Libby Coker (Corangamite, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Treasurer. How is the Albanese Labor government getting wages moving again in our economy, and what approaches have been rejected?

Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thanks to the member for Corangamite for all of her hard work and for her great question as well. This Albanese Labor government's focus this week and every week is helping to ensure that people earn more and keep more of what they earn. This is the primary motivation behind the tax cuts which will come in for every taxpayer from 1 July, and it's the primary motivation behind the submission that Minister Burke and I will make to the Fair Work Commission on Thursday.

We are the party of working people. We support Australians on the minimum wage. We know that wages growth is best when it's bottom-up and not just top-down. We back people who work hard and provide for their loved ones and who just want to get ahead.

Angus Taylor (Hume, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Wages are down 7½ per cent.

Milton Dick (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Hume will cease interjecting.

Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This is our reason for being: to feed and fuel aspiration right up and down the income scale, not the limiting and exclusive and elitist view that those opposite take about aspiration, which says you can only be aspirational in Australia if you've already made it.

We know that people are under pressure and, as the member for Swan was saying in her great contribution a moment ago, we know that cost-of-living pressures disproportionately impact people on the lowest incomes.

Milton Dick (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Gippsland will cease interjecting.

Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We know from the data that we'll get later in the week, in the monthly CPI, that people are still under cost-of-living pressure. We also know that one of the most effective ways that we can deal with cost-of-living pressures in our economy and in our communities is to get wages moving again. But this is not the only way that we can go about it. We're rolling out tens of billions of dollars in cost-of-living relief. We've got the tax cuts for every taxpayer from 1 July. We see these important cost-of-living measures as in addition to, not instead of, a decent pay rise for Australia's minimum-wage workers.

Partly because of our plan, we've got a trifecta at the moment of falling unemployment last week, moderating inflation, and real wages growth for the first time in years. A big reason why we've got real wages growth is the approach that we have taken to the minimum wage. Our approach is very different to theirs, it must be said. For a decade, a deliberate design feature of their economic policy was to keep wages low. That's why we had stagnant wages for the best part of a decade; that's why we had real wages falling 3.4 per cent when we came to office; that's why wages growth, on average, under them was half of what it is now, under us; and it's why workers earning less than 45 grand didn't get a look-in in their stage 3 tax cuts.

We want people to earn more and keep more of what they earn. Those opposite want people working longer for less. The difference is very, very clear. You'll see it in our submission to the Fair Work Commission. We are here for working people. Those opposite never were, and they never will be.