Aaron Violi (Casey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's a pity that the member for Hawke has decided to leave the chamber in the debate on this motion; it probably says a little bit about the credit that he gives it—and he was given it by a minister, no doubt. But he did talk about real wage statistics, and he talked about the last two quarters. What he didn't talk about was the fact that real wages have gone backwards in every quarter, on an annual basis, since Labor came to government. That includes the biggest collapse in real wages on record, in the December 2022 quarter. He didn't want to talk about that. He didn't want to talk about the fact that, over the past 18 months, real net disposable income per person fell by 8.6 per cent. For an average income earner, this is a decline in take-home pay of just under $8,000. Primarily, it has been driven by rising mortgage payments, falling real wages and increasing taxes.

The other thing he didn't want to talk about, but was happy to throw barbs at the opposition on, was wage theft and voting against wages. I'll give him his due: he wasn't in the parliament at the time. But he's been involved in politics for a long time and is very influential, I hear, in the ALP in Victoria. He didn't talk about how Labor voted against legislating a wage-theft provision on 23 February 2021. He didn't talk about the fact that we could have had legislation in operation today for workers, if Labor had voted for it in 2021. Conveniently, he misses that in history. It was described by one Labor source, in the AFR on 3 February 2021, as 'collateral damage'. So it says a bit about those opposite that they're happy to get up here and talk about wage theft, but their actions in 2021 said another thing. This motion from the member for Hawke, in many ways, sums up the challenges with Labor's—

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 12:29 to 12:48

The challenge with this legislation and this motion is that there's no mention or discussion of productivity. Everyone wants higher wages—it's good for the community, it's good for society, and it's good for business. But to avoid inflation from wage growth, it has to be coupled with productivity gains. As Richard Holden, the University of New South Wales's professor of economics, recently said:

We have a big productivity problem in Australia. And that makes current wage increases inflationary … But @Tony_Burke sure isn't being careful about IR policy and inflation.

See this speech in context