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

We all only live once, but so many in my generation are being denied a chance at a good life. So much of our lives is spent working, paying huge portions of our incomes on rents or mortgages, or, worse, living out of a car. Now far too many of my generation will never know the security of owning their own home. In this parliament, over the last 2½ years, the Greens have fought hard for ordinary people, young and old, whose lives seem only to be getting harder day by day.

Politics has badly failed millions of people in this country, and it's worth reflecting for a moment on a quote by, of all people, Virginia Woolf, who once reflected on the 'instinct for possession and the rage for acquisition which keeps the stockbroker and the great barrister going indoors to make money and more money and more money, when it is a fact that 500 pounds a year will keep one alive in the sunshine'. With those 500 pounds, she wrote, came the freedom to think and write as she pleased. These days, we certainly need a little bit more than 500 pounds a year, but the point remains. We're not asking for much, and, if we made the billionaires and big corporations finally pay their fair share, we could all have the basics we need to live a good life with security and meaning, full of the things that matter—time with family and friends, to go to the beach and, most importantly, to be alive in the sunshine. We're not asking for much, and I think we can certainly achieve that in this country.