Why isn’t Albo promising wage indexation?

Does Opposition leader Anthony Albanese really plan to give all federal public servants an immediate 5.1 per cent pay hike if he wins the election?

Opposition leader Anthony Albanese in Wolloughby on May 11, 2022. Picture: Sam Ruttyn

Has Anthony Albanese just promised to deliver all federal public servants an immediate 5.1 per cent pay rise if he wins the election? And if not, why not?

He has said, emphatically, that pay rises should keep pace with inflation. Federal public servant pay rises are ‘in the gift of the federal government’.

So why isn’t that a clear-cut promise that an Albanese government would immediately deliver a 5.1 per cent pay rise – less any increase, obviously, delivered under current arrangements – to ‘keep pace with’ the 5.1 per cent CPI inflation, reported by the ABS for the March year?

Or indeed has he effectively promised to deliver a 6 per cent-plus rise – the likely inflation rate for the June year? Further, hasn’t he effectively promised – and if not why isn’t that the case – to introduce automatic wage and salary indexation for federal public servants.

If inflation is 5.1 per cent, they automatically get a 5.1 per cent pay increase; if it’s 7 per cent, they get 7 percent; if it’s 10 per cent, they get 10 per cent. Indeed, isn’t that’s exactly what’s demanded by his rhetoric? Surely, he should put his money – well, actually, our money – where his mouth is?

All the media focus so far, in the wake of his ‘thought(less) bubble’, has been on whether a Labor government would support a 5.1 per cent increase in the minimum wage at the Fair Work Commission.

Opposition leader Anthony Albanese on May 11, 2022. Picture: Sam Ruttyn

But that would only be a recommendation. Although, then again, if he really believed in ‘pay rises keeping pace with inflation’ he should be promising to change the Fair Work Act to similarly index the minimum wage. But public servants are an altogether different matter. They are directly the responsibility of the federal government.

Why, if we go back to the Whitlam government, all this is exactly what it did do. Back in 1973, it ‘hit the ground running’ by delivering indexed wage rises across the federal public sector. Indeed, Whitlam’s Labour minister Clyde Cameron actually boasted that he wanted public sector pay rises to be the ‘pacesetter’ for the entire economy.

So why isn’t Albanese intending to follow the same script, if he sincerely believes that pay rises should keep pace with inflation?

The short answer is that he quite literally doesn’t have a clue. He’s into slogans and thought(less) bubbles. He doesn’t have a clue where they actually lead – far, far less, the ‘hard bit’: developing real and complex policies; actually dealing with messy and complicated realities. Indeed, he’s utterly clueless even about his big – thought(less) bubble - picture. He says – he sloganises – that an Albanese government would be a replay of the Hawke government. He ‘announces’ it would be a replay of the shambolic chaos of the Whitlam government.

He’s already shown he has – not net but absolute - zero understanding of what’s actually been happening, right now, in the economy, far less the massive and very complex challenges the economy faces.

Not least, I might add, from the now entirely bipartisan ‘mad, bad and dangerous’ commitment to that – not Covid, but CO2 - net zero and the utter destruction of an electricity system that would provide reliable, plentiful and cheap power.

In short, CO2 net zero in Australia is as utterly insane – and similarly completely unachievable - as China’s Covid-zero. While China’s doing the very opposite – maxing out – with its CO2 emissions.

Albanese’s utter ineptitude which was at first just (extremely) disturbing, has become outright dangerous.

We clearly saw the ‘best of Albanese’ in that week when we saw nothing of him, in his downunder version of Joe Biden in his cellar.

At the start of the campaign he displayed signs of ’Early Onset Joe Biden’; now it’s developed into the full-on version.