Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Australian Greens oppose the Tax Laws Amendment (Personal Income Tax Reduction) Bill 2008. Let me quote from Dr Peter Rischbieth of the Rural Doctors Association of Australia on budget night, who said:

At the end of the day, the Government can’t say it doesn’t know how bad the rural health crisis is—we have repeated over and over again that an additional 16,000 health professionals are needed in the bush, including an additional 1000 rural doctors (and probably now an additional 1500 doctors based on the Government’s own audit).

The fact is that, even in the 21st century, rural Australians:

• can expect to die younger than their urban counterparts
• continue to suffer from much worse health outcomes and difficulties in accessing treatment
• continue to suffer from reduced access to health services because of a huge shortfall of healthcare funding compared with those living in the cities.

We know, from the Australian Medical Association and other studies, that $500 to $600 million per year is required for health services for Indigenous communities. The great task, which the government has said it is taking on, of eliminating the 17-year life-expectancy gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians is not being undertaken at a serious level in this budget.

The Australian pensioners have been left stuck, with no increase in the base pension of $273 per week. The Greens have been campaigning for a long time now to get that raised by between $30 and $100. The government has some one-off payments, but the pensioner community—over one million pensioners in Australia, who have been the working families in this country for the last half-century and who have given us the Australia that we have, one of the wealthiest nations on earth—are living in poverty. They were ignored by the budget on Tuesday night.

The tax cuts that we are dealing with here are largely servicing the wealthy. As Senator Murray pointed out, three-quarters of the tax cuts will go to people on more than $34,000 a year—and, of course, the wealthier you are, the better off you will be with these tax cuts. Had these tax cuts been diverted to pensioners, they could have got the sort of increase that the Greens have been campaigning for. As it is, pensioners have not had any real growth in income since 1993 or thereabouts. There was the drought of the Howard years for pensioners, and that drought has kept going now under the first Rudd-Swan budget.

I cannot understand why pensioners have been ignored while tax cuts for the rich have risen to the top of the flagpole under this social democrat government’s first budget. Of course, I was very alert to the election campaign last year, when then Prime Minister John Howard announced in the first week of that campaign that he was going to have over $30 billion in tax cuts. The press gallery went into overdrive, saying that Labor had to respond to this. You can remember the days ticking by, and there must have been very, very intense negotiations in the Labor camp, in Mr Rudd’s office, during that week.

The outcome was that by Friday Labor announced that it was going to follow suit. It was going to back the conservative Howard government’s tax concessions to the wealthy, and that commitment is what we have before us in the Senate today. It is manifestly unfair, it is inflationary and it has to starve funds from this country’s ability to adequately fund hospitals, the health service, the public school system, fast and efficient public transport and the great challenge we have to address climate change in 2008. But if we have to pour money—and it is a cash-rich period for governments—into infrastructure for the nation, for the benefit of all the people, why have these tax cuts which are loaded to the wealthy? It is the wrong way to go, it is unfair, it is socially regressive and it fails every test of nation building that we would have expected of a new government. Let us look at one of the alternatives that could have been undertaken here, beyond our priority of giving pensioners a fair go—and I would add, of course, carers, who have got very meagre returns from this budget as well.

If we move to climate change, the government has flopped on its high duty to address climate change and make that a priority in this first budget. Instead, much of what is going to address climate change—and even on the government’s own figures it is something between $2 billion and $3 billion; it is less than a 10th of these tax cuts over the coming four years—is going to the coal industry. These megawealthy largely overseas owned corporations ought to be investing in so-called clean coal—this chimera, this entity that does not exist and that even the coal industry says will not exist for the next decade or two. It cannot help meet the international scientists’ call for a rapid response to climate change that will see greenhouse gas emissions from the planet, instead of increasing, falling within five years. If we do not do that, we face catastrophic climate change with temperatures rising more than two degrees Celsius globally, with massive consequences for economies, society and the environment.

I add here: every day we pick up the latest scientific information on climate change—as in today’s newspapers, the impact on biodiversity. It is much worse than previously thought, and there is one consistent trend with the analysis on climate change around the world. Each analysis says: ‘This is worse than we thought it was before.’ But this government has got its head stuck in the sand. Incredibly, in the budget it cuts $200 million over four years out of the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts. Presumably, that is part of the sacking of some 3,300 jobs out of the Public Service—the government says it is 1,200 or 1,500; whatever it is—the sacking of many hundreds or thousands of breadwinners for so-called working families. They have been spiked by Labor up-front. Some of that will come out of the department of the environment. Where that money is going to we do not know—$50 million is going to be redistributed at $12.5 million a year to the new climate change unit, but it is small change compared to the $31 billion in tax cuts we are looking at here. If you combine that with the last budget, the Howard-Costello budget tax cuts, we are looking at no less than an astonishing $57 billion in tax cuts over the coming prescribed years.

Was it too difficult for this government to adopt the Greens’ proposal brought forward to the Senate by Senator Milne that over the coming 10 years every single house in Australia be retrofitted for climate change with renewable energy, with solar power or alternative renewable energy—a solar hot-water system or alternative heating from renewable energy and retrofitting with insulation? These things create jobs and stimulate the economy but cut greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power stations. Was that too difficult when that program, through cutting power bills for people—some of which they returned to government—would in the long run be cost neutral? The government could not come at it. Instead, it is going to try this program for 200,000 households over the coming five years. That is three per cent effort compared with what the Greens were proposing.

