Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

This bill, the Treasury Laws Amendment (Cost of Living Tax Cuts) Bill 2024, is this much better—slightly better—than the bill that was first introduced by the Liberal government five years ago. The Australian Greens have been fiercely opposed to the stage 3 tax cuts from the start. We've been the only political party to consistently call on the Liberals and Labor to abandon this unfair and ridiculous policy. And finally, after years of sustained pressure from the Greens and the wider community, Labor is changing the Liberals' tax cuts—the tax cuts that they voted for when the Liberals were in office. It goes to show that pressure works. Despite this bill only being slightly better than the Liberals' version of the stage 3 tax cuts, today's bill is a win for the Greens and for everyone who spoke up for a fairer society. Together, with a united voice, we can push Labor further and faster on the issues that matter.

While it's encouraging to see Labor finally accept that the stage 3 tax cuts as they were first put together are unfair, this bill will still make economic inequality in Australia worse. Under these rejigged cuts, politicians and CEOs on incomes more than $200,000 will be given three times the value of tax cuts than the average worker, whilst the lowest 40 per cent of income earners will receive just nine per cent of the benefits. And this bill provides absolutely zero cost-of-living relief for people struggling to survive on income support payments or earning less than $18,000 a year—nothing. Those people who are scraping by on income support, people who are relying on charity, friends, family or neighbours, people who are couch surfing or living in their cars or tents and people who have been evicted from their homes because they can't afford the rent get nothing. People who don't go to see the doctor or fill scripts for their meds or get mental health support because they want to afford their kids going to the doctor to get the health care they need, and people who have given up on the idea of going to the dentist and are living with chronic toothache, eventually having to have their teeth pulled out rather than filled because they've gone too far, get nothing—while I and every other politician in this place get $4½ thousand a year in tax cuts. I and every other politician in this place do not need a $4½-thousand-a-year tax cut while millions of Australians are living on income support and are trapped in poverty. Australia is in a poverty and cost-of-living crisis. People who are on income support and others without permanent work are struggling to put food on the table, to find affordable and safe housing and to pay their medical bills.

Earlier this month the Brotherhood of St Laurence published their Making ends meet report. This report is the culmination of a study to better understand financial stress in the current cost-of-living crisis. The Brotherhood interviewed 43 low- to middle-income people across Victoria in 2022 and heard devastating stories of how people are currently struggling to survive. And if it was bad in 2022, it is worse now. These are the people for whom Labor's so-called cost-of-living tax cuts bill will provide no relief. Here are some of their experiences.

Kerry is a 60-year-old who relies on the disability support pension. She said:

I'm living on a shoestring, and my health is suffering as well. The doctor says to me, 'Your diabetes is high, you've got to eat better.' And I said, 'Well, I can't eat better because there's no money.' If I had the money, of course you can buy better food, better quality food, and I would go to the gym as well, but I can't do that because there's no money. He wanted to send me to a dietician, and I said, 'Well, you're wasting your time. I know what to eat, the problem is I can't.' Instead of buying a steak, you've got to buy potatoes because you can't afford the steak.

She also said:

I am feeling very depressed as there is never enough money to make ends meet. Every time I am almost out of debt something happens and I have to borrow money again.

And:

There is no future, the only future is death. … I'm so limited in everything I can do that sometimes I think well, Lord, give me cancer so I can die because I can't take it anymore.

Paul is a 63-year-old who was made redundant in 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic. He shared:

When I finally went up to Centrelink they said, 'Oh no you've got this [redundancy] payout. We aren't actually [going to] start paying you the JobSeeker until for another six months.' And I looked at them and I said, 'Well, great, I've got $1000 in the bank. … How am I going to live?'

And when Paul finally received JobSeeker, and after selling all of his belongings, he remembered:

I got a bit of a false sense because the first dole payment had all the Covid bonuses. So, it was about $1200. And I thought, oh this is all right, I can live on this … And then it dropped, and it was down to just under $1000, I think. Okay, well you're going to have to pull your head in, but that was all right. But then, I think the one or two payments after that it had dropped back even more.

I was back to the normal JobSeeker, and then I realised, well you're going to have to pull your head in here, and—I did take some super when the government said you could take a bit of extra super and, you know, paid rent in advance and all that sort of stuff.

