The report examines the five key reforms the federal government has used to make a difference to wages growth. It demonstrates the contrast between the Government and Coalition policies and provides a summary of the major parties’ policies on wages for the 2025 federal election campaign. 

The report also highlights key policies introduced in this term of government that will mean wages will keep moving, such as multi-employer bargaining, better pathways to convert from casual to permanent work, the right to disconnect, stronger laws preventing wage theft, protections for gig workers and the closing of various wage cutting loopholes.

Key findings

• Workers would be $8,700 worse off by now, if Peter Dutton had achieved his goal of blocking major reforms to get wages moving.
• Since 2022, due to legislative and policy changes by the Albanese Government, there has been consistent wage growth averaging 3.7%.
• Wages grew by 2.1% in the decade from 2013-2022, when the Coalition government was in power.
• The turnaround in wages since 2022 has occurred across all industries, in contrast to the slow rate of wage growth in every industry in the decade prior.

Reforms examined

1. Intervention in the past three Annual Wage Reviews that resulted in Australia’s award and minimum wage workers receiving wage increases.
2. Improving collective bargaining through the Secure Jobs, Better Pay reforms that are now delivering the strongest pay rises in nearly 30 years, for a rapidly growing group of workers.
3. Reducing insecure work by introducing a sensible definition of casual work and the Same Job Same Pay laws ending the corporate practice of paying labour hire workers less than directly employed workers and limiting the use of fixed term contracts.
4. Lifting public sector wage caps and bringing public sector work back in-house, ensuring Australia’s public sector workers are getting paid their worth and ending the practice of expensive consultants.
5. Strengthening equal pay and work value laws so that Australia’s previously undervalued care workers, the majority of whom are women, are finally getting paid what they deserve.