Sue Lines (WA, Deputy-President) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak about what Labor believes is wrong with this government's tax plan. I want to start by just reiterating some of the comments that Labor senators have made in this place tonight. Australians believe in fairness. There's no question about that. It's part of our DNA. It's part of who we are. Fairness is what we believe in. You can see that with the most recent marriage equality debate, where, at the end of the day, people voted because they saw it as fair that marriage in this country should be made available to all of those people, regardless of their gender, who wanted to get married. Ultimately it was a question about fairness.

This tax package will come down to fairness. Australians that I talk to when I'm out knocking on doors still believe in this concept of fairness. For the Turnbull government particularly to design a tax package where the biggest tax cuts go to the wealthiest in our community is just not fair. It is not fair. Mr Turnbull is our Prime Minister. For his electorate of Wentworth to be the electorate, out of all the electorates in Australia, that benefits to the greatest extent—Australians are not going to cop that. They're just not. They are absolutely going to see through it.

I have really tried to understand because I know that some of those in the government are also motivated around concepts of fairness. I don't know how they can, with their hand on their heart, stand up and support this tax package when it's the electorate of Wentworth, of all the electorates in Australia, the Prime Minister's electorate, that's going to benefit the most from this supposedly gold-standard tax package. I know the government will somehow complain that Labor can't bear people who make a buck. That couldn't be further from the truth. If someone is successful in life and they make a good living, 'Good on them,' I say, but they need to pay their fair share of tax. They need to be part of a progressive tax system. If they're earning more, they should pay more—it's that simple. That is what Australians will sign up to. They want to sign up to a fair tax package. So never let it be said—although I'm sure the government will try it on—that somehow it's the politics of envy. It's nothing to do with that. It is absolutely the politics of fairness. Good on people who make a buck. Good on people if you are making a lot of money, but pay your fair share.

Wentworth, the Prime Minister's electorate, is going to get the biggest tax cuts in this country. I can tell you Australians will not cop that. It's at a time when we've got by-elections in Tasmania and in Queensland. We know that the electorates of Braddon and Longman don't have much advantage from this tax package at all. In fact, most of them—more than 70 per cent of them—will be much better under Labor's package. Here we have a government that thinks it can go out and sell a message that says, 'Yes, I'm the Prime Minister, and people in my electorate are getting the biggest buck out of these tax cuts, but, sorry, Braddon and Longman, you'll just have to battle along.'

Then today, of all things, the Prime Minister said that an aged-care worker caring for the most vulnerable people in our society should just aspire to a better-paying job. Maybe those opposite don't know what happens in aged-care facilities. I do. It was part of my working life for about 11 years. I can tell you that old people die in the arms of aged-care workers. Often, when people go into an aged-care facility, their families no longer visit or their families have also passed on. Many aged-care workers I know have said to me, 'I am often the last person that a resident has a conversation with.' Aged-care workers have told me people have died in their arms. And yet today the Prime Minister said that aged-care workers should just aspire to a better-paying job.

Let's just backtrack a couple of years to when Labor was in government. We put a package together which would have improved the lives and the pay packets of aged-care workers. It was a bargaining framework. The employers agreed with it. All of the employers, whether they were part of the church and charitable sector or part of the private sector, saw it as a fair deal where there would be enterprise bargaining to lift the wages by about $5 an hour. What was one of the first things that the then Abbott government did, which those opposite all voted for? They took that package away. So we've seen the form of this government; it's quite prepared to take money out of the pockets of low-paid workers.

Most aged-care workers in this country—perhaps Mr Turnbull doesn't know this—work part time. It's hard work. It's a lot of lifting. It's a hard slog. It's emotionally draining. Aged-care workers do that job largely because it's their vocation. They really want to make a difference to the residents that they're caring for. But that seemed to have passed Mr Turnbull by when he gave that flippant comment, 'Just get a better job.' Most aged-care workers work part time. Those opposite might think they can just get another job, but, of course, they can't because nursing home managers string that part-time work out to five days. They might have six-hour shifts. The average aged-care worker in this country is on about 30 to 35 hours per week on a low wage of about $20 to $21 an hour.

