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

Isn't that surprising? Labor is promising another review. My colleague Senator Siewert has tirelessly championed this increase for some of the most vulnerable Australians through three separate parliaments, including the Labor government prior to the 2013 election. So let me say to Senator Cameron: three times, in three separate governments, we have raised this issue. We are nothing if we are not consistent when we are battling for low-income Australians who shouldn't be living on $38.39 a week.

This week the Commonwealth Bank put out their annual results. We know that their chief executive officer, Ian Narev, although he's going to get a small 'haircut', is still going to be paid over $10 million a year. Do you know how much that is every day? It is nearly $30,000 a day. We live in a country where our corporate elite are paid obscene amounts of money and we have low-income, vulnerable Australians who should be supported by a safety net, our social security system—a system that we could afford if we had decent revenue-raising policies in this country—and yet they are struggling to survive on $38 a day.

My party is proud to be a party that constantly strives to achieve outcomes and, to be totally blunt, tries to drag the Labor Party over the line on some of these key policies. I could list a number of policies as long as my arm that we've been proud to achieve in getting Labor over the line on. A royal commission on banking is just one example. We campaigned on that for years. It was called exactly what Senator Cameron called this today: a stunt. So let me say this again: Labor got up and said that our call for a royal commission—a motion we put through the Senate—was a stunt. Would you even know it now? I'm glad that Labor's called for a royal commission. I'm glad that they have joined the chorus for this royal commission into the banking sector. There are so many other policies.

Guess who it was who decided to raise the issue—and it was almost heresy when we raised it—of removing negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions, these perverse incentives that have created not only a housing bubble and systemic financial risks in this country but a housing affordability crisis for so many young Australians and so many low-income Australians who may never get to own their own home. There is this disparity, this inequality, in wealth in this country. It's fine for Senator Reynolds to come in here today and talk about how the HILDA numbers show that income inequality has been static, but she neglected to mention that, for wealth inequality in this country, the charts are horrendous for young Australians. Home ownership in this country has dropped nearly 30 per cent because of perverse government policies that allow mostly older and wealthier Australians to buy multiple homes, at the expense of younger and poorer Australians. It was the Greens who first raised the idea that we need to scrap these investor incentives. And, good, Labor came out eventually and supported that as well, and that's now, I understand, a key policy of theirs.

Taxing trusts as corporations—guess who took that to the last election. The Greens did. That was one of our policies that we'd had in place for some time. And, lo and behold, less than a month ago, Mr Bill Shorten came out and announced that Labor would tax trusts as companies, and we congratulated him. That was great. There's a bit of a trend in what I am saying here that is contrary to what Senator Cameron's come in here and said—that somehow what we do in in place is insignificant and that it's a stunt.

I'd like to pay tribute to Senator Siewert. There are very few senators in this place who work as hard as she does, and this is something she has been an absolutely tireless champion on now for a long period of time. She's a senator, and in her tool box she has the chance to raise this issue in the Senate through a whole range of different things such as motions and referrals to inquiries, and she's introduced again, for the third time in a row, a private senator's bill to help low-income Australians who are suffering and who need our support.

No doubt Senator Williams would raise the question: how do we pay for this? That's a really good question, Senator Williams. How do we pay for this? I believe and my party believes that we can afford to raise the safety net for low-income Australians, for the unemployed—the people we should be looking after. I remember, in the 2013 election, talking to unemployed Tasmanians who were receiving Newstart and talking to single mothers on family payments. In this political debate, there is this cookie cutter approach: if you're unemployed and you've been on Newstart, especially if you are long-term unemployed, somehow it's a character trait or a character fault of yours. With these people I met, all their stories were different and a lot of them were heartbreaking. We have a duty to these people.

Numerous parliamentary inquiries have found that Newstart is too low. So why do we need Senator Cameron's suggestion of another inquiry, another review? We already know it's too low. Thirty-eight dollars and thirty-nine cents a day is not a lot of money to live on. We get paid shiploads—I'll use the 'p' word—more than that in here, don't we, Senator Williams? We get paid a lot more than that. Some people think we're overpaid, and they're entitled to their opinion, but we recognise that $38.39 a day—and that's including the energy supplement—is virtually nothing. It's less than half the minimum wage.

Of those on income support in this country, 36.1 per cent are living below the poverty line, including 55 per cent of people receiving the Newstart allowance. That's a pretty stark and scary statistic. The Australian Greens had a bill back in 2011 and 2012 to increase the single rates for Newstart and independent youth allowance. It did not get supported by Labor, contrary to what Senator Cameron was saying. He was saying that somehow this is a stunt that we have brought up with a government under which—because they control the lower house, the other place—we know this will never get done. We've tried it—we've tried it previously under a Labor government.

We took this policy to the last election, and our platform was fully costed. Now, it's easy to come in here and say that we are a party that's—to use a term Senator Williams often uses—somehow down the bottom of the garden with the fairies. I would like to stand here and say we have some of the best economic policies of all the parties in this place, and we spend an incredible amount of time working with the Parliamentary Budget Office to get everything costed. Our platform, at every election we go to, unlike the other parties, is transparent and fully costed, and that takes an incredible amount of work, trust me. I've been on our committees actually getting this done. We have had this costed, and we know that we can support an increase in payments of $110 a fortnight by doing some pretty simple things.

I recently travelled to Western Australia with the economics committee, and we were looking at the petroleum resource rent tax in this country—a super-profit tax, supposedly—on the economic rents that are earned by the petroleum and oil and gas industry in Australia. These rents are supposed to reflect a fair payment to the Australian people for the resources that we own in the ground that we should sell to multinational companies, some of the biggest and wealthiest oil companies in the world. But what do I find out when I go to this inquiry? We have given them, through our tax system, $238 billion in tax credits. How many Gonski fundings could we fit into that? How many NDIS fundings could we fit into that?

All we're asking for here is an increase of $110 a fortnight for some of the most vulnerable people in our society. I've looked at how these oil companies have been able to accumulate that much deferred tax—tax that could pay for so much—and managed to get away with that. Well, we had said, for these rates, that they can uplift their operating expenditure and their exploration expenditure at 15 per cent plus the bond rate every year. They can compound their tax deferrals by 15 per cent plus the bond rate every year. Imagine getting that kind of return on your investment? That's what we're giving them—15 per cent. If we tweaked that 15 per cent by even half a per cent or 0.1 per cent, we could pay for this. It's ridiculous! Why aren't we taking on some of the biggest and most wealthy oil companies in the world? We're giving away our resources for nothing, when we know we need revenue to pay for things like this. Believe me: it wouldn't take much at all.

What about removing negative gearing and capital gains tax? Labor's come part of the way with a reduction in what they think should be paid on a capital gains tax, if you sell your house and you're an investor. And they have come some of the way to removing negative gearing. But, if we remove the entire lot, we could not only solve a key problem in our housing affordability crisis; we could actually raise another $10 billion to $20 billion of revenue on forward estimates—enough to pay for a small, very modest increase for Australians who need it the most.

What about a diesel fuel rebate?