Sam Rae (Hawke, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's always a pleasure to follow such an illustrious contribution from the member opposite! The reality is that everybody in this House, everybody in this parliament, and especially everybody in the Albanese Labor government, is acutely aware that people across our communities have been doing it very tough for a protracted period of time now. But working people are not mugs. They know that the conditions that have led to these challenging circumstances weren't made overnight and they're not isolated to Australia. Many times in this chamber, across the public discourse, we have discussed the issues related to inflation in our economy, many of which began as part of an international inflation problem, and we see the reverberations of that international problem across all economies, including many of our peer economies in the developed world.

The reality is that, as compared with other economies across the world, Australia is doing relatively better—that's true: relatively better. But I come back to that point I made at the beginning: people across our communities are still doing it very, very tough.

Now, in any household budget—indeed, in any budget, really, at all, but in any household budget—there are the revenues coming in and the costs going out. In order to address the challenges that our households face, we need to look at both ends of their budgets. That's what the Albanese government has been relentlessly focused on, since we were elected: how we can support families, households, across our community with the cost of living by looking at both the revenue and the costs.

When we talk about revenue at a household level, I know that some of those opposite measure their revenue in terms of their returns from their Gold Coast apartment investments, or their family businesses that are essentially chains of childcare centres that return revenues. But, for working people, we are talking about wages. Wages are the revenues of the households of working people. So our government has relentlessly pursued the policies and the actions that lead to real wage growth for Australian workers.

We have seen the worst decade, under the former Liberal government, for real wage growth in our country's history, and only in the last three quarters have we started to see positive real wage growth returning for Australian workers. The most recent wage figures showed a nearly one per cent—a 0.9 per cent—wage increase in the wage price index in the December quarter, and that brings the annualised wage price index to 4.2 per cent higher throughout that year. That's the fastest growth for real wages in Australia since 2009, when Labor was last in government. It's the first time since 2018 that we've even seen three consecutive quarters of real wage growth.

Our government has been relentlessly focused on the revenue side of household budgets, in order to increase wages by any means necessary, for working people. At the other end of household budgets, we have the costs. We know, due to those international pressures across energy markets and food and groceries, as well as some of our own domestic challenges, particularly in relation to the weather events that we've had, that some of those household costs have been growing at a faster rate than households are able to absorb.

So, again, we have worked relentlessly to try and reduce the costs, reduce the outgoings, of households and working people across our economy. The best way that we can do that is to introduce—and, indeed, it had the lukewarm support of those opposite—cost-of-living tax cuts for every single Australian taxpayer. Every Australian taxpayer will be getting a tax cut from 1 July. Every single Australian taxpayer will see that tax cut showing up in their pay packet every single month or fortnight, depending on their pay cycle. We are addressing the revenue issues and we're addressing the cost issues. The Albanese Labor government is ensuring that our economy is fit for working people. (Time expired)

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