While Mr Shorten will leave it up to the commission to set the new wage, he is, at the same time, also promising to restore penalty rate cuts for 700,000 workers that were made by the commission.
In November 2017, ACTU secretary Sally McManus ignited calls for a living wage and said it should be set at 60 per cent of the median wage.
On Thursday, Ms McManus backed Mr Shorten in declining to nominate a level at which the new wage should be set.
She, too, suggested changing the criteria used to calculate the minimum wage to better reflect the modern cost of living and and leaving the final determination up to the commission.
“The independent umpire needs new rules that allow it to determine what a living wage should be based on the costs and needs of working people,” she said.
“The workplace umpire should also determine how a transition to a living wage takes place and the time over which it should be phased in.”
Small and medium business expressed concern on Wednesday when Mr Shorten backed the concept of a living wage while speaking at The Australian Financial Review Business Summit.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the best way to increase wages was by growing the economy.
“Wages growth will come with economic growth. Wages growth won’t come with higher taxes, which is what Bill Shorten is proposing,” he said.
Despite annual growth until the end of December slowing to 2.3 per cent, Mr Morrison said Australia was “still outstripping the majority of developed economies in the G7” and a turning point had been reached on wages.
Mr Morrison said flatlining wages of recent years were due in part to the “hangover” from the mining investment boom where “wages maintained at a particular level and there was a gap that needed to be closed between producer and consumer wages”.
“Now, those two lines are now starting to come a lot closer together and as we’ve seen with wages growth over the last six months or so, as the Reserve Bank governor has illustrated, we have seen a turning point when it comes to wage growth,” he said.
“We now have wage growth running above 2 per cent. It was sub-2 per cent prior to that.”
He said the only wages that would increase under Labor were those of people smugglers.
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