Katy Gallagher (ACT, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Hansard source

Well, there's some context. I know it's an uncomfortable truth about what happened to wages because it was a deliberate design feature of your economic architecture to keep wages low. We are dealing with an inflation challenge at the moment, and no-one is pretending that wages should be growing at the pace of inflation. But we are seeing wages growth. We are seeing wages growth unlike when we look at what happened—2.2 per cent a year under the previous government—and we have already seen the minimum wage case deliver over five per cent. We've seen that for the aged-care workers and for all of the low-income workers that you fought against ever getting a pay rise—remember your submission had the benefits of low-paid work in it. We want to see low-income workers get a pay rise, and that's what they'll get under this government and under the laws that we're going to pass. (Time expired)