Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Instead of investing in Australia's future, the Morrison government is choosing inequality and climate collapse in its federal budget. We know this because the billions of dollars in fossil fuel subsidies that have long plagued this government's budgets will still be there tonight. They've got this gas-led recovery that they're full steam ahead on, despite the massive impacts on farmland, groundwater, our climate and First Nations' land rights. It is full steam ahead for the government's corporate donors: their big mining mates, their millionaire mates, their lobbyist friends, their future employers.

Inequality will be turbocharged, because we know that about $5 a week of the tax cuts that are being brought forward—at the cost of, as the PBO says, roughly $28 billion—will end up in the pockets of people who earn less than $37,000. People who earn over $120,000 will get $50 a week. Are people on less than $37,000 meant to be happy with $5 a week? If this government has got $28 billion to splurge on tax cuts, why did it just cut JobSeeker and JobKeeper? They've just ripped 300 bucks a fortnight out of people's pockets and they're giving back $5 a week to low-income earners—and they're supposed to be happy with that?

This budget will turbocharge inequality, and it will also turbocharge gender inequality. We know that the COVID crisis has exposed and exacerbated existing structural gender inequalities and that women are fighting to maintain the progress that they've made in the past two decades, let alone move forward. According to the women's finance index, the pandemic has reversed two years of growth in women's full-time employment. For every month of COVID it has added another year to the time line for reaching gender wage parity. We're at 36 years now before we'll see gender pay parity. Women drawing down their superannuation accounts to make it through the pandemic, when this government let them down so badly with the proscriptions on JobSeeker and JobKeeper eligibility, will really struggle to rebuild their retirement savings. Some analysts have said that the early withdrawal of $20,000 now could mean $100,000 less in your retirement balance when you retire—with compound interest, of course.

On Equal Pay Day this year the Workplace Gender Equality Agency CEO, Libby Lyons, said that the gender pay gap rose two percentage points during the global financial crisis and took a decade to recover. We can't let that happen again. We can't afford another decade. The government's budget must invest to address inequality, and it must close the gender pay gap and the superannuation gap by permanently increasing JobSeeker and increasing wages in the lowest-paid industries—which, we know, are feminised. It must invest in the care economy rather than private construction, brown infrastructure and tax cuts for the rich. The Australia Institute has estimated that by investing in education and care you will create nine times as many jobs as you would in construction and manufacturing—not just more jobs for women but more jobs for blokes, too. So there are actually no downsides to doing that, but this government is just on its ideological war path.

We also want this government to invest in free child care to support parents and, in particular, women to return to the workforce. We had a taste of that; it was great—bring it back! And we want the government to give women a chance to rebuild their retirement savings by scrapping that $450 superannuation contribution threshold which means that low-income earners—predominantly women—don't actually get super contributions from their employers. And, of course, we want super to be paid on parental leave, as it should have been from the word go.

As predicted by women's services across the country, family and domestic violence has risen to epidemic levels during COVID and is expected to spike with ongoing economic insecurity during the recovery. As many as one in 10 women in relationships reported experiencing abuse during COVID, with half reporting that abuse had worsened and a third experiencing that violence for the first time. It is absolutely heartbreaking, and yet the meagre funding that's been provided by this mob has been too little and too slow. Just last week, they had the audacity to re-announce funding from February last year, which was already pitifully small, and tried to make out that this was some pre-budget drop. This was in the same week that Women's Legal Services told a Senate committee that they have to turn away 50 per cent of callers because their funding is not adequate. Women and children are trapped not only by violent partners but by an underfunded system that fails to offer support when they escape. Services are stretched: the supply of crisis and long-term housing falls well short of demand; child care remains unaffordable; and work is increasingly insecure.

We welcome the reinstatement of the time-use survey and the expanded reporting tools provided to WGEA, but data collection means little if it's not reflected in policy. The announcement of the Women's Economic Security Statement is welcome, but it's no replacement for a gender lens on the budget. We don't want funds for kitchen renovations, we want gender equality.