Richard Di Natale (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to put on the record the Australian Greens position on this amendment. We will support the amendment. However, our position on the Treasury Laws Amendment (Lower Taxes for Small and Medium Businesses) Bill, which has been made clear by my colleague Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, is that is we won't support this legislation because it is, again, a further measure to implement an unfair trade deal that hands over far too much power to large corporations and removes power from governments to protect the environment and public health.

I also want to take this opportunity to put on the record that we are now 10 minutes away from the guillotine being adopted without any opportunity to debate a further bill that would rip $3 billion out of essential public services and give a huge tax cut to business. We didn't have the opportunity to even give a second reading speech to put our objections formally on the record because the Liberal Party, with the support of the Labor Party, have prevented us from doing that in a remarkable act, an attack on democracy in this chamber. You do not have the guts or the decency to allow the crossbench to articulate our opposition and, indeed, to interrogate a bill that would hand over $3 billion to businesses.

Let's keep this very, very simple. We talk about the opportunity cost of a spending decision, which is the lost opportunity to do something with the money you're spending and how much that's worth. Let's actually talk about the opportunity cost of the legislation that we're being prevented from debating. Here's what this bill, which you won't allow us to debate in this chamber and are seeking to ram through without any scrutiny, does. It brings forward a tax cut worth $3 billion over the forward estimates. But here's what it doesn't do. Earlier this month, we got news from the IPCC that we're on track to lose 90 per cent of all coral reefs on the planet in the next 20 years. People come from all around the world to see the Great Barrier Reef, because you can't see anything like it anywhere else. It's worth billions to the economy. It's worth over 60,000 jobs a year, and it could be dead, could be gone, in 20 years.

What does the Great Barrier Reef get out of a tax cut? Absolutely nothing. Nine in 10 public schools are on track to never get the funding they need in order to educate students from right across the country, many of them from disadvantaged backgrounds, living with a disability or living in remote and regional communities. Those students won't get the bare minimum of funding they need; nine out of 10 of them will not get the minimum standard that we've agreed. No school ever got funded out of a tax cut. We've got 100,000 people in Australia, including 18,000 kids, who are homeless. No homeless shelter was ever built out of a tax cut. At least five women have been killed by their current or former partners since the beginning of the month. According to White Ribbon, one woman is killed by her current or former partner on average every week in Australia. Let's not beat around the bush. This is as much an economic issue as it is one of justice. Women, particularly younger women with kids, who don't have anything in savings, who aren't working or who are relying on income from an abusive partner, are being let down by economic inequality. They're crying out for our support, they're being killed every week, they're asking for help, and what are we doing? We're giving $3 billion in tax cuts. You don't open family crisis shelters with a tax cut.

Indigenous children today are twice as likely to die before their fourth birthday than non-Indigenous children. Indigenous men make up less than two per cent of the overall population and 25 per cent of the prison population. It's a national disgrace. It's an indictment on this place. It should embarrass everybody. It should shake us into action. Yet we're missing four out of our seven Closing the Gap targets. Do we think they're going to be met with this tax cut? Or do we think it's going to be harder to close the gap because of this tax cut? Well, we know the answer to that question. That's just a fraction of the opportunity cost involved in handing over this tax cut. It's not just the budget cost of bringing forward a tax reduction. It's the human cost of what we're forced to do and the things we can't afford to pay for, to invest in, because of the decision of this chamber, and you don't have the guts to ensure that it gets the scrutiny it deserves.

We are one of the wealthiest countries in the world. We are at the wealthiest point in human history. We've got the resources and the means to guarantee that all Australians get an opportunity to lead a rich and fulfilling life. Instead of doing that, you're here facilitating the passage of legislation to hand over more power to corporations—to take the power from governments to ensure that they can protect their citizens and protect their environment. And you're now, without debate, about to give $3 billion to companies who don't need it. A company with a turnover of $50 million is not a small business.

This is a massive transfer of wealth. At a time when economic inequality in this country is getting worse, at a time when our environment has never been more precarious, here we are with the Liberal Party and the Labor Party joining together to continue with this crap that we've been fed for more than three decades. Trickle-down economics doesn't work. Invest in people. What's good for big business isn't automatically good for people. You've presided over an economic system where big companies write their own policies. We've got the business industry writing this tax policy for you. We've got the coal industry writing energy policy. We've got media companies writing our media laws. And here we are with the duopoly, Liberal and Labor, joining together to prevent any debate so that the Australian community can understand what is being done in their name. The foundations of a decent society are not built through this war, this escalation, this auction on tax cuts—my tax cut is bigger than your tax cut; billions of dollars handed over to companies that don't need it.

There are so many other things that we can do for small business. There's the instant asset write-off. Again, the Greens led the charge on that, but we don't believe that taking revenue away from Newstart, from our schools and from our hospitals is the pathway to a more decent or, indeed, a more prosperous society. We're a party that believes in the public good. We believe in public ownership. We believe in investing in our essential services which are the foundations of a decent society. We believe in protecting the environment—clean air, clean water, clean energy and clean politics. And, today, what we're seeing is dirty politics, with the duopoly ganging up again, preventing meaningful debate on an issue that the Australian community have a right to hear about.

So let me just say in closing that we oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership and we're appalled that the Labor Party would back in a Liberal Party that wants to do the bidding of its big corporate mates. We oppose these huge tax cuts that are going to businesses that don't need them, that are going to big businesses with a turnover of $50 million. What we support is investing that money in our schools, in our hospitals, in ensuring that people don't need to live beneath the poverty line, in supporting women who are living through domestic violence at the hands of an abusive partner and in ensuring that people who are sleeping rough can get a roof over their heads. It's not the government or the budget that are paying for this tax cut; it's those people who are being left behind who are paying for this tax cut.