Jordon Steele-John (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I shall endeavour. I am from a vulnerable community. I have lived that life. Let me tell you, when you need the doctor, when you need a roof over your head or when you're wondering where your next meal comes from it isn't the couple of bucks in your back pocket, that comes from these tax cuts, that helps you out. You can't take your 100 bucks down to Bunnings, buy a hip replacement and bang it in yourself. You need to go to the doctor, and that is what is enabled with the collective pooling of public funds. Taxation and public contribution are the legislative embodiment of the Australian belief that when you are in trouble, when times are tough, we come together and help out. If you are better off, you pay a little bit more. If you are worse off, you pay a little bit less, and that is fair. For decades, that has been the basis of the Australian tax and contribution system, and that fundamental tenet is being murdered tonight.

With this legislation you are seeking to transform our society into a US-style economy—a savage, predator-style capitalist state which will drive millions of our most vulnerable people into the most crushing forms of economic inequality and poverty.

This is not a joke, folks. You come down to Rockingham. You come down and you meet with those people who are, right now, living in the bush next to grain silos on contaminated land, because they can't find a single place to call their own and pay for it with the amount of money that they are given through Newstart and rent assistance. That is their reality. You are making a conscious decision tonight, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, not to help those people. Shame on this chamber! There is nothing more shameful than walking past somebody in need and deciding not to help.

To be honest, with one side of this chamber, that isn't surprising. It's why you guys exist to sell the Australian public the idea that your personal greed and your desire to maintain your ownership of property is somehow in the national interest. That's your guiding political principle. Hats off to you. You're doing a terrible job. But this side of the chamber was brought into existence for something better. You, the Australian Labor Party, exist and were created to do better. You have been re-elected to this chamber in the role of the opposition. The role of which, traditionally, is to oppose things. To stare down a government's agenda and say no. What we have seen so far, however, is nothing more or less than a urine-soaked rollover—