Press Conference, Adelaide

AMANDA RISHWORTH, MINISTER FOR EMPLOYMENT AND WORKPLACE RELATIONS: Well, today, I'm very pleased that I'm releasing Enterprise Bargaining Trends for the new June quarter. This enterprise bargaining data demonstrates some really good news. Enterprise bargaining, of course, is when employers, unions and employees sit down to negotiate what works for them. 

What the data for the June quarter is showing is that we are seeing the largest number of people covered by enterprise bargaining since enterprise bargaining began. It is now sitting at 2.8 million employees being covered by enterprise bargaining. Of course, that is up from the last quarter, which was 2.68 million people.

Now, not only are we seeing more employees covered by enterprise bargaining, but of course, enterprise bargaining is delivering real wage increases. The most recent data shows that agreements approved in the June quarter have delivered an annualised wage increase of 4.2 per cent. That's well above the economy-wide increase of 3.4 per cent. 

We know that there's been seven consecutive quarters now where wages delivered through enterprise bargaining have been higher than inflation. Our government's focus was to get wages moving, and that's exactly what this data is showing. It is showing that there are real wage increases, particularly for those that are involved in enterprise bargaining.

I also want to highlight a couple of other important statistics in this report. In particular, private sector increase in wages was higher in approved agreements in June than it was in the previous quarter, and importantly higher than in the public sector. So what we're seeing is wage increases delivered through enterprise bargaining in the private sector outpacing in the last quarter, the public sector. This is good news for employees right around the country.

Our government has been really focused on ensuring that wages are moving again after, under the Coalition, a decade of deliberate wage suppression. Our workplace relations changes have been designed to reinvigorate enterprise bargaining, which is really crucial to delivering wins for employers and employees, and now we're starting to see the dividend of that through increased employees covered by enterprise bargaining, higher wages through enterprise bargaining, and importantly, delivering enterprise solutions locally.