Working Australians are enjoying continued real growth in their pay packets while inflation is back down.
Today’s CPI results show that working Australians are starting to get ahead, with confirmation that inflation is growing at a slower rate than wages have grown over the past year.
The Reserve Bank’s preferred measure of underlying inflation has also fallen to 2.9 per cent, within the Bank’s target band, while headline inflation is even lower at 2.4 per cent over the year to March 2025.
The Reserve Bank must now cut official interest rates again at its next board meeting on May 19-20.
Rate cuts are needed urgently to take more cost-of-living pressure off the shoulders of working Australians, who are finally seeing real, sustained wage growth.
Quotes attributable to ACTU Assistant Secretary, Joseph Mitchell:
“Working Australians are starting to get ahead again with some consistent real wage rises filtering through in the last 15 months.
“There’s no way the job is done, and there is still a way to go before working families fully recover from the Coalition’s signature low wage growth policies of their nine-year term.
“But there are encouraging signs that real wages have continued to increase steadily in 2025. We expect them to grow again in this quarter, as they have over the last five quarters.
“This is a positive sign that the nexus between the Coalition’s IR policies engineered to keep wage costs deliberately low is finally being broken through a raft of Albanese Government workplace reforms calibrated to get wages moving again.”
