Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is a Squiz podcast. We're your shortcut to being informed. Good morning, I'm Alice Dempster.
And I'm Andrew Williams.
It's Wednesday the 3rd of June. In your Squiz today, minimum wages get a boost, Russia ramps up attacks on Ukraine, Anthropic prepares to list, and a devilish mystery on the Gold Coast. This is your Squiz today.
Chapter 2: What changes are being made to minimum wage in Australia?
One of the biggest stories around yesterday and still this morning is about the Fair Work Commission signing off on lifting the minimum wage by 6% and award wages by 4.75%. And the main takeaway, Andrew, is that it means around 2.8 million Australians will get a pay rise next month.
That makes up about 21% of the workforce. So one in five of us roughly. And those workers are in industries like food and accommodation, healthcare, retail and administrative support. So it'll give them some help to cope with increases in the cost of living, which we know is a big issue at the moment. And to put it in dollar terms,
It means if you're on the minimum wage, you will pocket up to an extra $56.90 a week, and that would push your pay packet over $1,000 a week for the first time. This hasn't come out of the blue.
The minimum wage is something that gets reviewed by Fair Work every year after they speak to the government, unions, and businesses, but it's making some waves this year because it's being lifted higher than the current inflation rate, which is 4.2%.
And if you've seen any of the coverage about this, you'll know that there's lots of questions about what it means for interest rates. The Reserve Bank's target range is between 2% to 3%, and it's something that it's trying to rein in. So some economists say that putting extra money in people's pockets could add to inflation.
One reason for that is that the small business sector, which is also dealing with rising costs, isn't thrilled about it. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industries, David Alexander, said that the extra costs would be too much to bear for some businesses and then they would be passed on to consumers and then that adds to inflation.
So the example given in one story was that people might be paying $7 for a flat white soon, although depending on where you live, Alice, in the country, you might already be doing that. The Fair Work Commission's President Justice Adam Hatcher said, though, that that was all taken into account.
He said this decision was particularly challenging due to rising oil prices and those inflation pressures, but it was made to protect the position, in his words, of the lowest paid workers whose wages hadn't kept up with inflation, particularly after the pandemic.
And Treasurer Jim Chalmers agreed with that. He called it the pay rise millions of Australian workers need and deserve. And although the Coalition has blamed the need for a pay rise on the government's spending, they say that they'll support it.
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Chapter 3: How will the minimum wage increase affect Australian workers?
The board is meeting on the 15th and 16th of June, so we'll find out then. Over the last day or so, Russia has launched one of its most significant attacks against Ukraine in months, and the strikes have killed at least 22 Ukrainians.
They hit the Ukrainian cities of the capital, Kiev and Dnipro in the east, and an eight-year-old boy is among the dead. So Russia says it's a response to a Ukrainian strike from late May and that the strikes are likely to continue. So in response, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky has asked the US for more Patriot missiles to try and defend itself. Now,
These Patriot missiles are the ones that the US stopped selling directly to Ukraine after President Donald Trump came to power last year.
Yeah, so its European allies have instead been buying them from the US and selling them on to Ukraine. But they've been in short supply recently, especially after the US began its war on Iran in February. There's been no response from the US to that request just yet. The search for two villagers trapped for weeks in a flooded cave in Laos is still going.
Rescuers are now trying to reach them through vertical shafts found on the hill above the cave.
You might have seen that five of the other men who were trapped were freed on the weekend after rescuers pumped water from the cave and that allowed them... to get out. Those men have since drawn a map to try and help with the search, and they've pointed out a large air chamber where their friends could be stuck. But this is far from easy to try and get to these last two villages.
Heavy rains have since flooded the way again, but the search crews are continuing. Of the vertical shafts, several have led to blocked tunnels, but rescuers say there are still more to try.
I've seen a lot of coverage about one of those rescuers, the Australian cave diver Josh Richards, who's part of that rescue team. But he's also there with a Finnish diving expert, Miko Parsi. He helped in that incredible rescue of a soccer team from a cave in Thailand in 2018. And Parsi says although they're not finding signs of life in this cave, they're not giving up on those last two men.
We'll be hearing a lot more about Anthropic in the coming months. That's the artificial intelligence company behind the clawed chatbot. It's preparing to go public on Wall Street.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of the minimum wage hike on inflation?
As for what else we're watching for Squiz the Day, a reminder that our new Squiz series is set to begin tonight. We've partnered with Minduru Foundation for a three-part series on how we're looking at artificial intelligence in Australia. And our first episode is all about how much we trust AI here. Spoiler alert, it's not much.
It's not much at all. We're one of the lowest. We have one of the lowest levels of trust amongst any country that was surveyed around artificial intelligence. So we are very, very sceptical. So we'll dig into why in that first episode, which, as you say, is the first part of three that we're looking forward to rolling out over the next three weeks.
One other thing to look out for, you might see some news about the Big Bash campaign. Today, very rare that you would get cricket news in June, but there is some around today. And the reason is because the two Melbourne teams in the Big Bash, which are the Stars and the Renegades, are reportedly going to be merged into one team.
So if you've been a Stars fan or a Renegades fan for the last 15 years, there's every chance that your team will be no more just all of a sudden and they'll be combined together. by the looks of things, into a team called just Melbourne that'll wear a different colour entirely, navy blue, and might be called the Bush Rangers, which is what the old Victorian state team used to be called.
So that's a big, big change and a lot of people are going to be upset about it.
Yeah, I want to watch. That's us done. Thanks for listening. We'll be back with you again tomorrow.
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