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

According to the Treasurer, Labor's budget 'is realistic about the pressures people face now', and apparently it's 'a budget for every Australian'. What self-serving rubbish! This isn't a budget which is realistic about the pressures that people face. It's not a budget for everyone. This is a budget that does just enough so that Labor can say that they understand the challenges that people are facing while continuing the special treatment for big corporations and wealthy property investors. This is a budget that puts people under more pressure. Under Labor, cost of living's up, rents are up, food prices are up and climate pollution is up, because this is a government that is more concerned with the big corporations and their profits. They're more concerned about the stock exchange than ensuring that everyone has a roof over their head or enough to eat. They're more concerned about CEOs' pay than workers' pay. To many people, Labor's so-called answers are just plain offensive. They're glib talking points, weasel words designed to allow Labor to say that they're listening and that they're a bit better than the Liberals, but in reality the problems people face keep getting worse.

Labor said that in this budget they're delivering cost-of-living relief, but a few hundred dollars off your power bill won't stop the international gas cartel making billions of dollars while driving up prices. A tiny chop-out for the fraction of people who are on rent assistance won't help the majority of those in the country who rent. The student debt indexation changes won't deliver cost-of-living relief to people now, when they need it, and people will still get stuck with completely unaffordable degrees. Saying that things like giving rent assistance to people will help when most of the renters don't even get it is exactly why people are losing faith in the major parties.

Labor say they're realistic, but what's realistic about spending $342 billion on nuclear submarines when 3.3 million people are living in poverty under the worst support payments in the OECD? What's realistic about spending $50 billion on fossil fuel subsidies in a climate crisis while not spending a single extra cent on underfunded frontline services for women escaping violence? What's realistic about banking a $9.3 billion surplus when every one of those dollars could help people who are now living below the poverty line in this wealthy country of ours? None of this is realistic. It is deeply unrealistic.

Millions of people are trapped in a pressure cooker, and Labor is turbocharging inequality. The rent keeps going up, food prices keep going up, power bills keep going up, health costs keep going up and, despite working harder and harder, people are going backwards. Labor ignored these real concerns. They refused a rent freeze. They won't take on the wealthy property investors, and most of their MPs are property investors. They won't take on the big supermarkets and make price gouging illegal. They let big banks push up mortgage rates to slow down the economy while completely ignoring the big banks' massive profits that they're making off the back of people's pain. And now everyday people are paying the price. Parents are skipping meals so that their kids can eat. People are going hungry just to be able to pay the rent. And instead of ensuring that everyone has enough to eat or a roof over their head, Labor is spending billions of dollars on nuclear-powered submarines.

I'll tell you one sure-fire way to make the problem worse: ignore expert advice. The government 's own expert advisory body told them to raise JobSeeker by $17 a day, but Labor refused because apparently they know better. The parliamentary inquiry into supermarket prices, which heard from experts, farmers, economists from around the country, told the government we need to make price gouging illegal and break up the duopoly. But the Prime Minister apparently knows better, saying:

… we have a private sector economy in Australia and not a command and control economy.

But we do, Prime Minister, we do, and it's working exactly as the designers intended. We have a command-and-control economy, where the big corporations say 'jump' and Labor says 'how high?'

Labor and the Liberals have created an economy for the big corporations which preys on people for profit. They have created an economy where the share which goes to working people has never been lower and the share which goes to corporate profits and billionaires has never been higher. They have created an economy where one in three big corporations pays no tax! When a nurse pays more tax than a multinational something is deeply wrong. They have created an economy where the government is no longer in command and can't control the big corporations, but rather is at the mercy of them.

Under Labor there are fewer people in unions than ever before, more people living in tents and real wage growth just isn't keeping up. Labor has overseen an economy where billions of dollars of government services is spent on big consulting firms; where public housing is sold off; where energy, telecommunications, water and every other public service that you can think of gets privatised; where already wealthy private schools get overfunded, but public schools have to fight for every scrap.

Labor says it's realistic about the pressures that people face. Well, why won't Labor stop increasing the pressure? Labor could reduce the pressure for a single mother couch surfing with her kids or facing the pressure of wondering whether the card's going to go through at the checkout. People's problems are caused by these big corporations, these wealthy property developers making massive profits from essential services like food and housing, but Labor can't even bring themselves to say that these big corporations are to blame. They blame supply chains and the global situation. They said the cost of living is moderating, but 'not as fast as we would like', but they never say a word about the price gouging or the profiteering of these big corporations, about the people who are charging too much for the things that we all need. How can you fix a problem that you can't even name? What we need is an economy that works for people. People need representatives who are going to fight for them, not fight for the big corporations.

Labor is more concerned with the future of coal and gas corporations and their massive profits than they are about the climate crisis or the cost of the gas that they sell us. For years we've known Labor, together with the Liberals, have been fully owned entities of the coal and gas corporations. Just look at how many frontbenchers, how many ministers leave this place to go and work in the coal and gas industries. Pretty much every former energy minister in this country now works for coal and gas corporations or their lobby groups.

