Australia Has $16 Minimum Wage and is the Only Rich Country to Dodge the Global Recession source
Their economy shrank during Q4 of 2008 just like everyone else's did, and just barely held steady during Q1 of 2009.
Gross domestic product for the March quarter grew a seasonally adjusted 0.4 per cent from the previous three months, the Australian Bureau of Statistics said, bouncing back from a revised 0.6 per cent decline in the final three months of last year.
http://www.smh.com.au/business/australia-dodges-recession-20090603-buyq.html
Growth aside, they were losing jobs just like everyone else.
Also, your minimum wage figure for the recession time frame is wrong. It was A$14.31 from October 1, 2008 to July 1, 2010. On January 1, 2009, that was worth US$9.91.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_law#Australia
http://www.oanda.com/currency/historical-rates/
One more thing, Australia's economy was just as much buoyed by the mining boom taking place as anything else. It is dishonest to tie the two together like they are directly related.
Among major developed economies, business investment and exports initially nosedived close to 20 per cent amid the slump in global trade, particularly for manufacturing. But, in Australia, business investment and exports held up remarkably well. Rather than dropping 5.75 per cent in 2009 as implied by the budget forecasts, export volumes grew 1.5 per cent.
Indeed, if the mining boom never happened, Australia’s jobless rate would be 1.25 percentage points higher, the researchers found.
Had Australia stayed hitched to these economies it almost certainly would have been pulled down with them in the crisis. But as China grew over the past decade, it became Australia’s No. 2 export market (after Japan) — one hungry for Australia’s rich supply of iron ore and one of the few economies to show significant growth through the crisis years. (Although China’s GDP growth rate fell from a high of 13 percent, it has stayed above 6 percent, a rate that more established economies would consider an outright boom.) In 2008, the year the crisis hit, China absorbed AU$32 billion (or 15 percent) of Australia’s exports, an eight-fold increase in 10 years.
Mind you, I don't think raising the minimum wage is necessarily a bad thing. But it looks like you're trying to sell it as something better than it really is.