The minimum wage should be lifted by at least 10%   
Green Left Weekly
April 10, 2026

The Fair Work Commission’s (FWC) annual minimum wage order sets a baseline for the poorest fifth of workers in Australia, who are not on enterprise bargains and whose wages are set by awards.

The FWC raised the minimum wage by 3.5% last year, but this still meant that real award wages remained lower than they were in 2020.

The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) is asking for a 5% rise in the minimum wage this year. While this has been met with the predictable howls of protest from the bosses, a 5% rise will still not make up for the fall in real award wages.

The ACTU’s claim would raise the minimum wage to $26.19 per hour, lifting the annual full-time rate to $51,761. This would still less than half of the annual wage of the highest-paid two-fifths of workers.

The current national minimum wage is not enough to get by on, the ACTU’s submission noted, and now “falls $262 a week short of what a full-time worker living alone needs to make a healthy living”.

The ACTU’s minimum wage submission admits: “Workers on award wages are also still behind from the last spike in inflation after Covid and despite progress over the last few years, they have yet to catch up.

“A typical full-time award wage worker would be nearly $2,500 a year better off today, if wages had kept up with inflation from mid-2021.”

This was before the new spike in inflation, the result of the latest United States-Israel war on Iran.

“Everyone knows the lowest paid workers in Australia are doing it tough because they have borne the brunt of cost-of-living increases as landlords put up rent and supermarkets and fuel companies pumped up prices to inflate their profits,” said ACTU Secretary Sally McManus.

“We will not accept the lowest-paid workers in Australia going backwards because of the Reserve Bank and Donald Trump. Workers were the ones who felt it the most last time inflation spiked; we cannot let this happen again. This is why low-paid workers need and deserve a decent pay rise. Energy companies, the banks and the supermarkets continue to deliver their mega-profits. Hardworking Australians must not be left behind.”

While all real wages started falling again in the year to December last year, the lowest fifth of workers — including hospitality and retail workers, disability workers, health care workers and baristas — did not share in the modest rise in real wages other workers had over the previous year. The real wages of the lowest waged workers have fallen further behind.

The situation for workers dependent on the minimum wage is worse than this, because inflation hurts people on lower incomes more than those on higher incomes.

This is due to several factors:

• Price rises of essentials, such as housing, food and energy, disproportionately hit lower-income households.

• Lower-income households have less “fat” in their spending, as do low-wealth households, renters, and people on government payments. This means these households have less room to reduce their spending before cutting spending on essentials.

• Low-income households also have fewer savings and fewer liquid assets, and so have less capacity to draw on their savings to maintain their consumption when prices rise.

The latest Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) inflation report — for the year to February  before the US-Israel war on Iran — show that housing costs went up 7.2%; electricity costs went up 37%; food and non-alcoholic beverages went up 3.1%; and, beef and lamb went up 13%.

So the ABS’s average measure of inflation (the Consumer Price Index), which went up 3.7% over that same period, understates the cost-of-living pressures on poorer households.

The ACTU’s submission acknowledges that award-reliant workers are the hardest hit by rising housing costs, such as higher mortgages and rents.

“Around 41% of award workers are renters, compared to 31% of all adults. As many as 44% of award workers are also paying off a mortgage, compared to 35% of all Australians,” it said.

Lower income workers usually do not have the bargaining power for higher income workers and they certainly do not receive pay rises like Commonwealth Bank CEO Matt Comyn, who last year received a 14% pay rise, taking him to $2.82 million.

Corporate CEOs are paid, on average, 55 times what their companies pay their workers, yet they give themselves double-digit pay rises, year after year.

Victorian teachers are campaigning for a 35% pay rise over four years. At the very least the ACTU should be asking for a 10% rise in the minimum wage, not just 5%.

Daves2017 wrote on Apr 11^th, 2026 at 3:08pm:


That's a very bad idea.

I strongly suspect Greg means that if we wait for politicians' wages to be cut by half then no one else will ever get a wage rise.

In other words - it will never happen.

Pay them like public servants:


https://www.afr.com/politics/these-32-public-servants-earn-more-than-1-million-2...



.
Agency      Name      Role      Total*

1      NBN      Stephen Rue      CEO      $3,037,016

2      Australia Post      Paul Graham      CEO      $2,385,610

3      Western Sydney Airport      Simon Hickey      CEO      $1,610,978

4      Future Fund      Raphael Arndt      CEO      $1,563,561

5      NBN      Kathrine Dyer      COO      $1,519,571

6      Snowy Hydro      Roger Whitby      COO      $1,475,610

7      Future Fund      Ben Samild      Deputy CIO      $1,373,300

8      Snowy Hydro      Iain Graham      CEO, Red Energy      $1,339,285

9      Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation      Alison Tarditi      CIO      $1,325,553

10      Snowy Hydro      Gordon Wymer      Chief commercial officer      $1,318,978

11      Australia Post      Rod Barnes      EGM network operations      $1,283,008

12      Future Fund      Alicia Gregory      Deputy CIO      $1,279,967

13      NBN      Will Irving      Chief strategy and transformation officer      $1,275,094

14      Future Fund      Not disclosed      Not disclosed      $1,248,036

15      Snowy Hydro      Paul Broad      Former CEO      $1,220,412

16      NBN      Philip Knox      CFO      $1,218,992

17      Australia Post      Rodney Boys      CFO      $1,198,563

18      Australia Post      Gary Starr      EGM parcel, post and eCommerce      $1,196,625

19      Future Fund      Not disclosed      Not disclosed      $1,194,397

20      Australia Post      Catriona Noble      EGM Retail, brand and marketing      $1,189,097

21      ABC      David Anderson      CEO and managing editor      $1,156,969

22      Reserve Bank of Australia      Philip Lowe      Governor      $1,147,465

23      Australia Post      Susan Davies      EGM people and culture      $1,143,204

24      Australia Post      Not disclosed      Not disclosed      $1,109,190

25      Federal Circuit and Family Court      William Alstergren      Chief justice      $1,097,339

26      Future Fund      Not disclosed      Not disclosed      $1,071,472

27      Defence      General Angus Campbell      Chief of the defence force      $1,062,702

28      NBN      John Parkin      Chief engineering officer      $1,052,988

29      Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation      Damian Hill      CEO      $1,038,474

30      Snowy Hydro      Gabrielle Curtin      Group executive      $1,035,649

31      Future Fund      Cameron Price      General counsel and chief risk officer      $1,011,614

32      Defence      Greg Moriarty      Secetary      $1,006,474

Bobby. wrote on Apr 11^th, 2026 at 5:09pm:




That sounds like a “ hit list”.

I wonder what bounty a hunter might earn?

Totally just speculation.

L