Fair Work Amendment (Protecting Penalty and Overtime Rates) Bill 2025

Senator WATT (Queensland—Minister for the Environment and Water) (18:46): I'm not aware of whether any particular work was done on that for this bill. I make the point I made before: if coalition parties or employer groups were correct in saying that lifting wages or stopping wages from being cut was the way to lift productivity, then we wouldn't have seen the worst decade in 60 years of productivity growth under a coalition government which suppressed wages.

Suppressing wages did not lift productivity growth under the coalition. It is not the way to lift productivity growth, and it's not the way that this Labor government intends to seek productivity growth.