Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I'm very happy to get into this debate because this is something the Greens, and only the Greens, have been campaigning on now for the last five years. We can go back to when these tax cuts were first announced under the previous government two parliaments ago. The original legislation was supported by Senator Lambie and former senators Patrick and Griff from the Xenophon party. Once their support was secured, of course the now government, the Labor Party, backed them in too.

It took years of Greens pressure to finally get the government to drop the Liberal Party's tax cuts. Pressure works. I've got to say, it may have been the Greens in this place that applied that pressure, but there were a lot of stakeholders out there that were working towards this as well, and I'd like to acknowledge them today. And, of course, many commentators, economists and journalists are raising valid concerns and questions about this legislation on a number of different levels.

But these tax cuts will still make economic inequality in Australia worse by giving politicians, such as me, and others on incomes over $200,000—millionaires and potentially billionaires—significant tax cuts. I think I get as a senator—and I'm not sure what other senators' salaries are in this place, but I suspect they'll be fairly similar—about $5,000 a year in tax cuts. I've been asked about this publicly on the radio. I feel very conflicted about that. I don't feel like I need that money as much as other people in this country do.

The Greens put forward sensible suggestions—that for those on incomes over $200,000, like most of us in this chamber, that money go towards directly benefitting Australians who are doing it tough. There are a whole range of things I'll mention in a second that we could fund if we amended this legislation to make a cut-off at $200,000. On these salaries, we get three times the value of tax cuts compared to the average Australian worker.

These revised tax cuts that we're dealing with today will make inequality worse by providing the poorest 20 per cent of society with only 0.4 per cent of the share of tax cuts in the next financial year. That's compared to the wealthiest of society—that includes us, again—who will enjoy half the total value of these tax cuts. They are predominantly going to benefit the wealthy in this country. We have seen evidence that they will exacerbate the gender-pay gap, with 42 per cent of the tax cuts going to women and 58 per cent going to men. That's obviously a very topical issue in the media today. It'll make inequality in Australia worse by starving the budget by a jaw-dropping $318 billion over the next decade. This massive bucket of revenue means that the biggest unspoken losers from these tax cuts will be people who rely on strong public services, like aged care, the NDIS and income support, and all the families who depend on the public education and health systems. There is only a certain amount of money that is in the pool to go around, and there will be pressure brought to bear to find savings in public services.

At the Press Club, when announcing the policy reversal, the Prime Minister said 'no-one held back and no-one left behind', but everyone on income support and everyone earning below $18,000 a year—and there are a lot of Australians earning below $18,000 a year—get nothing to deal with the cost-of-living crisis. The government could have made these tax cuts quarantine people such as ourselves who are earning over $200,000 a year. That would have freed up billions to invest in things like adding mental health and dental health into Medicare, something the Greens were proudly able to bring in for children back in 2010 that we've never been able to have extended to adults in this country. We've got a state election in Tasmania, and we've been out doorknocking and talking to people who are doing it really tough in this cost-of-living crisis. I can tell you, I met a woman who has been on the public waiting list to get some dental work for nearly five years. She told me how many teeth she'd lost in that period of time, how much pain she'd been in and the number of times she's had to go to GPs. It really hits home how hard it is for some people in this country because we don't have dental care in Medicare. It would be an absolute winner for the current government, or any government, to implement such a simple measure. We could fund that by not giving wealthy people in this country a tax cut that, I would argue, they don't need.

Free child care is another thing the Greens have been arguing for. Wiping student debt and building the clean-energy system our planet needs are others. We could also fully fund threatened-species recovery plans, which have received virtually no funding under respective federal governments in the last 15 years. At a time when we're starting to see the extinction crisis hit hard, there's never been a more important time to invest in a healthy environment than now. It's not just because we're green, we're conservationists and we want to protect nature; we need this in order to have healthy communities. I would argue that that is also a priority.

Perhaps something a little bit personal to me: we are concluding a Senate inquiry into the Australian Antarctic Division, and senators from all political parties have been involved in this. We've heard about a number of critical science programs being cut, delayed or deferred because the AAD is short $25 million. This is at a time when we're seeing the biggest loss of marginal sea ice in recorded history and very real concerns about the temperatures of our oceans and the kinds of things we need to be researching now.

On that point, the ABC ran an article yesterday on the RV Investigator, an absolutely brilliant floating science platform based out of Hobart which was originally a Labor government commitment. I must say, I commend the previous Liberal government for fully funding the RV Investigator for 300 days a year for marine science. We find that their funding has been cut too. They're back to around 180 days, so back to where they started before we campaigned so hard to get the RV Investigator fully funded. I look at that and I think, 'Wow, that's $50 million for doing critical ocean research right now. The ocean is the barometer of our planet's health, weather, climate and so many other things, and we don't have the money to fund our scientists to do this work at a time in history when we most need it.

