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