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

I hear interjections from the opposite—is to leave people in rental stress now and to say their housing bill, which won't see a single home built if at all until after the next election, is somehow going to solve it. Renters are in trouble now. Labor is leaving them behind now. They are saying 'pass this tick-a-box bill because something might happen after the election, if our $10 billion gamble on the stock market returns money', which, by the way, it didn't last year. There would have been zero spent under Labor's approach last year.

Labor have ignored renters, Labor have ignored the rental crisis and they have nothing for renters now. I have in Melbourne people who are spending 60 to 70 per cent of their incomes on rent. Now we hear the Reserve Bank governor has apparently just told estimates that next year rents are going to go up by another 10 per cent. What is Labor's plan? Nothing. It is to wash their hands and say, 'We will leave it up to the market. There is nothing we can do about it.' If this approach of bringing a bucket of water to a house fire and ignoring renters and ignoring the cost-of-living crisis and instead giving tax cuts to politicians and billionaires—leaving the big corporations, supermarkets and banks off the hook—continues, people are going to fall behind and they will fall behind for a generation. They may never get out.

This is the chance to lift people out of poverty. This is the chance to make the reforms that will ensure this country is a fair society, where no-one is left behind. There are the numbers in this parliament to pass legislation through the Senate to ensure we can fund a rent freeze, get dental into Medicare and stop giving tax cuts to politicians and billionaires. We can do the things now that people are expecting us to do. The only obstacle in this parliament to making progressive reforms, like getting dental into Medicare or freezing rents, is Labor's ambition.

To the people who are doing it tough at the moment and who are worrying about whether the next rent increase is going to see them evicted, who are worried about whether they can pay for the next meal, put food on the table or whether they will have to skip it in order to pay the rent, the Greens are fighting for you. More can be done to lift people out of poverty if we have the courage in the middle of one of the biggest profit booms we have seen from the big banks, the big corporations, the supermarkets and the energy companies, to make them pay their fair share of tax. Now is the time to say there are better things to spend $313 billion of public money on than giving Clive Palmer a tax cut when one in six children in this country live in poverty. Labor cannot justify the continued handouts to people of the very wealthy, the politicians and the billionaires, who frankly don't need them. Now is the time to have the guts to take on the big corporations and the billionaires and make them pay their fair share so that in a wealthy country like Australia everyone can live a good life and no-one has to go without.

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