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

In part, this motion deals with the funding of additional and unforeseen expenditure required for the National Recovery and Resilience Agency, to support a decision by the Australian government to extend the availability of the pandemic leave disaster payment from 1 November 2021 to 30 June 2022. The pandemic leave disaster payment is a lump sum payment made to people who cannot earn an income because they must self-isolate, quarantine or care for someone who has to self-isolate or quarantine. The pandemic and the government responses to the pandemic have ultimately taught us that, from the point of view of governments, big business and big corporations, people are much more economic units than they are human beings. Ultimately we have lived through—and still are living through, I might add—a global pandemic that has been caused by a virulent and highly contagious virus that can lead to significant short-term health impacts, to significant long-term health impacts and even to critical illness and death.

The government's response was a highly corporatised response. It was just manna from heaven for the big corporations, many of whom made obscene levels of profit during the pandemic in part because of the rivers of gold that flowed to them from the public purse. We also know that during the pandemic the ultra-wealthy in this country, the billionaires in this country, made off like bandits. While many Australians were left languishing, the ultra- wealthy profited massively. Many of the billionaires in this country doubled their wealth in the first two years of the COVID pandemic. Just think about that for a minute: many of the ultra-wealthy in this country doubled their wealth during their first two years of the pandemic, yet so many ordinary Australians did it incredibly tough during that time.

It was very instructive that the then LNP government made a decision to cease insisting on mutual obligations for people on JobSeeker during the pandemic. It actually doubled the JobSeeker payments during the pandemic and, for the first time in living memory, people on JobSeeker actually had a level of income that allowed them to be lifted out of poverty, or to come very close to being lifted out of poverty. This is the level that the JobSeeker payment should actually be at, as we speak today. But unfortunately, the Labor government is prioritising a $20 billion budget surplus over doing what it can to look after people on JobSeeker.

What the pandemic has done, and what the government's response to the pandemic has done, including the additional and unforeseen expenditure of the National Recovery and Resilience Agency, has not just exposed the fact that governments regard Australians more as economic units than as people but also exposed the fact that poverty is a political choice. Poverty is a political choice that's being made by the current Labor government every day. This is a government that is pouring more money into the pockets of big corporations, by subsidising the burning of fossil fuels, than it is allocating to lifting JobSeeker so that people without a job do not live in poverty.

I remind folks that the unemployment rate in this country is a deliberate policy setting. This is a government that, in the budget it handed down only a few months ago, accepted that 150,000-odd more Australians are going to be put out of work. That's the government's forecast. But unemployment is kept high to keep wages low. That's what's going on in Australia. Unemployment is deliberately and artificially kept higher than it needs to be so that wages are kept low because the big corporates who donate so much to the LNP and ALP insist on wages being kept low so their profits can be kept high. That's what's going on. Anyone who takes the time to analyse where we find ourselves in our society and where we find ourselves in our economy understands that.

The motion before the Senate also deals with the funding of additional and unforeseen expenditure required to complete construction of Centres for National Resilience at Mickleham in Victoria, Pinkenba in Queensland and Bullsbrook in WA. These were required to provide dedicated traditional quarantine capacity to manage high-risk cohorts of international travellers during the pandemic as Australia reopened to international travel. They are also intended to provide future contingency, including for natural disasters, health crises or humanitarian situations.

I want to be clear about this: in terms of national disasters, we can expect natural disasters to continue to increase in frequency, in scale and in the impact to our communities and to our environment. The reason we can expect them to continue is climate change. One of the reasons that climate change is going to get worse is that governments around the world, including the Australian government, are still publicly subsidising the burning of fossil fuels. This is an extraordinary situation, when you have the Secretary-General of the United Nations, just this week, warning about global boiling, you've got the Australian government with aspirations to hold a COP in the next couple of years, and yet, the Australian government continues with its public subsidies of burning fossil fuels. The reason I mention that is so that people understand the merry-go-round of money here. We put money into corporate pockets to encourage them to burn fossil fuels. Climate change continues to get worse, ultimately threatening the survival of every human on the planet. And then the government has to turn around and fund additional and unforeseen expenditure on centres for national resilience to provide contingency for natural disasters that are going to get more serious and more common as a result of climate change. Those are the things that need to be said and understood in relation to these motions.

Question agreed to.