I do not know what has happened to Ministers Garrett and Wong, but they have failed to impress the economic conservative Prime Minister and his Treasurer. They have failed to get their message to a Prime Minister who says, ‘I have as a priority climate change.’ No, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, you do not have it as a priority. You have dismissed it and relegated it to an insignificant other in this budget. And, by the way, what has happened to the rhetoric of Labor in terms of supporting research and development and science in this country? There are smart remarks coming from the Labor benches at the moment, but I will ask somebody from Labor to get up and justify the $69 million cut to the CSIRO—$69 million, and we have got $31 billion going to tax cuts, specifically benefiting the big end of town. Labor, my foot! Social democrats, my foot! This is a conservative government presenting a conservative budget to please the lobbyists, who dominate this parliament and the political process, the corporate sector and the already wealthy.

I have to canvass many more knowledgeable people than me on the prospect of inflation. The speaker before me said it is not going to be inflationary. Yes, it is. We all know that, and every Labor person knows that, including the Treasurer. You cannot be injecting over three or four years $57 billion into tax cuts—and remember Labor supported those cuts last year; the Greens opposed it but Labor did not—without creating inflationary pressure. The alternative, of course, is to have massive cutbacks in public spending, and the government has not shown it is willing to do that, nor should it be. So this fact does emerge, and I agree with the opposition completely on this: if we do get further interest rate rises—and they will really hit the working families that Labor attributes so much to—they will be squarely on the shoulders of Prime Minister Rudd and Treasurer Swan. The inflationary process is being fuelled by these tax cuts, which come out of this legislation here today.

I want to go back to look at the cruel disparity between the commitment Labor is making to pensioners and the commitment it is making to the already wealthy people who are on big incomes. It says these are tax cuts across the board. They are not; they are highly loaded towards the big end of town. Next year, for example, if you are on $30,000 you will get $11.54 per week in tax cuts—hardly enough to pay for the rapidly increasing fuel costs in this country. However, if you are on $300,000 you will get $91.35 per week in tax cuts.

I heard a Labor interjector during the week say, ‘Yes, but the disparity gets better as you go further on.’ Let’s look at the year 2010-11. If you are on $30,000 then you will be getting an extra $14.42 per week, but if you are on $300,000 you will be getting an extra $116.35. In other words, the further we go under this tax cut program, the bigger the disparity between the rich and the poor.

When you go across to pensioners you find that they get zero. They are not on an increase of $11 or $14 a week. By crikey, they could use it but they are not going to get it. Instead of that they languish at the poverty line. Let me quote from a single age pensioner who wrote to me about this matter last year. In anticipation that there would be a change of government, she was very hopeful that she would get a better response. She wrote:

I have written to the spokesmen of the Government and the Labor Opposition regarding the poverty in which Single People, who are solely reliant upon a Single Age Pension, are existing.

I have not yet had a response from the Opposition—

that is the Labor Party—

and the response from the Government was not at all sympathetic and, I considered, rather high-handed.

I wonder how the Members of Parliament, or their Advisers would manage to live on the sum of $530.90 per fortnight (this includes $5.80 Pharmaceutical Allowance) which is reported to be 20% below the Poverty Line and less than half the Basic Wage.

For your information I am enclosing my fortnightly Income and Expenses Budget. I live as frugally as I can, cook all my own meals. I rarely buy prepackaged food, and cannot eat take-aways, having had surgery for Bowel Cancer.

You will note that this statement does not cover Dental Care. I and many others are going to spend the $500 Special Grant given by the Government in July on Private dental care—

We can bring that up to date. Another $500 has been given by this government—no difference.

because of the long waiting time for Public dental care—some areas are waiting for years.

I know the Government—

she is talking here about the Howard government—

has said that it will expedite dental care for pensioners with serious illnesses. This is putting the cart before the horse, because many people I know personally are suffering serious health problems due to the lack of dental care.

I am 83 years of age and a “little l” Liberal who is looking to change my vote at the coming election. I feel that I may not look further.

To me, as a Green advocating an increase in the pension, she says:

Thank you again for advocacy for a large but fairly voiceless part of the Australian population.

She provided her budget, including such things as canned fish, paper products, household cleaners, coffee, tea and sugar—right down to the last cent. In a sentence amongst all this she says she puts aside for birthdays and Christmas gifts, 12 at $40 each, a rather hopeful $480. Savings for car service, the gap payment for specialist medical treatment, repairs to the refrigerator, TV, washing machine or dryer, and donations to churches and charities are all under a question mark. Holidays, outings and clothes are not provided for.

In effect, pensioners are living in very tough times. I reiterate: these are the working families who have made Australia the wealthy nation that it is. They have helped get us to the point where we have a Treasury swimming in money, a budget surplus that is unprecedented in Australian history, yet we have a miserly attitude to one million to two million pensioners and carers in this country which leaves me speechless. I would have thought, as did that pensioner—she was intending to change her vote, as you heard—that the advent of a Labor government would have brought some relief for pensioners, but they have been dudded by Labor.

This is a matter that the Greens intend to continue to campaign strongly for. Let me tell the government, it is not going to go away. There is no way that we will support the legislation for these tax cuts when pensioners are left out in the cold, struggling day by day simply to make ends meet. There is no way we are going to support massive cash injections, effectively, into the realm of the already wealthy while the poverty stricken remain as they are, unheeded by this government. I foreshadow Greens amendments as circulated.

Debate (on motion by Senator Ludwig) adjourned.

Ordered that the resumption of the debate be made an order of the day for a later hour.