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

Here we are, in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis. Food, petrol, medicine, transport, rent, electricity, insurance, mortgage repayments—you name it; the price of everything is going up. However, while workers, students, mortgage holders and small businesses are all getting smashed, corporations are making record profits. Real wages are going backwards, but company profits are at record highs. Inequality is increasing before our very eyes, and yet here we are today—here are the Liberals today—asking the Senate to endorse a $9,000-a-year tax cut for billionaires. How out of touch can you get! They are tax cuts for the super-rich that will further fuel inflation, further fuel inequality, and make the cost-of-living crisis worse for everyone except for those who are already very wealthy.

That's what you expect from the Liberals, but the real issue here is the Australian Labor Party, once the party of the workers but now just another political party for the asset-owning class. Labor senators know that the stage 3 tax cuts are bad policy. Labor has actually never once run the argument that stage 3 tax cuts are good policy—never once—because they know that they're not. They only supported the stage 3 tax cuts for the very wealthy to neutralise the issue so as to give themselves the best chance of winning the election. Make no mistake about it, Labor's policy on the stage 3 tax cuts boils down to this: they're not going to do the right thing, because they promised to do the wrong thing. That's Labor's policy. They would rather turbocharge inequality—and, for that matter, gender inequality—than change their position. It's a quarter of a trillion dollars in tax cuts, three-quarters of which goes to the top 20 per cent of income earners. And twice as much of the benefit goes to men as goes to women.

If Labor had the political will, they could 'unlegislate' the legislated tax cuts. The numbers are there in this parliament—in this Senate and in the House—if Labor is prepared to do the right thing by this country, but they're not. That's why the stage 3 tax cuts are no longer the Liberals' stage 3 tax cuts. They are Labor's stage 3 tax cuts, because if they're not prepared to ditch them then they're going to have to own them.