Millions of Aussies are set to get a cash boost within days as Albanese government goes ahead with huge changes
Millions of Australians will receive a cash boost when minimum wage, superannuation and paid parental leave changes come into effect next month.
From July 1, the minimum wage will be increased 3.5 per cent, from $24.10 per hour to $24.95 per hour, affecting more than 2.6million Aussies.
The new rate will total $948 per week, based on a 38-hour work week, after the Fair Work Commission decision handed down earlier this month.
Nearly 10million Aussies will also get an automatic boost to their Super next month, as the superannuation guarantee rate rises from 11.5 per cent to 12 per cent.
It means employers will pay, on average, an extra $317 into employees' Super accounts each year.
In total, that could mean an extra $132,000 in Super for young Australians by the time they retire.
The federal government will also start paying Super on its paid parental leave scheme, with the change applying to parents who receive parental leave pay on or after July 1.
The scheme is also expanding, with the amount of government-funded leave increasing from 20 weeks to 22 weeks on July 1 - part of the Labor government's plan to expand it to 26 weeks by July next year.
Also from July 1, Services Australia payments will be indexed (adjusted in line with inflation) by 2.4 per cent.
Paid Parental Leave, Family Tax Benefit A and B, the Newborn Supplement, and Multiple Birth Allowance will all receive a modest increase, affecting about 2.4million Australians.
For example, a family receiving Family Tax Benefit A will pocket an extra $5 a fortnight.
Parents with triplets will receive an extra $120 a year, while first-time parents of a newborn child will pocket an additional $48 over 13 weeks.
Minister for Social Services Tanya Plibersek described indexation as a 'crucial way to help families when cost of living rises'.
'Millions of recipients of social security payments will see more money in their bank account,' Plibersek said.
However, asset limits and income thresholds will also increase by 2.4 per cent.
That means some Aussies will become ineligible for JobSeeker Payment, Youth Allowance, Austudy, ABSTUDY Living Allowance, Parenting Payment, Special Benefit and Parenting Payment Single.
The July indexation will not impact youth and student payments, which are indexed each year in January.
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The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
King or crook?: the enduring legacy of Queensland's political strongman Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen
'Sir Joh will be remembered, and he will long be remembered. But not for what he wanted to be remembered for.' This was my prediction when Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen died in 2005, heading up one of a number of obituaries. Propelling my pen was a sense of obligation to do justice to the stunted opportunities and deliberate and casual cruelties inflicted on the state and many, many, Queenslanders under Australia's most blinkered, authoritarian and corrupt postwar regime. The balance in the initial flood of obituaries was about two-thirds more adulation than condemnation. Cranes on the skyline and huge holes in the ground carried more weight than stamping on civil liberties and corruption. There is much better balance in newly minted television documentary Joh: Last King of Queensland, airing on Stan this weekend. Its signature touch is having Sir Joh present as actor Richard Roxburgh delivering characteristic monologues to answer or more typically homily his way around any questions or criticisms of his conduct. Vignettes from family, friends, political luminaries, journalists, historians and opponents and a wealth of available footage keep the narrative going. Back then, Joh's quite deliberate – even trained – incoherent rambling was all too frequently excessively tidied up by reporters and then judged by commentators as evidence of his political acumen. Of course, it also opened up opportunities for us reporters. Once, on a slow news day when he was still speaking to me, I asked Joh whether he was contemplating sending the then Liberal leader, Sir Llew Edwards, off to a coveted London posting. Nothing in his 'Well, you know Phil …' constituted a direct denial so yes, there was a story. It is easy to caricature much of Bjelke-Petersen's reign. Presumably Sir Joh had a hand in the wording of the citation for his 1984 knighthood, which noted he was 'a strong believer in the concept of parliamentary democracy' who had made 'many improvements in the parliamentary process'. This not long after the Liberals had abandoned the Coalition due to Joh's refusal to countenance parliamentary committees and while the legislative assembly continued to turn in new records for the brevity of its sitting sessions. In truth, Sir Joh (1968-1987) was the last and second-longest lasting of a string of strongmen Australian state premiers – Robert Askin (New South Wales: 1965-1975), Henry Bolte (Victoria: 1955-1972), Sir Charles Court (Western Australia: 1974-1982) and Thomas Playford (South Australia: 1938-1965). All were conservative and variously notorious for riding roughshod over Westminster traditions and disregard of civil liberties, abuse of the electoral system, and tolerance or participation in corruption. Even considering Askin's organised crime associations, Bjelke-Petersen was to surpass them all. Of many biographies, my vote for both best and best titled goes to Evan Whitton's The Hillbilly Dictator. That Queensland suffered for longer and graduated into such a relic of poor governance was, in Sir Joh's only valid defence, in part because a long string of Labor governments had demolished an inconvenient upper house and thoroughly gerrymandered the electorate. The Coalition government which fell, somewhat surprised, into government in 1956 ignored the pungent smell of corruption around Frank Bischof and appointed him police commissioner. In 1963, in the National Hotel royal commission, a future chief justice of the high court of Australia was successfully hoodwinked into a finding of negligible police corruption. Tony Fitzgerald, looking at many of the same names in much more senior positions 24 years later, found otherwise. Sir Joh, initially an impassioned critic of