Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

What a time to be debating the Treasury Laws Amendment (Enterprise Tax Plan No. 2) Bill 2017—a proposal by government to award corporations in Australia $80 billion worth of tax breaks over 10 years. What a time to be standing up and debating that proposal when the world and this country are facing massive challenges. The two great challenges that are facing Australia and, as a matter of fact, the world are accelerating environmental degradation and the decline of the capacity of the ecology of our planet to sustain life, including human life, and rampant wealth inequality. The decline in the capacity of our ecology to sustain life is embodied, most notably and seriously, in the massive disruption to the planet's climate that we are currently seeing because governments and parliaments are allowing corporations to use the atmosphere as a giant dumping ground for CO2. And we are seeing rampant wealth inequality because governments and parliaments are too interested in lining the pockets of people who are at the higher levels of big corporations in this world and are not interested enough in providing high-quality public services to the people who really need them.

Now, if you look at human history and at the crumble of civilisations that we know of throughout human history—and I don't use the word 'collapse', because civilisations crumble slowly rather than collapse overnight—they all, and I do mean all, have two defining factors in common. Those two factors are environmental degradation and wealth inequality. Those are the two factors that cause civilisations to crumble. We shouldn't be so arrogant as to think that we are somehow immune from that today just because we've got a civilisation that is high in technology in many parts. Just because it's a civilisation that has led to an explosion of human population around the planet, just because it's a civilisation that gives all of us in this place the most comfortable of lives, don't think we're immune to the forces of history and don't think that we're not doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. That's why debates like this are so important. What we're seeing is the theft of the commons. What we're seeing is a massive transfer of wealth from people to corporations and to those people who make the highest levels of profit and generate the highest levels of wealth from increasing corporate power.

As I said, those two sides of the same coin—ecological degradation and rampant wealth inequality—are caused by the same thing. They are caused by parliaments giving up too much power to corporate boardrooms. That's what they're caused by. If we want to address those two great challenges of our time, we have to act to rein in the power of the corporates. We have to stop the theft of the commons—that wealth that actually belongs to all of the people of the world and all of the people of Australia. We need to make sure that it delivers for the people of the world and the people of Australia, and it's just not delivering at the moment.

So here we are, debating $80 billion of tax cuts to the big corporates in 10 years, engaged in a global race to the bottom. Let's just play this out for a minute. What happens here is that the corporates run around the world and say, 'Look over there. Their tax rate's lower.' So certain countries drop their tax rates. Then they run around to the next bloc of countries with the highest tax rates and they say, 'Look over there. You've got the highest tax rates. Everyone else has got lower tax rates.' Well, game it out; it's not hard. We all end up with very lower or no tax rates on corporations. And I've heard the argument that has been put by the government here; Donald Trump has just lowered the US corporate tax rate. Well, so he has, stupidly, lowered the US corporate tax rate. That's no argument for us to do the same in this country.

What we're debating here is trickle-down economics. I'm telling you now that, since Ronald Reagan coined that term back in the 1980s in the US, there have been people in that country and around the world—the people doing it the toughest—who are still waiting with their hands outstretched, waiting for the first drops. And do you know what? They're never going to feel them, because all these corporate tax cuts are sucked up by the top end of town. The people who are going to make the most out of these corporate tax cuts are the shareholders, the institutions that own the shares in our big corporations, the CEOs and the top-level employees of the big transnational corporations. Yes, that's right—the same transnational corporations that are not paying enough tax as we stand here today in Australia, because they're rorting the petroleum resource rent tax. We've heard about ExxonMobil not planning to pay any tax until 2021. I will confidently stand here today and say they're not going to pay any tax in 2021 or 2022 or 2023 or into the future, because they will run rings around governments of the future from corporatist parties who think that the answer to everything is to look after the corporations.

The answer to everything is not to look after the corporates. In fact, the answer to everything is to reverse some of the power transfer and the wealth transfer that has taken place in this country and through liberal democracies around the world over the last 50 years and get some of the power back for the people. Get some of the power back for the parliaments. That's what we need to see, not lying down with your legs in the air, asking the big corporates to tickle your tummies, which is, of course, what the LNP are doing here—and of all the weeks! It is the week where leadership speculation is rife. We could be looking at Peter Dutton PM by the end of the week, if you believe some of the stuff that has been going on in this building this week inside LNP caucuses and the LNP party room.

Of course, here we have the Prime Minister, the merchant banker Prime Minister, who wants to look after his corporate mates, who wants to show them that he can deliver for them. So he is pushing ahead with this legislation when he knows that he doesn't have the numbers to get it through. So you have got to ask yourself: are we debating this tonight as part of an internal play inside the Liberal Party to allow Malcolm Turnbull to hang onto the job that he has wasted since he took it over a couple of years ago?

