With flatlining wages, the rising cost of living pressures, and an uneven economic recovery from the pandemic, what does the 2022 Federal Budget mean for you?
Let’s break it down.
Cost of living
Whether at the supermarket, the petrol station, paying your rent or mortgage, workers are being paid less while the cost of living goes up.
The cost-of-living crisis is not a temporary issue that can be solved by one-off and short-term election bribes.
Working Australians need real wage rises to meet entrenched cost-of-living pressures. The 2022 budget does nothing to address that.
In fact, the Government’s budget projections show workers’ wages going backwards again next year. This time, they’re predicted to go backwards even faster than they did in 2021.
The budget fails to support genuine wages growth while instead offering ineffective one-off quick fixes.
Wages
The average worker’s wage went backwards by more than $800 last year. Scott Morrison sat back and chose to do nothing.
The budget has confirmed that these losses are accelerating – the Morrison Government’s own projections show workers’ wages will go backwards in the first six months of this year by an average of $500.
The Prime Minister could support our claim in the Fair Work Commission for a real pay rise for Australia’s 2.2 million workers on Award wages. He could support the pay claim for our aged care workforce.
These promises are totally inadequate. We only have to look at his track record on aged care worker bonuses or the bushfire recovery fund to see a pattern of big announcements with little or no follow-through.
Secure jobs
More than one in four workers in Australia are now in insecure work. The Morrison Government continues to ignore the insecure work crisis, and in fact has made it even easier for big business to put workers into insecure, casual jobs.
We also can’t ignore the gendered implications of Morrison supporting on-going precarious labour. It’s the very reason why women have left the workforce during the pandemic.
We also know that providing that universal free childcare would go a long way in improving women’s participation in the workforce. But we have some of the most expensive early childhood education and care in the world and the budget did nothing to address that.
Working women
If you’re a woman living in this country, you are less safe, and less economically secure under Morrison.
Women earn on average $483.30 less per week than a man and retire with about half the amount of super as a man. That’s on top of wages going backwards last year!
Women also have a 2 in 3 chance of having experienced sexual harassment at work.
Prime Minister Morrison produced no plan to deliver the structural change we need to improve the lives of Australian women. Everything he’s done is trying to fix his political problems, not make work and life better for women.
Climate change
We have the potential to be a clean energy superpower but the plan for workers, jobs and regional communities is missing, while fossil fuel companies continue to receive large subsidies.
The Morrison government is yet again failing on climate change, with spending on climate change measures falling by 35% over the next four years.
Meanwhile, the climate crisis is accelerating. Australia has seen back-to-back climate disasters ravaging our communities, yet the Morrison government has withheld and delayed spending money from the $4.8bn emergency response fund (ERF) established in 2019.
After the devastation our communities have experienced through the flood crisis, the $150m from the ERF the government has finally agreed to allocate is simply too little, too late.
Not the first time Morrison has been missing for workers
Nearly a decade of record or near-record low wage growth and worsening job insecurity under the Morrison Government has created a crisis for working people and the community.
The 2022 Federal budget offers no solutions to stagnant wage growth or the rising cost of living. Scott Morrison is missing again.
Low wages, job insecurity and economic pain have not been suddenly caused by international politics. These are problems that have been caused or made worse over years of the Government playing politics at the expense of workers.
But while Morrison delivers disappointment, union members have been actively working to improve working conditions for all workers.
Already members earn, on average, $250 more per week than non-union members.
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What does the 2022 Federal Budget mean for you?