The Federal Government is pushing for an increase to the minimum wage to keep up with inflation. It’s asking the Fair Work Commission to ensure real wages for the lowest-paid workers do not go backwards.

Canberra

The Albanese Government has initiated efforts to increase the minimum wage in response to rising inflation rates. The primary aim is to persuade the Fair Work Commission to enact measures that would prevent the real wages of the lowest-paid workers from deteriorating.



Albanese Government pushes for minimum wage increase

Well, it's not overly surprising that we're seeing this position put forward by the Albanese government. It is very much consistent with all of their messaging ever since coming to power back in May of 2022. What it is saying, though, is that there is an acknowledgement of the cost of living crunch hitting right across the country, and it's hitting those who are on lower incomes even harder than others. So what we're expecting from the federal government's submission to the Fair Work Commission on this annual wage review is that call to again take into account inflation and ensure that any wage rise is in line with that. Otherwise, workers are going to be going backwards. If we cast our minds back to last year when the annual wage review was handed down by the Fair Work Commission, there was a pretty significant increase to the minimum wage announced by the commission. Back then it was 8.65% and a 5.75% increase to award wages. That meant that the minimum wage was bumped up to $23.23 an hour. If someone is working full time, that equates to a fraction under $46,000 a year. And there's nothing to say that the Fair Work Commission will be bumping it up by that sort of figure this time around, and that is mostly because inflation has eased somewhat since that period. It's come down from those record lows, but there is still an appetite, certainly within the Albanese government, to see the Fair Work Commission increase that minimum wage there. It is a really interesting point that Jim Chalmers is making here, though, about the government's own cost of living relief, which centres around these revised income tax cuts coming into force on the 1st of July. This package was designed to benefit more Australians, to ensure that more Australians were getting something of a tax cut, and Jim Chalmers is very keen to argue that that shouldn't be used as some sort of factor in lowering an official minimum wage decision from the Fair Work Commission. One shouldn't cancel out the other. Here's how he described it on News Breakfast. Well we don't see cost of living relief as instead of decent wages growth. We want to see decent wages growth on top of the billions of dollars in cost of living relief that the Albanese government is rolling out, and we don't want to see the tax cuts that we're rolling out for every taxpayer, or the energy bill relief, or cheaper early childhood education, or cheaper medicines, none of those things are a substitute for getting wages growing in our economy again. No one's really going to walk out there and start arguing against an increase to the minimum wage, particularly as a cost of living crisis is hitting the country. It would be a very brave politician to try to make that argument, but what we have heard from the Federal Opposition today in response to this is, picking up on that point Jim Chalmers is making that the stage 3 tax cuts shouldn't be seen as a reason not to increase the minimum wage. Jane Hume, who is the Shadow Finance Minister, said that that is something of a concession from the government, that that is the only thing it is doing to try to bring down cost of living pressures for Australians, and that that effectively bells the cat there, that the government should be doing more. Here's what she had to say. If they're using the tax cuts as their only solution to the cost of living crisis, that's a recipe for disaster. There should be a far broader plan to tackle the cost of living, and we've been saying this now since Labor came to government, because they went into the election saying that the cost of living was the number one issue. It remains the number one issue nearly two years on. Shadow Finance Minister Jane Hume speaking earlier today. We've got a couple of months before we see how the Fair Work Commission will rule that decision, not expected until the middle of the year.

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