Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Cadell, I would remind you that there is one side of this parliament who has been very focused on delivering to Australians who are struggling with the cost of living—that is, the Australian Labor Party. It is the Labor government. There has been one side of the parliament who has been focused on obstructing benefits to Australians to try to handle the cost of living—that is, the coalition. That is the reality. When we have brought in measures to try and help Australians with the cost of living, which is hitting Australian families and Australian pensioners—we understand that—we have been met with opposition from those opposite time and again.

If there were one area where you would really want to see that, of course, it would be in the area of wages. Those opposite had a deliberate design policy of low wages for 10 years, and, not only that, they voted no fewer than 48 times against new industrial relations laws, claiming that those laws would return Australia to the Dark Ages—I wonder who said that!—that they would close down the economy, that they would leave supermarket shelves bare, because people might have gotten a pay increase. Do you remember that? And they claimed that any increase in the minimum wage would wreck the economy.

Senator Cadell, you're a decent man. I'd say to you: maybe you can explain to your colleagues why decent wages are an important part of ensuring Australians can deal with the increased cost of living, and perhaps you should talk to some of your frontbench colleagues who come from this scorched-earth mentality that says that those workers should just make sure their wages stay low because that way the economy works better.