If it wasn't for that super, I'd be buggered on JobSeeker, alone … With the cost of living going up, JobSeeker doesn't seem to be going up that much.

But what worries me is that unfortunately I'm still a bit over four years now off the Age Pension. And the Age Pension is around $1000, I think a fortnight. I can live on that.

But what does worry me is that if I haven't been able to get a job by the time I retire, there'd be no super in there … because I would have eaten it all while unemployed.

Luke, who worked as a self-employed gardener and relied on the JobSeeker payment as he tried to manage his mental health, said:

Unless I have a steady stream of income, I don't think I'll ever feel safe, but I can't work a standard 40-hour week, or even a 20-hour week, because of my mental health. But then my mental health tanks because I'm stressing about money, or it tanks because I'm working too much, and I can't recuperate like I need to. Damned if I do, damned if I don't.

Bianca, a 39-year-old mother of two, has struggled to find permanent work after being made redundant in 2020. She said:

You can find a casual job, but a casual job is not [going to] give you the financial strength to think of the future, or even the present. The market is hard, and I have given so many interviews so I can get [something] permanent.

She also said:

Not enough groceries at home, freezer is empty. I have asked my landlord if I can pay rent late. I'm tired and feeling anxious about finding full-time work.

Grace is a 29-year-old who was completing an unpaid placement as part of her degree. She said:

I feel like I am coping well, making the best possible outcome out of a difficult situation, but I also believe the situation should be changed so that the best possible outcome is not barely surviving.

Finally, Rodney, a casual worker, shared his frustration at the limits of his financial situation:

From a human point of view, it affects your mental health. There's a lot of things you want to do. And work doesn't allow you to do that either because being casual you just can't take—you take a week off you lose a week's pay …You do go through a lot. Sometimes you feel depressed. Sometimes your mental health's affected. I've learned just to stay positive because, like I said, it's very easy to hit rock bottom sometimes.

These stories are heartbreaking but, sadly, they are all too common. As the cost of living soars, people are finding it increasingly difficult to survive on casual employment, leading many to rightly seek financial support from our social security system. But the current inadequacy of income support payments is leaving so many of these short-term recipients at risk of financial stress and pushing others who are forced to survive on the payment long-term because of illness, disability or other circumstances deeper into poverty.

There's a clear and simple way that the Labor government could help Rodney, Grace, Bianca and everyone whose stories I've shared, and that's by immediately raising the rate of all income support payments to above the poverty line—to $88 a day. But what Labor has elected to do instead is spend a jaw-dropping $318 billion over a decade on tax cuts, the bulk of which will go to the wealthy. Despite Labor's long, rousing rhetoric on helping the disadvantaged, since they have been in government we have seen them overwhelmingly choose policies to keep people in poverty.

At the last budget, Labor ignored the calls of unemployed advocates, social service organisations and their very own Interim Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee to significantly raise the rate of income support. Instead, they opted to raise the rate of JobSeeker and other working-age payments by just $4 a day. Four dollars a day isn't enough for a coffee, and it certainly won't help someone pay rent, buy their groceries or cover medical bills. Let's go back to that $4½-thousand-a-year tax cut that everyone in this place is going to get. That's largesse of $12 a day. That's three times what was given to income support recipients in the last budget.

Labor also continues to publicly support the punitive system of mutual obligations and the privatised model of our employment system. Both are expensive, largely ineffective—and harmful—elements of our social security system. And now we've got Labor pushing through a bill that provides zero cost-of-living support for those who need it most. Labor could have made these tax cuts not apply to people earning over $200,000 a year, which would have freed up billions—billions to invest in things like raising the rate of income support, bringing mental and dental health into Medicare, wiping student debt and raising student allowance, free child care and building the clean energy systems that we need to tackle the climate crisis.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese often speaks of growing up in public housing and living off his mother's income support payments, yet it seems he is pulling up the ladder behind him as he tinkers around the edges of income support and our tax system. Prime Minister, if you truly cared about people living in poverty, if you truly wanted to leave no-one behind and actually offer cost-of-living relief to those who need it most, you would immediately raise the rate of income support, properly fund essential services and stop giving tax cuts to the wealthy. While you continue to persist with this neoliberal ideology of trickle-down economics, the Greens will continue to call out your hypocrisy. We know that pressure works, and we will continue to fight to ensure a fairer society.