Media Release
5 September 2014
ACT Leader Dr Jamie Whyte
ACT backgrounder: the living wage is a dumb way to help poor working families
The Treasury found that two-thirds of households earning between $14.25 and $18.40 per hour had no dependants and receive little in
the way of welfare payments.
The red bars in the diagram below show how much goes back to the government in taxes and reduced welfare payments, such
as abatement of working for families.
A living wage helps the government claw-back a lot of welfare payments including working for families, it then helps
single people who have no children, and last of all, working families on low wages. That payoff matrix is before any
discussion, and there must be that discussion, of the job losses from a higher minimum wage.