Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Hasn't it been one of those weeks in politics where we have really seen the true colours of the government on display? On Monday the PM flagged an increase to the GST, a tax that will see every single Australian have their tax bill rise. On Tuesday we saw the announcement about the fuel tax hike, where the government has desperately gone around the parliamentary processes in order to increase taxes for every Australian that drives. On Wednesday we had the Prime Minister announce that every Australian taxpayer, again, will be slugged—this time to create a $2.5 billion slush fund that will go to the biggest polluters in the country. Those on the other side may not have a lot of principles, but they are consistent on this one fact, and that is that families around this country have things taken from them and big corporates and multinationals—and now big polluters—are the ones who get the big benefits. The decisions that we have seen this week are just a handful of literally hundreds that we have seen in the last year since these guys have been in government.

I want to go back to the months before the budget, because the budget I think we all agree is really when this government came out and showed us where its priorities were. We had endured months of this ridiculous and fact-less rhetoric about a budget emergency—a budget emergency that no-one other than those on the other side would actually suggest existed, probably because we left Australia with a AAA credit rating from all three credit agencies and one of the lowest levels of debt in the entire OECD. But, if we go back to the budget, again, we have had months of this baseless rhetoric, and under that budget emergency guise the Prime Minister justified what we think is the cruellest budget in a generation. So what did we see? What was the impact on families? We know that, due to changes to the family tax benefit, to things like the payments relating to child care and to the schoolkids bonus, families on low incomes will lose about one in 10 dollars from their family budgets—an enormous amount for those people who really do need to watch every dollar just to stay afloat. All of us have them in our electorates.

We know a family on about a $65,000 income will lose $6,000 of their budget. For a single-parent family it is roughly the same: one in 10 dollars gone. But, when we take the wealthiest Australians—those who probably least need the support of government—lo and behold we find that those in comparison are being asked to pay very little. In some instances it is a few hundred dollars or perhaps $1,000, which you will probably acknowledge in a much larger household budget is not going to make as much difference.

So that was families, but what about older Australians? Surely they would be supported by this coalition? But no; we saw changes to pensions where the indexation has been changed, leaving less money in the pockets of older Australians than they otherwise would have. But it is not just pensioners; any older Australian, like part pensioners and superannuants, has their seniors supplement taken away. So pretty much all older Australians are also under attack.

We have had higher education changes that we have been talking about in this last couple of days—changes that will see Australia revert to a nation of two generations ago, when families had to make that cruel decision about which of their young children they would send off to university.

Of course we had tax increases associated with that budget; and, as consistent with the themes, those taxes are going to hit people who are worst off the hardest. The GP tax will see the sickest Australians—those with chronic conditions, older Australians, big families—pay the most under that tax. We see the same thing with the fuel tax. We know that all drivers will have to pay that fuel tax, but regional and rural Australians are those who will have to pay the most.

That is the family in the ordinary Australian side; but, when we look at the other side—the corporate and big business side—what do we see? Tax breaks for big miners. We see multinational loopholes that have been left wide open. We see, again, big polluters getting paid $2½ billion by the taxpayer. I really want people to understand exactly what is going on here. Labor tackled climate change by trying to get big polluters to pay; and, using the money that we raised from those polluters, we compensated ordinary Australians for the increasing cost. What these guys are doing is creating a slush fund that takes money raised from taxpayers and gives it to big polluters. It is actually astounding.

Apart from being so profoundly unfair—and I think that Australians will quickly see that this is the case—what we know is that direct action will not even work. Economists like Ken Henry, Ross Garnaut and Peter Shergold have all agreed that this will probably get us 20 to 30 per cent of the way there. So I ask the government: what is the cost going to be to Australian households and how much are you willing to burden them with the cost that will go straight to these big polluters? (Time expired)

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