Max Chandler-Mather (Griffith, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

A message to Labor: you don't beat the far right and their billionaire and corporate mates by adopting their policies, taking their money in political donations and offering more of the same. We have seen it in the US. Trump blamed immigrants for the cost of living and the housing crisis, and what did the Democrats do? They acted tough on migrants, took donations from billionaires and basically proposed the status quo with a bit of tinkering around the edges. Well, we saw the result of that. Somehow they allowed Trump, a billionaire property mogul backed by billionaires like Elon Musk, to become the anti-establishment change candidate.

Now Peter Dutton is blaming migrants for the cost-of-living crisis. What are Labor doing? They're passing some of the most draconian antimigrant laws this country has seen. That's what Labor are doing in response. They are breaking their own policy platform to adopt Dutton's policy proposal for mandatory minimum sentencing, and they're dumping their own environmental policy to please a bunch of massive mining corporations—oh, and taking donations from billionaires like Anthony Pratt, himself a supporter of Trump—and proposing basically the status quo with a bit of tinkering around the edges. Now Labor are somehow allowing Peter Dutton—the guy who rides in billionaire Gina Rinehart's private jet to special parties and thinks mining corporations should pay less tax than they already do—to become the anti-establishment change candidate, just like Trump.

Time and again we have seen far-right thugs like Trump and Dutton rise to power in times of economic crisis only after political parties like Labor utterly fail to offer any genuine alternative vision, one that directly addresses the cost-of-living and housing concerns of working people and offers an alternative narrative to the one offered by the far right. People are losing hope because the main opposition party is proposing radical right-wing change and the other party is promising basically more of the same. When more of the same is skipping meals to pay the rent, I can understand why people are angry.

But here's the real problem, and, if the Labor Party had guts, this is what they would say. One-third of Australia's biggest corporations pay zero dollars in tax. Meanwhile, two-thirds of all retirees who rent are living in poverty, skipping meals, sitting in the dark to save on their power bills and dreading their next rent increase.

The real problem is not migrants. It's the fact that Australia's 159 billionaires more than doubled their wealth over the last few years to over half a trillion dollars, or $584 billion, while one in three single parents and their families live below the poverty line. That is over 300,000 kids with single parents in this country living below the poverty line.

The real problem is that, over a seven-year period, five of the largest multinational gas corporations operating in Australia made $134 billion in revenue and, you guessed it, paid zero dollars in tax. Meanwhile, millions of Australians are struggling to pay their rent or mortgage.

The real problem is billionaires and big corporations wielding enormous power over our political system, and they use that power to make the vast majority of our lives tougher while using their ownership of giant media companies to blame migrants.

The silver lining in this context is that Australia has a very different political system to that of the United States. We aren't forced to choose between a far-right radical like Trump and more of the same in the Democrats. In Australia you can choose something else. Our preferential voting system means you can vote for the Greens and then preference whoever you like after that, and then you can make sure that you keep Dutton out but actually push for a hopeful vision—

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