Stephen Bates (Brisbane, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

According to Oxfam, $67,000 is how much the average billionaire in Australia makes every hour. It's over 1,300 times more than the average Australian. Last year the wealth of billionaires in this country grew by more than eight per cent—roughly $28 billion or about $3.2 million per hour. All these numbers can sound overwhelming, unreal even. It's the dragon hoarding the medieval peasant towns' wealth—all this wealth being amassed in the pockets of the already megawealthy while the rest of the country sees living standards decline and life become more unaffordable. We are truly living through a new Gilded Age, watching economic inequality increase every year. The cost-of-living crisis did not create a new problem; it simply laid bare a problem that had been brewing for decades. According to research done by the Australia Institute, the wealth of the richest 200 people in this country has grown from the equivalent of 8.4 per cent of GDP in 2004 to 23.7 per cent now. This is wildly unsustainable.

Our entire economy is based on the principle of supply and demand. If we continue down the path of more and more wealth being amassed in fewer and fewer hands, how does anyone expect our economy to survive? It can't and it won't. Billionaires and giant multinational companies calling the shots on policy and setting the framework for what is even considered possible in politics cannot last forever. I said before that we are living through a new Gilded Age; that age ended with the start of the Great Depression. If we do not learn from our past, we are just condemned to repeat it.

So it's time for a new vision. We have a unique opportunity here in Australia, for better or worse, being about 10 years or so behind the US and UK. We have time to make the changes that we need, and it starts with making sure the ultrawealthy and the multinational corporations pay their fair share of tax. Everyone else does, so they should too. What's worse is they already do elsewhere. Soon after Norway discovered oil off their coast, they decided that wealth generated by a resource-rich country needed to be shared among everyone in society, not just the top 0.1 per cent. Their solution was a superprofits tax on oil companies.

The revenue from the oil tax allowed Norway to invest in free universities, universal health care, impressive national infrastructure, renewable energy and a welfare system that ensures everyone can live a dignified life. That is the kind of policy we can make and the type of society we can have if we are not afraid to take on those with all the wealth and power.

Making sure that billionaires and huge multinational corporations pay their fair share of tax means that we can get dental and mental health into Medicare, get 100 per cent renewable energy, build affordable housing, and ensure everyone can lead a dignified life. This vision is not radical. What is radical is to see the crises we are living through and then recommit to the status quo that the two major parties offer.

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