Low Pay Commission research has found that Government policies have driven the UK minimum wage's "bite" of the median up by 9.3 percentage points, while Australia's has increased by less than 0.1 percentage points since 2015, with next month's 9.8% wage floor rise in the old country to bring the minimum up to two-thirds of the median wage.
Award wage increases have responded to rather than contributed to higher price inflation, and although the tight labour market has brought higher pay growth, it is "not enough to be a threat to slowing price inflation", according to a leading labour market economist.
The RBA says several new early indicators it has developed in-house are helping it to build a "fuller view" of wage movements ahead of the release of official figures.
The highly-orthodox IMF has told the RBA's annual research conference that it is "hard to find" recent wage-price spirals across advanced economies and that pay acceleration "should not be seen as a sign" that the corkscrew feared by the central bank "is taking hold", in a session in which new board member and former FWC president Iain Ross led discussion.
New DEWR data has undercut RBA warnings about the risks of a wage-price spiral, indicating that private sector bargained wage growth remains anchored below 4% a year.
The Remuneration Tribunal has awarded a 4% pay rise for federal parliamentarians and the most senior public servants after noting that increases awarded over the past decade had been "conservative", including zero in 2020 and 2021 and 2.75% last year.
RBA Governor Philip Lowe, who earned the ire of unions and some in the Albanese Government with his repeated warnings about the risks of a wage-price spiral, is set to be replaced at the end of his term by his deputy, Michele Bullock, who will be the first woman to lead the central bank.
Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke has played down the significance of FWC president Adam Hatcher questioning whether a perceived big increase in the minimum wage could contribute to further increases in interest rates.
A senior Treasury Department official says the Federal Budget's forecast that inflation will drop back to 2% to 3% by mid-2025 assumes the FWC will make a minimum wage ruling that "broadly proxies" last year's increases.
Private sector rates of pay increased to 3.8% annually in the March quarter, up from 3.6% in the previous three-month period, according to the ABS, but relatively weak public sector rises have restricted the economy-wide movement to 3.6% in trend terms, about half the rate of inflation.