Peter Boyle
The Australian Council of Trade Unions is asking the Fair Pay Commission for a $30 per week pay increase for workers on the minimum wage. At current prices, that would buy three kilos of bananas.
This would roughly adjust the minimum wage into line with the consumer price index increase, which has been blamed on the high price of petrol and bananas — although childcare costs also rose 12.4% in the year to June, up 82% over the past decade. Food prices increased by 8.3% last year, transport by 7.7%, education by 5.8% and health by 4.6%.
Peter Hendy from the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry claimed that the equivalent of three kilos of bananas a week for the working poor was "over the top".
The Liberal federal treasurer, Peter Costello, reckons the workers are doing OK because they've simply stopped buying bananas.
Perhaps agreeing with Costello, the Labor government of South Australia has asked the Fair Pay Commission to give the poorest workers only a $17 per week (1.7 kilos of bananas) pay rise.
PM John Howard (who scored a $20,280 pay rise last month, which brought his annual salary to $309,270) said that minimum-wage workers deserve some bananas, but shied away from saying how many.
Labor opposition leader Kim Beazley says he gives heaps of his bananas to charity.
Kim Beazley: Very substantial slabs of my income go to charity all the time and that will continue to be the case, including with this [latest politicians' pay rise].
Neil Mitchell (Radio 3AW): You're going to give it all back.
Beazley: Mate, I give away huge amounts of my income in relation to the way in which I operate my electorate and the rest of it. That's what we do in politics.
Mitchell: I understand that. One of the state politicians said that they are giving their pay rise, all of it, to charity. Are you going to that?
Beazley: Mate, I'm not going to give all my pay rise to charity. I give substantial portions of my existing pay to charity and I will keep doing that and now I will give more.
Mitchell: You can understand how this would get up the nose of the average worker wouldn't you?
Beazley: Yes it would. It would get up the nose of the average worker in the times in which we find ourselves. There you have a position where the politicians are getting substantial pay rises, and an awful lot of workers have got a question mark over their pay right now. I can understand it would get up their nose.
(For the full text of this July 28 radio interview, visit <http://www.alp.org.au/media>.)