Australian wages are growing at a faster pace than costs of living despite double-digit increases in electricity and petrol prices, an economics professor says.
Pay rises failed to outpace inflation in the year to June, with both measures increasing by 2.1 per cent.
Electricity bills rose by an annual 10.4 per cent and petrol prices jumped by 16.3 per cent, recently hitting a four-year high, the Australian Bureau of Statistics’s consumer price index showed.
But Melbourne Institute Professor Mark Wooden said that since 2001, overall wage growth had outstripped increased living costs.
Australian wages are growing at a faster pace than costs of living despite double-digit increases in electricity and petrol prices, an economics professor says
Not all popular items went up in price, with vegetables 8.7 per cent cheaper over the year as clothing costs fell 3 per cent.
While wages have been flat, it has also occurred against a backdrop of weak inflation, which is on the low side of the Reserve Bank of Australia’s two to three per cent target band.
Prof Wooden pointed out that with almost a quarter of award-wage earners receiving a 3.5 per cent pay increase from the Fair Work Commission, well in excess of inflation, many workers were better off.
This followed a 3.3 per cent minimum wage increase in July 2017.
Pay rises failed to outpace inflation in the year to June, with both measures increasing by 2.1 per cent as electricity prices rose by 10.4 per cent
Melbourne Institute research fellow Professor Mark Wooden said low wage earners had done well out of the Fair Work Commission
‘The lowest paid workers should be doing better,’ he told Daily Mail Australia.
‘The people at the bottom, the bottom 10 per cent, they are relatively no worse off to the people in the middle.
‘The last three or four years, there has been no increase in wage inequality.’
The academic fellow with the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research calculated that during the past decade, which has included the mining boom and the global financial crisis, wages have risen by 31 per cent, compared with 22 per cent for inflation.
The gap between the two was used to argue that real wage increases, adjusted for inflation, had delivered increases in living standards.