Labor takes millions in donations from the coal and gas corporations. The one time that Labor, under Kevin Rudd, tried to make the coal and gas industry pay a fairer share of tax, the mining industry and its big lobby groups mobilised a massive campaign that saw Kevin Rudd turfed from office. It was a campaign which cost the industry millions and made them billions. Now, Labor does whatever the gas corporations want. That's what the Prime Minister means when he says this is a private sector economy in Australia. It's why students paying for their university education deliver more to the public purse than the entire gas industry does through the gas tax. It's why giant corporations like Woodside and Santos get the go-ahead to trample the land and water rights of First Nations communities, even though the Prime Minister wants to be remembered as a champion of the Indigenous people of this country. It's why Labor is backing climate bombs like the Scarborough gas field and the Beetaloo basin—and backing them with the public's money. The most recent budget has billions of dollars of your money going to coal, gas and oil corporations, the same companies who are causing the climate crisis. Labor's new policy, a Future Made in Australia, is a future for coal and gas past 2050, when they told us that we were meant to be at zero emissions. They're now saying it'll go past 2050. You can't put your foot on the brakes and the accelerator at the same time and expect to go anywhere. When Scott Morrison announced the gas led recovery, he was rightly mocked, but this is the same plan now. It's why so many people are telling me that it is getting harder and harder to tell Labor and the Liberals apart.

Gas is one of the leading causes of the climate crisis. Australia is one of the biggest producers of gas pollution. Gas is not safe. Gas is as dirty as coal. It's not renewable. It's deadly, and it's massively expensive. It's going to cause more floods, more fires, more droughts and more diseases. It is going to smash people's future, all for the profits of these big corporations—profits which are largely sent offshore, tax free. Labor's plan is to back gas all the way until 2050 and beyond. The concerns from Labor backbenchers, like the member for Macnamara, have been licensed by the government because those seats are under pressure from the Greens, but, when it comes to parliament, those members all line up to vote to back new coal and gas mines in the middle of a climate crisis.

Labor's not even using this gas to lower the power prices for people struggling here. The whole strategy is about protecting the profits of big gas corporations, not reducing power prices or emissions. Eighty per cent of this gas gets sent overseas. The biggest user of gas in this country, the biggest source, is the gas industry itself. They use more than all of the manufacturing in Australia put together. That's what this gas strategy is about: propping up the big corporations and the massive profits that they pay.

We rank, together with Russia and Saudi Arabia, in the top three exporters of fossil fuel pollution. That is not a podium that you want to be on, but that is a podium that Labor puts us on. In the middle of a climate crisis, Labor is opening more coal and gas mines. You can't tackle the problem while you're making the problem worse. You can't put the fire out while you're pouring petrol on it.

What is also clear is this: Labor is running the economy for the profits of big corporations, and it's selling off the future of generations to come. The Prime Minister, as he loves to tell us, grew up in public housing as the son to a single parent, to now become the most powerful person in the country. Now a family in a similar situation would face the risk of hunger, homelessness and poverty. When the Prime Minister was 21, university was free. You could see a doctor for free. You could buy a home on an average worker's wage. Working people didn't have to choose between having kids and buying a home. Now, 40 years later, the country is in a much different position. Going to university will saddle you with debt for decades, you will need to save for decades to have enough for a deposit to buy a home, you won't be able to see a doctor for free, food and power are more expensive than ever, and you'll face a growing climate crisis. All of this is because we have an economy that is working for the big corporations but not working for everyday people.

The decisions made by the Liberals and Labor over the last 40 years have made growing up today much harder than it needs to be. They have grown the profits and the power of the big corporations across the economy, whether it's the big banks, the big supermarkets, the big power companies or the big gas corporations. But the share of the economy that goes to working people and everyone else is at a record low. We know that corporate profits and their excessive price gouging are driving the cost of living and the climate crisis. We know that the cost of living and the climate crisis will hit gen Z and future generations the hardest. We know that they are the first generations in peacetime that face a declining living standard and a declining level of homeownership, and they are, rightly, pretty worried.

The price of housing is the clearest example. Homeownership was once a defining feature of life in this country, but now it is simply out of reach of a whole class of people. Renters are now worried about being thrown out onto the streets. Nurses and teachers aren't able to find properties near the hospitals or schools where they work, forcing them to travel for hours just to get to work. Young people are living for longer with their parents, and tent cities are springing up across the country. In a wealthy country like Australia, where on last census night a million homes were vacant, this is outrageous. Meanwhile we have this race to the bottom where they seek to blame migrants and say that that is somehow the problem. They are not the people who have caused this problem. The competition for a renter when they turn up to an auction is a wealthy property developer who has a big fat check in their pocket courtesy of Labor and who is able to push the price of housing out of reach of people in this country. In a wealthy country like ours, no-one should go without. It's time to fix this broken system.

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