Voters might be shocked, amazed even, but the day’s campaigning was devoted to a real issue of wide relevance where there’s a genuine gulf between Labor and the Coalition.
On the one hand, Anthony Albanese supports pay rises for low-paid workers of 5.1%, to ensure they don’t go backwards in real terms. On the other, Scott Morrison thinks workers’ real wages being maintained is “economic vandalism” and Albanese’s support shows he’s a “loose unit” on the economy.
Higher wages were “like throwing fuel on the fire of rising interest rates and rising cost of living”, the prime minister says.
Much of the media appears to agree with Morrison’s “we must cut low-paid workers’ real wages” position, so Albanese’s support has prompted much pearl-clutching and hyper-ventilation by the media.
Albanese was eager to embrace the issue this morning, and had his attack lines ready in the face of hostile questioning from journalists:
What Scott Morrison says is that it is OK to find $30 million for a block of land that is worth $3 million. It is OK his government can always find money for sports rorts, for commuter car park rorts, for all of this activity … he is OK to waste those billions of dollars. A billion dollars literally on advertising of the government itself. But backing a $1-an-hour pay increase is not OK. Workers who are paid $20.33 an hour to be paid $1 extra. That is what this debate is about.
(There’s an implicit challenge in that fact: can anyone name a low-paid worker who would be overpaid at $21.33 an hour? That’s $41,000 a year. How many politicians, commentators and journalists could live on $41,000 a year — or would they need to work multiple jobs like so many low-paid workers have to?)
Challenged on whether he thought a wage rise for the low-paid was a bad idea, Morrison professed it wasn’t his job even to offer an opinion. Some quotes from his media conference today.
The Fair Work Commission is the appropriate body to look at all of the economic implications for where they set the minimum wage. If we wanted politicians to make this up, that is what we would have done …
… not respecting the process of an independent setting of minimum wage conditions in this country …
… what is calmly determined, sensibly, by the independent process that looks at all of these factors…
But Albanese’s opinion, apparently, would lead to inflation and economic chaos.
At the same time, Morrison was arguing that wages were rising because “businesses are growing and becoming stronger. That is where pay rises come from.”
Confused about both the role of politicians, the Fair Work Commission and business in wage-fixing? You should be.
There’s at least an element of consistency in Morrison here and, for once, some laudable honesty in policy. The Coalition has actively engaged in wage suppression in the interests of business over the past decade, using several techniques: refusing to support minimum wage rises and cutting penalty rates; increasing temporary migration to push wages down; placing caps on public sector pay; demonising unions; and refusing to fund pay rises in service sectors run by private enterprise but funded by government (like aged care — where Morrison is refusing to commit to funding the wage rise currently under consideration by the Fair Work Commission in its work value case for aged care workers).
In that context, explicit support for real wage cuts continues the Coalition’s policy over the previous three terms in office. It’s saying the quiet part out loud: the Coalition supports businesses’ relentless opposition to wage rises for workers, which have vanished in real wage terms since 2013.
It will go down well with The Australian Financial Review, of course. But whether it plays well in those crucial outer suburban and major regional seats that Morrison — mainly because he can’t go anywhere else — has been targeting, well, that’s a different matter.
In other news, Barnaby Joyce took a break from pork-barrelling to visit the National Press Club. The challenge of stringing more than a handful of words together in relatively coherent fashion at one stage overcame the deputy prime minister, who suffered a nosebleed from the effort. Highlights — using the term loosely — included Joyce calling for a domestic shipping industry (something urged by Labor, while several Coalition governments have — quite rightly — worked to kill it as the protectionist nonsense it is), calling Labor’s Help to Buy policy “Fidel Castro politics” (continuing his Cuba obsession, after branding the Solomon Islands the Pacific equivalent two weeks ago), and his argument that the rest of the world was backing away from their climate commitments.
