Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

It is not people first; it is industry first. That is the policy position being taken here, when you see a profit of a billion dollars in six months. In this day and age, in anybody’s language that is a significant amount of money. We do not need to be subsidising that anymore. They need to be paying their fair share. Everybody always understood it was to get an infant industry up and running. Now there are other things that Australia needs to be doing. We need to be getting behind a renewable energy industry and supporting that much more. We need to be genuinely supporting the mums and dads and the pensioners who are in need and getting away from this corporate handout to organisations that can well and truly stand on their own two feet.

I have not heard that BP, Chevron, Shell, BHP, Mitsubishi or Woodside are struggling at all. All we are doing is trying to prop up major companies instead of supporting families and pensioners. The opposition bring their bleeding heart in here and talk about pensioners—finally they have woken up to the fact that pensioners are doing it tough. They were in government for 11 years and did not manage to help them. Now all of a sudden they are in opposition and maybe they have time to actually look around at the people who are suffering in Australia. All pensioners in Australia, not just age pensioners, are suffering and, after 11 years, all of a sudden it has dawned on the opposition that these people are struggling. ‘But we’re not going to support any of the measures that actually raise some revenue because we don’t like tax either. We want to support big business and we want to support pensioners. Which one are we going to go for?’

Are we actually going to make sure that the corporates pay their fair share for the resources that they are making money out of so that Australia gets its fair share? This was a subsidy in the first place, so what they are arguing is that any support for infant industries has to stay forever and we are never going to take it from them. Once they become megabig, they are so big that we are going to keep supporting them anyway. It does not make sense to me.

It is about time that we started making sure that we have enough in our consolidated revenue that we can genuinely look after those in Australia that need it most. I do not think the likes of Woodside need that subsidy. It is corporate subsidy, it is corporate welfare and we do not need it anymore. We have got to get away from ‘big is better’ and ‘greed at all costs’ because it is bringing down the American financial institutions. The Americans are sick of it, and I will tell you what: Australians are certainly sick of it.

I also stood in a polling booth in the recent WA state election, and I have never had as many come and get Greens how-to-votes from me and say, ‘Things have got to change.’ So wake up and smell the roses. It is time to get the corporates off the corporate teat and start delivering for those that are genuinely doing it tough in this country.