Unions, business and the federal Parliament should come together and strike a "radical" grand bargain that would deliver a much-needed pay rise for ordinary Australians, Labor leader Bill Shorten says.
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Mr Shorten's call to arms on the need to address low wage growth was delivered in the inaugural address to the John Curtin Research Centre dinner in Melbourne on Wednesday night.
It comes two weeks after Treasurer Scott Morrison delivered a significant speech addressing the issue, in which he said that "increasing what Australians earn is one of my most important objectives".
In the speech, the Opposition Leader argued Australia is in danger of having growth without prosperity, and there has been a growing divide since the Global Financial Crisis between wage earners and people who derive wealth from assets such as property portfolios.
But people earning a weekly pay cheque are paying more for doctors, childcare, electricity and at the supermarket checkout, and "far too many of our fellow Australians don't have enough to make ends meet on a continuing and regular basis", Mr Shorten said.
Australia faced an "unprecedented challenge" to fix this problem, he said, and that required "business and unions and Parliament to do something drastic, something radical, something profoundly different: co-operate. And I believe this can be done".
"Right now - for one of the very few times in Australian history - we've got union leaders, business leaders, economists and analysts of every stripe on the same page," he said.
The call for unions, business and the Parliament to work together echoes to some extent the grand bargains, or accords, former Labor prime minister Bob Hawke struck with unions and business leaders in the 1980s.
It was delivered on the same day the Federal Court dismissed a union challenge to the independent Fair Work Commission's decision to cut Sunday and public holiday penalty rates.
Mr Shorten said the verdict confirmed voters had a clear choice at the next election.
"A vote for Turnbull's Liberals is a vote for cuts to penalty rates - a vote for lower wages. A vote for Australian Labor is a vote to restore and protect penalty rates - a vote for higher wages," he said.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said on Wednesday his government respected the court's decision to uphold the penalty rate reduction.
To back up this assertion that wages growth is flat, Mr Shorten pointed out that real labour productivity has grown by 20 per cent in the last decade, but real wages have only grown by six per cent.
"For everyone's sake - working Australians need a pay rise," Mr Shorten said.
While Labor and the Coalition agree that economic data demonstrates wages growth is flat, Mr Morrison has stressed that weak wages growth did not necessarily mean that Australia was battling rising inequality.
"Treasury's research also debunks the populist theory that soft wages growth has also contributed to growing income inequality. It is in fact the opposite," Mr Morrison said recently.
"The government has not only acknowledged and sought to understand the deep frustrations Australians are feeling over low wages growth, but we are doing the work to understand what is driving these outcomes and implement policies that will turn this around."
Mr Shorten said in July that tackling rising inequality would be the "defining mission" of a future Labor government he led.