What Australia needs is quality public services. What the Australian people want is quality public services. And do you know what? If you want to pay for quality public services, you've got to get the money from somewhere. I remember when we had a budget emergency back in the day. I remember Mr Abbott viciously prosecuting the argument that we had a budget emergency. You don't hear so much about the budget emergency now, when the government wants to give away $80 billion over the next 10 years to its corporate friends, its mates in big business and, more importantly, its major political donors. Make no mistake: this is a quid pro quo. This tax cut is saying to the big corporates, 'Donate politically to the LNP so that the LNP have got a fighting chance to win the next election, so the LNP can outspend everyone else on the upcoming election campaign.' The LNP want those donations. It's the big corporates that are the reservoir for those donations for the LNP. But you've got to give a quid pro quo in the corporate world, in the world of big business and big politics—that nexus where big business, big money and big politics come together. And the quid pro quo is $80 billion worth of corporate tax cuts in exchange for political donations from the big corporates to give the LNP a crack at winning the next election.

As I said earlier, at the end of the day this is about whether or not you believe in trickle-down economics, and I use the word 'believe' advisedly, because trickle-down economics is nothing more than an ideology. Trickle-down economics is nothing more than blind faith, because there's no substance to it at all. Let us look at who the losers are in this massive transfer of power and wealth that we've seen over the last half a century—this transfer from the parliaments, which are here to represent all people, into the pockets and the boardrooms of the big corporates, which are here to represent the profit motive and those people who already have wealth enough to own shares or work for those corporations. The two big losers are the people doing it toughest and the environment that sustains all of our lives on this little bit of rock orbiting the sun.

If we don't get this right, the ramifications are absolutely horrendous. I mean, wake up! We've got the National Energy Guarantee being watered down day by day in front of our very eyes. There are 80 bushfires burning in Australia in the middle of winter. It's cold across most of the country, but the bushfires are burning. This is the climate disruption that the Greens have been warning about. This is the climate disruption that millions of people in Australia have been warning about. This will cost everyone. If we don't address it, it could cost us everything. We are going to see mass displacement of humanity around the world. We are going to see sea level rises that dislocate hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people by the end of the century. We are going to see giant swathes of this planet rendered uninhabitable. When the people start moving in their hundreds of millions, their billions, where are we going to put them? What are we going to do with them? Are we just going to leave them to die?

This is a direct result of parliaments handing over power to corporations and not reining in corporations, allowing them to continue with what, in corporate speak, are called externalities, where they can continue to plunder fossil fuel resources as if they were infinite when in fact they are finite, and where they are allowed—in fact, encouraged—by parliaments to continue to dump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as if the atmosphere were infinite when fact it is finite. There's going to come a reckoning, senators, colleagues. Whether it be in our political careers or not, I can't tell you, but there will come a reckoning, and, when the history of these times is written, those that stayed in the pockets of the big corporates are going to be outed for what they are—cowards, friends of the rent-seekers and participants in the theft of the commons that is going on.

So, when you think about this legislation, when you think about the need to run quality public services, when you think about the need to build quality intergenerational public infrastructure, when you think about the need to revolutionise our transport systems, when you think about the need to transition out of fossil fuel extraction and into renewable energies, when you think about the need to provide quality education for all, with universal access, and when you think about the pressures on our health system and the need, expressed by so many people so often, to run a quality public health system—when you think about all these things—you need to make choices. You need to make choices about how you are going to raise the tax revenue that allows you to do those things and the many other things that need to be done to ensure a fair future for our kids and our grandkids. What we're engaged in now, in handing over this power and wealth to the big corporates, is not only a theft of the commons but an intergenerational theft.

When I talk to my kids at home and their friends, they just shake their heads. They are actually despondent or depressed about their future. They can't see a way they're going to be able to own a home. They can't see a future that's not massively disrupted because of the climate crisis. I genuinely believe that we are at risk of inflicting a condition called solastalgia on an entire generation. Solastalgia, a diagnosable psychological condition, in lay terms is anxiety brought about by environmental change. We're infecting a whole generation and setting the preconditions for a generation that, believe me, is not going to look kindly on the things we're doing today—like this proposal to give the big corporates tax cuts of $80 billion, which young people know should be used to provide better quality public services, to engage in the correction of the housing market so that young people actually have a reasonable crack at owning a home in the future, to create a framework that puts a price on carbon so that the big corporates can't continue to pollute relentlessly and emit ever more greenhouse gases, and to require corporations to act in an environmentally sustainable way. They look at what this parliament does—at proposals like this, to give $80 billion over 10 years to the big corporates, many of whom are not even paying their fair share of tax at the moment—and they despair. They are looking for leadership. They're looking for someone to do something about it.

I genuinely hope on behalf of our fragile ecology, which supports the life of every single person on this planet. I hope in the interests of fairness and equality, not just today but on an intergenerational basis, particularly for those young people who are looking at the body politic today and despairing that we simply don't understand what we are doing and that we are driven by greed far more than we are driven by a desire to do the right thing. We need to give those young people some hope because, I'm telling you now, they are rapidly losing it.