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

As my colleague Senator Shoebridge says, they love the billionaires.

The important thing to know is that Labor has never been able to run an argument that these tax cuts are good policy, and of course that's because Labor knows they're not good policy. So why does Labor support them? Because in their own self-interest they decided prior to the election that they had to support them. Labor's position boils down to this: they're going to support policy that they know is wrong and they're doing it because they promised to do something that they knew was wrong.

We're in the middle of an inflation spike in this country at the moment, with the RBA basically going rogue, using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut, trying to use old style interest rate rises, which work well when it's a demand side-driven price spiral but don't work when it's a supply-side price spiral, which is what we're in now. The reason the RBA feels it has to do that is because Dr Chalmers, the Treasurer, has abandoned the field. He's run for cover. He won't use the powers that he's got in the Reserve Bank Act to actually override the RBA on interest rates. He won't pull any of the massive taxation levers he's got at his disposal.

When you consider Labor's political cowardice on the stage 3 tax cuts with Dr Chalmers's cowardice in refusing to implement anti-inflationary tax policy and refusing to use the power that he has to override the RBA, we're left with a situation now where we're going to get super inflationary stage 3 tax cuts, a quarter of a trillion dollars of pump priming the economy, in the most inflationary way conceivable at a time when they come into play when, according to the Reserve Bank, inflation will still be above the target band. The Treasurer says Labor's got a plan for inflation. It is inconceivable that that plan includes putting $9,000 a year into the pockets of billionaires. These are Labor's tax cuts. They have to own them, and they should walk away from them.

Question agreed to.