Labor's gerrymander, went on to embrace the innovation of making islands of Aboriginal communities within other electorates. Policing became political, increasingly aimed at opponents of the regime. A notable shortage of real communists (Queensland police had nearly beaten Australia's only ever Communist member of parliament to death in 1948) did not deter the anti-communist rhetoric Joh aimed at the Labor party, unions, university students and Aboriginal activists. Sir Joh long denied even the possibility of corruption in the police force, well beyond the optimum point to beat a hasty retreat to 'I knew nothing'. It is hard to reconcile this with the Fitzgerald inquiry's ability to acquire the records of any cabinet meeting of interest but one – the one that saw Terry Lewis appointed as commissioner of police. All of this is relatively well canvassed in Last King. My only quibble is that it leaves the question of whether Sir Joh was personally corrupt unnecessarily unresolved. When Sir Joh died, so did the defamation writ that he had issued years before for my publishing the details of the corruption charges that had been prepared against him in relation to brown paper bags of cash delivered to his office. True, he never faced these particular charges, but allegations of lying to Fitzgerald about the brown paper bags was the essence of the trial that brought him within a Young National juryperson of becoming the first Australian premier to be consigned to a term in prison. The special prosecutor judged Sir Joh too old to face a second trial before a fresh jury – unfortunate for the sake of history, and also in that it would have deterred Sir Joh from launching a ludicrous $338m claim against Queensland and Queenslanders for personal damages arising from the Fitzgerald inquiry. Other tribunals, however, were able to make definitive rulings. An outstanding A Current Affair program in 1989 detailed the largesse given to Bjelke-Petersen by construction magnate Sir Leslie Thiess. Thiess immediately sued for defamation and lost, the jury finding that Sir Leslie had bribed Sir Joh on an extravagant scale, defrauding his own shareholders in the process. Bjelke-Petersen's pioneering role in the bribe by way of defamation settlement racket was then highlighted by the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal. When Alan Bond let it slip that threats to his business were a feature of a 1986 $400,000 payment to Sir Joh in settlement of a 1983 defamation case, the tribunal delved deeper into whether Bond was a fit and proper enough person for a sizeable lump of the broadcast spectrum. Backing up the tribunal, the high court outlined Bond's proposal to pay Bjelke- Petersen the $50,000 Channel Nine's lawyers thought was a reasonable or at least defensible sum, with the $350,000 balance to meet his demands to come as 'a payment overseas related to assets, a loan without obligation to repay or an excessive payment for the sale of property'. But Bjelke-Petersen was too greedy and too needy – or too vengeful – for any of this, and the settlement made the television news and ultimately put Bond out of the television business. Karma also seems to have intervened after Bjelke-Petersen cajoled a large loan out of a foreign bank, with the internal documentation showing this as a balance of inducements and menaces decision somewhat at variance to the applicable credit rating. But appreciation of the Swiss franc then brought the Bjelke-Petersen family enterprises close to penury. Last King does note Bjelke-Petersen's deficient understanding of conflicts of interest, in his trying to put it over that it was perfectly OK for his wife, Florence, to hold the preferentially issued Comalco and Utah shares. In essence, enough evidence with enough in the way of judicial proceedings was lying for Last King not to leave the question of Bjelke-Petersen's personal corruption hanging. Last King deserves a notable place in the voluminous memorabilia around Sir Joh. The life and times (and crimes) of Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen are indeed pertinent to the current state of the world and Last King should be wheeled out at regular intervals and be a curricula staple to remind us. Phil Dickie is a Gold Walkley winner and author of bestselling book The Road To Fitzgerald: Revelations of Corruption Spanning Four Decades. His reporting on the Bjelke-Petersen government is credited, along with an ABC Four Corners program, with sparking the Fitzgerald corruption inquiry Joh: Last King of Queensland premieres on Stan on 22 June
The Guardian
an hour ago
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Queensland MP calls for return of vagrancy laws to allow police to prosecute homeless people
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The Guardian
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Tell us: what are your experiences of buying a home in Australia?
Australia has one of the most unaffordable property markets in the world, arguably made worse by tax breaks for investors. The share of investors buying homes has consistently grown over the past 25 years at the expense of prospective owner-occupiers. That trend threatens to accelerate again as younger buyers get priced out of the market amid another surge in property prices. A lack of housing stock has meant properties in favourable locations, near schools and transport networks, are subject to fierce competition between investors and those looking for a family home. We would like to hear your experiences of buying a home. How long have you been actively looking to purchase a property? What have been the worst of your near misses? Are you being outbid by other home buyers or investors? If you have recently bought a property – did you have to make any sacrifices in your search? Did your toughest competition come from owner-occupiers or investors? Tell us the suburb and city Please include as much detail as possible. Please include as much detail as possible. Your contact details are helpful so we can contact you for more information. They will only be seen by the Guardian. Your contact details are helpful so we can contact you for more information. They will only be seen by the Guardian. If you include other people's names please ask them first. If you're having trouble using the form, click here. Read terms of service here.
