Labor’s Tony Burke backs in Albanese over 5.1 per cent wage hike

The industrial relations minister if Labor wins government has bolstered his party’s stance on lifting wages to the 5.1 per cent inflation rate after colleagues left room to move on a figure.

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Tony Burke said anything less than a 5.1 per cent rise was a pay cut during a speech to the Transport Workers’ Union on Thursday, in which he also doubled down on Labor’s promise to “fix the stack” of Coalition appointees to the industrial umpire.

“When the wage price index at the moment is 2.3 and inflation is running at 5.1, what is a pay increase less than 5.1 other than a pay cut? If you’re on the same wages, and everything is going up except your wages, you are going backwards,” Burke told the union conference in Hobart.

“And so it shouldn’t be remarkable at all. I’d hope you’d expect it from all your Labor Party representatives, whether it’s [Labor senator] Tony Sheldon, whether it’s me, whether it’s Anthony Albanese, you’d expect from all of us that we’d say people shouldn’t go backwards.”

Burke said the wages debate had become the great divide between both sides of politics, with Scott Morrison lashing Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese as a “loose unit on the economy” after he supported raising the national minimum wage to meet the rate of inflation.

“If people were wondering ‘is there a significant difference between the parties?’ We are there, we are absolutely there,” he said. “You don’t find a bigger difference in the simplicity of ‘should workers be able to [move] up or should workers fall behind?’”

Labor Treasury spokesman Jim Chalmers backed Albanese in supporting the 5.1 per cent increase on Wednesday but added that a decision was yet to be made about a formal submission to the Fair Work Commission.

“We haven’t determined a final position on how we make our views known,” he said on ABC TV, while the Opposition Leader on Wednesday during a press conference declined to be pinned down on the figure in a formal case to the commission.

Conversely, Coalition spokeswoman Anne Ruston softened the government’s rhetoric on wages on Friday morning by appearing to land in favour of a pay rise for workers on the minimum national rate.

“We absolutely seek for Australia’s lowest-paid workers to continue to be able to have increases in their wages,” Ruston told ABC radio on Friday morning, while being questioned about the Coalition’s neutrality on the annual minimum wage review.

Scott Morrison this week criticised Albanese’s specific stance as being likely to trigger an inflationary chain reaction and “precondition” the economy to expect such a rise.

“Anthony Albanese says that he wants wages to go up by 5.1 per cent, and he thinks that Australians don’t know what the impact of that would be on their interest rates, on unemployment, or on inflation and the cost of living,” Morrison told a press conference on Wednesday.

However, Ruston on Friday morning retreated from the prime minister’s criticism of Albanese’s nominated rate, saying the Coalition’s condemnation was “not because of the figure”.

Burke also took aim at Coalition appointments to the Fair Work Commission, which decides the national minimum wage, saying he was on a “project of making sure” to rebalance the independent body following years of criticism over commissioners’ business-related and political backgrounds.

“Our objective is to fix the stack,” Burke said, after saying in a press conference this week there needed to be corrections in appointments to the Fair Work Commission.

“This government, right through to the appointment of [former Liberal MP] Sophie Mirabella, have used the Fair Work Commission in a partisan way … that will take some time to be able to correct but there needs to be some correction,” he said.

A Coalition spokesperson said the government appointed members to the commission who were qualified under the Fair Work Act: “That is, they have knowledge or experience in, one or more of the following fields workplace relations, law, business, industry or commerce.”