Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Cameron. I watched that same interview, and the journalist quite strangely put the proposition to the Prime Minister that there had been no wages growth. That was of course patently false. We have had wages growth of two per cent—above inflation, above CPI—and the Prime Minister made the accurate point that as you continue to have growth, as you continue to have a situation where a business is more successful and more profitable and has to compete for workers in the Australian economy, then obviously the laws of supply and demand mean that wages will increase by more.

You've got to remember, we inherited the situation where the unemployment rate was heading to in excess of 6¼ per cent, to the point where the shadow Treasurer said, in his Press Club speech after we won the election, that one of the three measures of economic success for this government would be whether we could keep the unemployment rate below 6.25 per cent. Guess what: it's at 5.5 per cent. And part of the reason why we've been able to keep the unemployment rate comparably low is because of flexibility in the labour market. That means that wages have grown by less than they have in the past. The alternative would've been a higher unemployment rate, but we are—