We've seen the attack on penalty rates. How long is it going to be before aged-care employers go cap in hand to the government, saying, 'We can't afford to pay penalty rates on the weekend'? That would devastate aged-care workers, because a significant part of their take-home pay is from doing night shifts or working Saturdays or Sundays, away from their families. They care for the residents that they look after. Mr Turnbull's already had one go at them—when the coalition first got into government, they took money away from them. Now he's having a second go at them by saying: 'The wealthy people who live in Wentworth are more entitled to a bigger tax deduction than you are. If you don't like that, just go and get a better-paying job.' What kind of solution is that? It's not a solution. It shows how out of touch the Prime Minister is when he can make that slur against aged-care workers, who have been agitating to the Turnbull government for about the last two years to lift their wages and to lift funding. Nursing homes and aged-care facilities are almost exclusively funded by the federal government and, yet, all we've seen the federal government do is reduce that funding, take money out of the pockets of aged-care workers and tell them they are not worthy of a decent wage increase at a time when wages in this country, and wage increases, are at historically low levels.

Things are crook if you are an average-wage earner in this country and you are looking to the government to try and improve your lot in some way. There's no point looking at the Turnbull government, because they think fairness starts in the electorate of Wentworth, not in the electorates of Braddon and Longman. Perth and Fremantle are, really, not much different—they are marginally better than the electorates of Braddon and Longman in terms of income but not much better. They won't see much from the Turnbull government either.

Is it any wonder that the Turnbull government ran a mile and refused to put candidates into those seats? There are no Liberal candidates running in the seats of Fremantle and Perth. I initially thought it was because, if they put candidates into the seats of Perth and Fremantle, voters would surely expect to see the Prime Minister, who never visits WA—in fact, there was a time when he'd spent more time asleep than he had talking to Western Australian voters! I thought the reason was, perhaps, that the Prime Minister didn't want to come back and visit Western Australia, but it's really these tax cuts. The government are too embarrassed to front up to the by-elections in Perth and Fremantle and go, 'Yes, we're delivering to you.' Well, how? How are they delivering? They took money out of the pockets of aged-care workers in their first term of government. They're delivering nothing to them in this tax package. Then, today, the Prime Minister of this country insults aged-care workers by saying, 'Hey, go and get a better job.' What an insult! Caring for the most vulnerable in our community has got to be gold-star worthy, and yet the Prime Minister just dismisses this.

The cost of this package is outrageous. The plan will cost a ridiculous amount of money. Mr Morrison, the Treasurer, has indicated that the 10-year cost of the plan is $140 billion. That is a heck of a lot of money. That's a lot of money that's not going to aged-care workers, for example, in a pay packet. It's not going to the aged-care industry to try to make aged care more available and to ensure that residents in aged care are treated with respect and dignity. It's certainly not going to early childhood workers. Perhaps it'll be tomorrow when our Prime Minister insults them and says, 'Go get a better job,' because they're on about 20 bucks an hour as well.

Most of those workers are women. They're young women, and they're trapped because they're on such a low wage that they can't afford to get into the housing market. In fact, many of them either still live at home, if they are not in a relationship, or, if they are in a relationship, are relying on the income of their partner being higher than theirs to make ends meet. This is the case for many early childhood professionals—and they are professionals. They have qualifications at certificate III level or higher. They have certificates III, diplomas or teaching qualifications. Some of them have PhDs. Yet they are on this poverty wage of $20 to $21 an hour. What's the Turnbull government's tax package doing for them? Nothing. They've got nothing to look forward to. Again, Labor had put a plan in place to raise their wages as well. What did the Turnbull government do? It came in this place and took it away; it abolished it.

