Mehreen Faruqi (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Imagine being the government of this wealthy country and seeing that millions living in Australia are suffering through a cost-of-living crisis. Then imagine being presented with a choice of how best to spend $318 billion. What would you do? How would you spend the money in a way that is fair and that improves people's lives? Labor has given us completely the wrong answer. It has failed the test of basic fairness once again. Labor's answer to the cost-of-living crisis is to give 50 per cent of the $300-odd billion in tax cuts to the wealthiest 20 per cent of society and to give just 0.4 per cent of the money to the poorest 20 per cent. That is what Labor's tax plan will do: $150 billion to the wealthiest 20 per cent and just $1 billion to the poorest 20 per cent. What a disgrace! How grossly unfair and insulting to all those who are struggling right now to put food on the table and pay their rent, and those who are being crushed under student debt.

Let's be clear how wrong Prime Minister Albanese is when he says his tax plan means no-one left behind. If you're one of the millions of Australians relying totally on income support or earning less than $18,000 a year, you don't get a cent from this plan. That's called Labor leaving you behind. If you're a middle-income earner under this plan, you get three times less in tax cuts than politicians, CEOs and billionaires. Labor is leaving you behind too. If you're struggling to keep up with the cost of groceries or with increases to rent and mortgage payments, this plan will hardly make a dent in your bills. While the rich get richer, while corporations make megaprofits, again and again Labor is leaving ordinary people to fend for themselves. That's called leaving people behind.

Instead of focusing on helping low- and middle-income earners through this cost-of-living crisis, Labor are giving $80 billion in tax cuts to politicians, CEOs and billionaires. They haven't given any reason for doing this, because there is no good reason; it's simply indefensible. CEOs and people earning the highest incomes don't need a $4½ thousand tax cut. Billionaires like Andrew Forrest and Gina Rinehart, who earn $1.5 million in just one hour, don't need a $4½ thousand tax cut. It makes no sense at all. Just imagine, Mr Deputy President, all the things that we actually could do with $318 billion, which is the price of these tax cuts. We could wipe student debt and make TAFE and uni free. We could put dental into Medicare and provide free and universal early learning and care for all. We could build hundreds of thousands of publicly funded homes and end the waiting list for social housing three times over. We could make public transport free for all and build the clean energy system that our planet needs. These are the universal services that would benefit everyone, services that would help to overcome gender inequity—rather than worsening it, as Labor's tax cuts do, with 42 per cent of the cuts going to women and 58 per cent to men. These universal services would stand the test of time. Instead, this bit of cash will be swallowed up by the landlord's next unfair rent increase—because Labor does back unlimited rent increases.

A mere $15 extra per week is what Labor is asking middle-income earners to be satisfied with under this plan—an extra $15 a week—while, under Labor's housing and rental crisis, average rents have increased by a hundred dollars a week and average mortgage payments have gone up by nearly $200 a week. This is just not good enough. If Labor were serious about addressing the cost-of-living crisis and the housing and rental crisis, they would tax billionaires and big corporations. If Labor were serious about leaving no-one behind, they would use this money to fund essential services for everyone, not give another whopping advantage to the top end of town. The truth is that Labor don't have the guts to stand up to big corporations and their corporate donors, who continue to pay almost no tax as workers are left to pick up the tab. Take the climate destroyer Santos, for example, which earned a whopping $5.8 billion in profit in 2022 and paid just $16,000 in tax—far less tax than that paid even by an average Australian worker. This is the same company that has donated $1.5 million to the major parties over the last decade and whose climate-wrecking gas mines Labor continues to approve in the middle of a climate emergency, in the middle of a time when the globe is boiling. Labor is totally captured by its corporate donors and continues to do their bidding. What an absolute rort!

Whenever Labor says it's too expensive to lift people out of poverty or to fund critical services, just remember it's because Labor keeps choosing to look after its corporate mates and the superwealthy, rather than people who live here. Whenever Labor says it is too expensive to make TAFE or uni free, or to provide universal and free early learning and care, just remember it's because Labor's tax cuts are for the wealthy and for the corporations, and their subsidies are for the fossil fuel companies—while life gets harder for everyone else.

People are entitled to expect a bit more from Labor than for them to effectively tell us, 'Oh, look: we made the tax cuts a bit less crap than the coalition did.' People are skipping basic essentials. Labor keeps telling us that, but then doing the exact opposite. People are missing out on the care that they need because they simply cannot afford it. So if Labor is going to come back and revise the coalition's tax cuts, they should do something that will actually make a change and a difference to people over the long term.

The Greens are the only ones in here who have, from day one, continuously opposed the coalition's tax cuts for the billionaires and the politicians which the crossbench at that time backed in, and Labor followed. It took years of Greens and community pressure to finally get Labor to shift on the Liberals' stage 3 tax cuts. So, clearly, pressure does work. But Labor could be doing so much more to help people through this cost-of-living crisis. The Greens won't stop pushing them until they put the interests of the people and the planet above those of corporations and billionaires.