I look at this $318 billion and I really scratch my head. How is it that we're cutting back on these absolutely critical programs just to give rich people in this country a tax cut? Whenever the Treasurer says we can't afford things like superannuation or paid parental leave, it's because the cost of these tax cuts makes everything else unaffordable. To put the cost of these tax cuts into perspective, here are some more of our policies that the Greens would like to see implemented over the decade. We believe putting mental health into Medicare would cost around $91 billion over the next decade; dental into Medicare, $10 billion; wiping student debt, $17 billion; free child care, $90 billion—that would actually cost less now that we've seen some legislated changes—and, generically, billions into building affordable housing, free public transport, faster rail between our cities and building renewable energy and storage. We need to get to net zero by 2035. Of course, this country is experiencing the costs of climate change right now. Just looking all around the country this summer, the costs of extreme weather events will only get worse. The cost of coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef. The loss of giant kelp forests in the Great Southern Reef is impacting the fishing industry. The costs of climate change by far outweigh the cost of taking action, and we're just not doing that fast enough or strong enough.

I want to finish my contribution by talking a bit about the home state of Tasmania. Yes, there is a Tasmanian state election on at the moment. Look at what that government's priorities are —not to mention that the Tasmanian Liberal government is the last Liberal government left in the states here in Australia. How much money are we putting towards a stadium at Macquarie Point that no-one wants? Bread and circuses has been a very successful formula since the Roman days, but in this situation we have money for circuses in Tasmania but no money for bread. We've got no money for those who are experiencing firsthand the devastation of this cost-of-living crisis. We have a federal government that wants to put $240 million towards building infrastructure, which is loose code for funding this Macquarie Point AFL stadium—a stadium, by the way, we don't need. We've got a really good stadium at York Park in Launceston that has been used by Hawthorn for many years. It's also getting a $90 million upgrade. It's a state-of-the-art facility, but somehow the AFL has us over a barrel and they want us to build a billion-dollar stadium down at Macquarie Point, a completely inappropriate location.

When you dig into the $240 million, it's not money going directly to the stadium or for other redevelopment at the Macquarie Point site. It was revealed in Senate estimates last week by my colleague Senator McKim that federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers has refused the state government's request to provide a GST exemption for any funds towards the Macquarie Point megastadium. That means Tasmania will lose out on $240 million, basically. We're not going to get the GST revenue that we so critically need to try to tackle the public health crisis in my state. We have some of the worst outcomes for public health. We still have ambulance ramping. People are dying in ambulances because there are no beds in our public hospitals. The emergency rooms are full because people can't afford to go to a GP, so they go to the emergency room. That's the only benefit they can get, and then they spend days waiting to be seen. People are dying on ambulance ramps because we haven't fixed that.

That's just one of the problems. We have people sleeping in cars. When the Prime Minister swung into Tasmania last year to offer this money he went past hundreds of people sleeping in their cars. There's no public housing. The state government has built hardly any, and we're yet to see any funds flow.

We've got our priorities all wrong. We are we putting money towards a stadium we don't need—which, I may say, is deeply unpopular in Tasmania, because Tasmanians aren't going to be conned; they're smarter than the Tasmanian Liberal Party, the Prime Minister and the federal government think they are. We all want an AFL team, but we don't want the money to be spent on a stadium when it is desperately needed elsewhere. So, I strongly suggest that both the federal government and the Tasmanian state government have their priorities all wrong.

They've been caught out, too, because Minister Ferguson, the state growth minister in Tasmania, announced this publicly only last week. He sat on the fact that the state was not going to be GST-exempt, right until the last minute, until his hand was forced to release a statement. That means the premier's promises that they would cap expenditures on the stadium are false. There's no way around that. We know, based on other stadiums around the country, that this stadium will blow out. We looked at your stadium in Western Australia, Acting Deputy President Sterle, and a great stadium it is, but it had a significant cost blowout, and we'll see that with a Tasmanian stadium if it's built on that site. There are much better options.

I hope the Tasmanian people can see through this, I hope they vote for a political party that has its priorities right, and that is the Greens political party. The Greens have clearly said that they oppose spending $1 billion on a stadium, that they oppose federal government funding going into the stadium. They would like to see more assistance, whether through maintaining that GST revenue or through direct funding being put into our public health system. No doubt we'll have more to say on that in the weeks to come. We would also like to see the federal government fully funding the rollout of public housing in Tasmania where it's so desperately needed.

When we deal with these priorities, these problems that, by the way, have been going on for decades, then let's talk about a new stadium for the AFL team in Tasmania. I hope the team still goes ahead, because, as I said, we have a perfectly good stadium in my home town of Launceston, at York Park. We don't need to be spending money on a new stadium when there are so many more important priorities. (Time expired)