Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Hasluck. I remember, during the election campaign, standing up with the member for Hasluck at the Guildford Town Hall, talking about the need to get wages moving and talking about the fact there had been a decade of wages flatlining. Well, 10 years of low wages as a deliberate design feature in Australia ended the day the Albanese Labor government began. With that one word of 'absolutely', there was a change from wanting to keep wages deliberately low to wanting to get wages moving in this country. You can only imagine, with global inflation, what the wage freeze of those opposite would have meant over the last three years if they'd been able to continue with it. Every single thing we have put forward to get wages moving in this country, they have opposed. When we moved to fixed bargaining, they opposed it.

I remember them arguing why we had to not go to these new bargaining rules. It was because it would push wages up. Well, yes, it has, and people in this country needed to get pay rises, just like we needed to have same job, same pay, just like we needed to criminalise wage theft and just like we needed to have minimum standards for gig workers. Why should there be a situation where low-paid gig workers in this country have no minimum rates at all? But those opposite fought for that to continue to be the case. They're a party that wants to continue to have people to work longer for less.

Every one of these results for wage rises is a result that those opposite tried to prevent—pay rises of up to 13½ per cent for aged-care workers; pay rises of 15 per cent for early childhood educators. Over three years, minimum wage workers now have a wage increase of an additional $143 a week. That's for the lowest paid in the country. There has been a 27 per cent increase in bargaining. Flight attendants, coalminers, meatworkers are all earning more, and, at the same time, the days lost to industrial action have fall by 63 per cent. There are more than a million new jobs, with more than half of them full time. Danielle, a mine worker in the Hunter, who I've referred to before, got her pay rise because of the same job, same pay legislation—an exact policy those opposite have said they will take to the election to undo. Are you going to cut her pay, or are you just going to freeze her pay? If same job, same pay goes—it's the only reason Danielle is now paid the same as her fellow workers, which is why she says that she's now in a position to purchase a home.

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