They Added $2,000. They Still Won't Add Inflation Protection.

"Key elements of the revised offer include: A new $2,000 lump sum payment (pro rata) at the start of the agreement for all members."

That's from the email that landed this morning, forwarded to members by AEU President Justin Mullaly. Notice who sent it this time. Not the Secretary. The union, relaying an offer it hasn't recommended yet, ahead of an extraordinary council meeting called for 5pm today, with stopwork action still on the calendar for 19 August.

I wrote three weeks ago about why I was voting no on the July offer. The government has come back with a revised one. I've spent the afternoon reading it against the last one, clause by clause, salary table by salary table. Some of it moved. Some of it is exactly where it was, dressed up to look otherwise.

What actually moved

Credit where it's due, because pretending nothing changed would be as dishonest as the Secretary's email was in July.

If you're an ES worker near the top of your range, or a teacher who cared about that deed sitting outside the enforceable agreement, this offer is better than the one before it. I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

What didn't move, and this is the part that matters

I went straight to the new salary tables, because tables don't spin. The Education Support Class table, dated 10 August 2026, shows subdivision 2-1, Level 1 Range 2, the entry point for ES staff doing toileting, medical intervention support and managing challenging behaviour. It shows an interim figure of $58,277 from 10 August, then $63,959 from 1 October 2026.

Not a typo. Not a coincidence. The medium-term outcome for the lowest-paid ES workers in this state has not moved one dollar. What changed is the path to get there, an earlier interim step, dressed up in the government's messaging as new front-loading. The destination is identical.

I also went looking for the thing I said was missing in July: any mechanism that protects this pay deal against inflation. I read the Letter of Commitment in full, every clause, gender equality committees, business manager induction programs, pre-service teacher supervision allowances. Nowhere in it is there anything resembling Queensland's automatic CPI uplift. Nowhere. The back three years of this offer are still 4%, 4% and 4.9%, against inflation currently running at 4.0% and the Reserve Bank's underlying measure at 3.6% and climbing.

The lock-in is still four years. It's now dated to 10 August 2030 instead of 17 July 2030, a fortnight's difference dressed up as a new date. No further claims, no further movement, same as before, just renumbered.

Why this pattern should worry you more than the numbers do

Here's what I noticed reading this revised offer against the last one. Every genuine improvement sits somewhere that costs the government relatively little or nothing structurally. Turning a deed into a clause costs nothing extra, it's the same commitment in a stronger legal form. A flat $2,000 is a one-off, not a recurring cost that compounds against the budget for the next four years. Widening the lump sum net to more classifications is generous-sounding, but the base salary those lump sums sit on top of, for the workers earning the least, hasn't shifted.

Meanwhile, the two things that would have cost real, ongoing money, a higher entry-level ES wage and an inflation-protection clause that could compound over four years if prices keep climbing, are precisely the two things that didn't move an inch.

That's not an accident. That's a negotiating strategy. Give ground on the cheap, permanent-sounding items. Hold the line on the expensive, compounding ones. It's a smart strategy if the workforce doesn't read the salary tables. It's a much harder strategy to run against people who do.

What I'd want you to do before the ballot

I said three weeks ago that voting no wasn't walking away from a pay rise, it was telling the government the job wasn't finished. Reading this revised offer line by line, I don't think the job's any closer to finished than it was in July. They found $2,000 they were willing to spend once. They still haven't found the inflation clause that would cost them every year after.

Read the tables yourself before you decide. Not the email. The tables.

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