Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

to attention throughout the whole thing and did not flinch once. I have got to say, if that sets the tone for this government then I have to ask the question: where is the vision? Where is the plan? 'Jobs and growth' is a three-word slogan. Where is the plan to sail this economy through the doldrums?

Where is it? The only plan Mr Tony Abbott had was to rip up all the good work of the Greens and Labor in 2013. There was no vision, no mandate to do anything. Nothing has changed.

It pains me to read the media release from TasCOSS yesterday. They talk about the omnibus bill, the first piece of legislation that we are going to get here. They say that this bill, to be tabled in federal parliament, will 'make life for the 16,000 jobless Tasmanians even more difficult'. The CEO of TasCOSS, Kym Goodes, said:

The instability of Tasmania's labour market combined with the proposed changes to NewStart … will put even more financial pressure on the entire generation of Tasmanians currently looking for work.

Then she goes on to say:

The NewStart Energy Supplement could be paid for many times over by withdrawing proposed Government tax cuts and cutting Capital Gains Tax and negative gearing concessions.

There are so many elements already in the first piece of legislation to this Senate that are going to hurt disadvantaged Tasmanians.

But there is no other plan on how we are going to stimulate the economy or generate jobs for Tasmanians. All we are going to do is put forward the same measures to make life hard for people in my state. It is Groundhog Day. We have learnt nothing from the last couple of years and nothing from the clear political outcome of a double dissolution election. The Greens do have the courage and vision to put forward an economic plan for this country—a plan that not only looks after the environment but actually delivers ideas on how we can stimulate the economy and how we can raise revenue, because we have a revenue crisis if we have a crisis in this country. We have a government that is not prepared to raise revenue.

We are talking about the Prime Minister's key focus this week as the parliament has come back. It was very evident in his speech in response to the Governor-General's speech: the massive moral obligation that we all have is to retire debt—a massive moral obligation. We heard something similar from Kevin Rudd about climate change. Now, that is a massive moral obligation for us to tackle. But it sounds very much like Mr Joe Hockey's budget emergency. We have already heard several speeches over the last two days about what Treasurer Scott Morrison calls 'the taxed and the taxed-nots'. It is the same kind of divisive language we saw two years ago. Haven't we learnt anything? Why are we going over this old ground when there is so much that we can do as a parliament to actually make Australia a better place? Why the divisiveness?

We can act on housing affordability. We can tackle negative gearing and capital gains tax.

Senator O'Sullivan interjecting—

You may not agree, Senator O'Sullivan. I know you have many real estate investments.