We've seen that with the cleaners in this building. The cleaners were on a trajectory to get better pay. In fact, Labor put a floor in under their wages because, when those contracts come up for negotiation, the only big expenditure item that the contractors have to negotiate around is the hours that the cleaners work, so what we always see at contract time is that the hours start to be pecked away. So we thought, 'Well, if we could put a base in and say this is the rate everyone has to tender at, it would take wages out of competition.' But, of course, the Turnbull government doesn't understand that. So what we saw here was the cleaners, over time, getting a wage increase and then—boom, poof!—it was just gone one day. It disappeared. So those cleaners cleaning our offices, cleaning our toilets, cleaning the toilets of the Prime Minister and doing a great job—a great bunch of women, and some men—have had a wage freeze for five years. That is absolutely at the feet of the Turnbull government.

So what are they going to see from the tax package? Very little. Unfortunately, they don't live in the electorate of Wentworth and they don't earn high incomes, so they are not going to see much of a benefit from this tax giveaway to the wealthy in our society. Of course, as you know, for those cleaners at the moment, there's been a contract change, so they mightn't even have a job, and the care factor from the Turnbull government is almost zero, when it's entirely within their remit to make sure that those cleaners are offered employment. I don't know how they can talk to them. Maybe they don't talk to them. I talk to the women who clean my office. I know their names. I know the names of a lot of cleaners. Fair enough—I worked for United Voice. I knew those cleaners before I came in here. Some of them have been here longer than all of us. We talk about grandfathers and grandmothers of the House. Actually it's the two cleaners who clean the Prime Minister's office. They've been here a very, very long time, and they're two fabulous women who came here as refugees. But they won't see anything from this tax package—nothing. They're pretty bold women. I hope that they raise it with the Prime Minister next time they're in there cleaning his loo. I hope they do, and I wouldn't put it past them to do it. These are the real faces behind the unfairness of the Turnbull government tax plan.

It's not as if Labor don't have a solution. We do. We have got a fair tax package that we are prepared to be up-front and open about and to put out there. Ours is not driven by ideology; ours is driven by the notion of fairness. Labor's plan will increase the tax cuts currently being offered under the government's tax offset proposal.

We support stage 1. I think most people in this chamber do, so we could have stage 1 for low-income earners tomorrow—boom, done. It's not a problem. Let's get that done and dusted. But, of course, the government want to hold the country to ransom to try to make out it's someone else's fault. It's Labor's fault. It's the Greens' fault. It's the crossbenchers' fault. It's anyone's fault but their own. It's their tax package. Australians across the country are saying to them, 'It isn't fair.' I think most of us are saying we'll support stage 1. Let's get it done. Let's do something for low-paid Australians—but no.

Our tax plan with a Shorten Labor government will deliver bigger and permanent tax cuts from 1 July 2019. Ours will be permanent. As you've heard today, people earning less than $125,000 a year will receive a larger tax cut under Labor's plan when compared to the plan put by Mr Turnbull, which, in a skewed way, rewards his own electorate of Wentworth. We know that under our tax plan more than four million people will be better off by $398 a year when compared to the Turnbull government's tax plan.

From the inquiries that were held we know that this is ideologically driven and quite frankly is bereft of ideas. By continuing to insist that the bill be taken as a whole and by refusing to both conduct and release even basic fiscal and distributional impacts, the government insults the intelligence of the Australian people. We just had Senate estimates and we tried really hard during Senate estimates. We asked question after question after question, as indeed we have here in question time, about what the true cost of the tax is. And there is the dishonesty of the package. There's no need to bring in the stage 3 right now. It's years away, so we don't need to legislate for it. We would have to have two more Turnbull governments—or whoever the new Prime Minister is—to get to their tax package.

The government is taking an ideological approach to an unfair tax system. Labor, in government, will put in a fair package. We will get the best return possible for taxpayers, and we will take economic circumstances into account. The Treasurer has politicised the Treasury, which a Labor government will be left to fix. Labor supports low- and middle-income tax relief because, ultimately, we stand for fairness and justice. That's what we stand for. We want to make sure that hardworking Australians get the tax relief that they're absolutely entitled to. We also want to make sure that a future government can afford these tax cuts so that we don't bankrupt Australia. The government's approach is not fair and it's not just and Labor will not support stages 2 and 3.