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

The Prime Minister is playing the opposition like a fiddle. According to reports, you've got Labor frontbenchers saying the party is 'politically dead' if it blocks tax cuts, and they're urging the Leader of the Opposition, Anthony Albanese, to 'regain the faith' of tradies by backing them. Let's call a spade a spade here. Most tradies don't earn $180,000 a year, and yet $30 billion is flowing to people on over $180,000 each year. Everyday workers aren't going to be the beneficiaries of stage 3 of these tax cuts, and this is the biggest proportion of funding in this package. The median income of working Australians is $58,000. A third of adults aren't actually in work. So when you put those two things together, according to the ABS, the typical Australian's income is actually $37,000. If you abandon all of your beliefs about working people, about fairness and about the opportunities for them, well, in my mind you're already politically dead. What do you stand for? A hundred years of campaigning for progressive taxation and in a moment that will be undermined because of a decision of this parliament.

Thirty per cent of stage 3 goes to the wealthiest Australians and $95 billion will be ripped away from government revenue. Let's actually look at some of the things that we could be investing in today. Imagine that this parliament came together today, took the revenue that's been ripped out of our budget and said, 'We want to create a different Australia.' Here are some of the things that we could be doing: every Australian in this country could have Medicare funded dental care at a cost of $44.9 billion, which is less than a third of what is being proposed in these tax cuts. Going to the dentist in Australia could become just like going to the doctor—bring out your Medicare card and you get dental treatment. We could raise Newstart by $75 a week. You want to stimulate the economy, raise Newstart. You want to make sure that no-one in Australia sleeps rough and that everyone can put food on the table, raise Newstart. That's $55 billion, again, just over a third of the cost of this tax package. We could have free child care for 80 per cent of families in this country if we made a decision to do that, and we could do it at a cost of less than half of this package at $77.3 billion. We could lift all public school funding to meet the necessary resourcing standard—$30 billion—making sure that our public schools get the support that they need. We could create thousands of jobs in restoring our environment and addressing our extinction crisis—real jobs, employing people not to destroy the environment but to care for it, to look after it, to nurture it, to rehabilitate it at a cost of $20.3 million under our proposal. Home care packages for older Australians: $23.4 billion. We could build half a million affordable homes and address the homelessness crisis in Australia for $84.4 billion, which is just over half of what's being proposed here today. There's so much more we could do, including high-speed rail along the east coast. There are so many nation-building projects we could do. We could modernise our energy system and improve our public transport system. This is the future that this parliament is turning its back on, and to do what? To support the lie of trickle-down economics. We know wealth doesn't trickle down. We know it flows up. It rushes up, and we're going to concentrate more and more wealth into the hands of fewer and fewer people.

Before the election, the Labor Party were resolutely against most aspects of this tax package. The final wash-up of this election is that a couple of seats changed hands, yet we're behaving as though the Morrison government has a mandate for these tax cuts. I say: where is your mandate? What was close to people's minds wasn't your agenda for tax cuts. It was the lie about death taxes. It was the confusion about retiree taxes and home taxes. It was uncertainty about what the future held if there was a change of government. I deeply hope that the Labor Party won't take away the wrong lessons from the election campaign. If people want to vote for a watered-down version of the Liberal Party, why wouldn't they vote for the real thing? If you want to turbocharge inequality in Australia, we know where you want to park your vote. Stand against these changes. We know what the Labor Party said in the lead-up to the election. Chris Bowen, at the time the shadow Treasurer, made it very clear that the tax cuts were regressive. He said that the $95 billion was poorly targeted, that we don't know what the economy's going to be like in 2024 and that, if Josh Frydenberg's being honest, it's irresponsible.