Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

Isn't it interesting that, if there is one thing that will set off the opposition, it's the idea that workers get paid fair wages. The horror! The horror that workers would get paid fair wages! You can be guaranteed the opposition will go off about that, because they always want to drive wages down.

We on this side of the chamber know that people in Australia are doing it tough right now. The cost of living is front and centre of people's minds, and it's at the top of our government's priorities. That is why we've delivered fairer tax cuts, which were opposed by the opposition; energy bill relief, opposed by the opposition; more bulk-billing, opposed by the opposition; cheaper child care, opposed by the opposition; cheaper medicines, opposed by the opposition; rent assistance, opposed by the opposition; and HECS relief for students and graduates—we're yet to have the vote, but I reckon that will probably be opposed by the opposition as well. We have done that because every bit of relief matters to Australians.

Unlike the opposition, the Albanese Labor government also sees strong wages growth as a key part of the cost-of-living solution, not the problem. When we came to government, annual real wages were falling by 3.4 per cent. Wages were falling dramatically compared to inflation. So it's no wonder that Australians are feeling cost-of-living pressures. It wasn't an accident that we saw that under the coalition, because, of course, we know that they openly said that low wages were a deliberate design feature of the economic policy.

Now that they're in opposition, Mr Dutton and the coalition have continued that approach, voting against almost every single measure to get wages moving, and now they're threatening to take it all away. After a decade of attacking workers and deliberate wage suppression under the Liberals and Nationals, real wages are growing again. At the same time, we're driving down inflation and keeping industrial action low. Labor's changes are working as we intended. In the last fortnight alone, we saw average private sector pay rises in new enterprise agreements hit four per cent for the first time in 12 years with the highest number of workers covered by— (Time expired)