Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to make a few remarks about schedule 1 to the Treasury Laws Amendment (2020 Measures No. 6) Bill 2020, and I'm confining my remarks to that schedule. This bill exemplifies schedule 1, exemplifies the government's approach to the recovery, which is to give money to business, and everyone else gets their support cut. As a result, as we've just heard in the last week or so, 60 per cent of the share of Australia's total income—the share of the pie in Australia—is now going to profit, which is a 60-year high, and only 40 per cent is going to wages. In other words, we are now at record low levels of having the national pie being shared with workers and record highs of having it go to profits.

When you want to understand why, you need to look at the measures and the approach being taken by the government in this bill. The budget that the government has put forward this year has $99 billion a year in subsidies and handouts to big corporations. Now in this bill we're talking about increasing the ability of some subsidiaries of some of the world's biggest multinationals to get even more from the public purse. The government is handing over billions and billions of dollars to big corporations and subsidiaries of multinationals in the hope that some of it might trickle down to everyone else. As we're heading towards the end of the year, the government brings forward a bill that says, 'Let's give billions of dollars more to big corporations', at the same time as people on JobSeeker and JobKeeper are getting their payments cut.

There's a different way of doing things, which is to say you get out of a recession by building from the bottom up, by using public money to invest in nation-building, planet-saving projects that will create jobs, and that means that in this country no-one needs to live in poverty. In other words, you use the money to lift people out of poverty by lifting JobSeeker, not cutting it. You provide people with guaranteed jobs on these big nation-building projects and the country gets something out of it. That was the approach that the US took to get themselves out of the Great Depression. But instead, what's this government doing? Instead of taking billions of dollars of public money and investing it in publicly owned infrastructure and expanding things like aged care and health care, the government is taking billions of dollars of public money and giving it to big corporations and hoping for the best. That is what schedule 1 does. It continues the government's trickle-down approach to recovery.

Instead, we need to go to the end of the year with a commitment that no-one in this wealthy country of ours will live in poverty. We need to go to the end of the year with a commitment that everyone who wants a job is able to get one. The government should be in a position to guarantee a job to everyone who wants one. If, instead of spending $99 billion a year on handouts to big corporations and the super wealthy, we invested the money in things like building half a million new public housing homes, expanding our aged-care and education sectors and building 100 per cent renewable energy, then we would get towards full employment in this country and we would lift people out of poverty. The big corporations might make a bit less. But in the middle of a recession, or our exiting out of a recession, with a million people unemployed and with millions of people in, or being plunged into, poverty as the government cuts their support, we should be saying there are better ways of spending money. There are better ways of spending billions of dollars than giving big corporations a handout and hoping for the best. The government will say: 'Well, it's okay. If we give billions of dollars in handouts to big corporations they're going to employ people.' But the thing is, in this bill there are no strings attached that say, 'If we give you billions of dollars of public money, will you use the money to employ people, or will you use it to buy local, or will you use it to grow the renewal energy sector?' No. The government just gives the money to corporations that might be so profitable that they can already be paying dividends. They're getting government handouts under this bill as well.

It is time for a different approach. It's time for the Green new deal approach to recovery: a government led plan of investment and action to grow jobs by investing in the industries that will tackle the climate crisis. It will make Australia more equal. That is what we should be doing with billions of dollars, not giving it to big corporations.

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