Penny Allman-Payne (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

During the election campaign, Labor promised us a country where no-one is held back and no-one is left behind. Giving massive cash handouts to the rich and crumbs to everyone else seems like a pretty perverse way of delivering that. By proceeding with the stage 3 three tax cuts in the Treasury Laws Amendment (Cost of Living Tax Cuts) Bill 2024, even after finally caving to pressure and making amendments, Labor has signed the death warrant on its own claims to progressivism. The single remaining virtue that the modern ALP can claim is that they are marginally less terrible than the Liberals—a party which in 2024 resembles a loose collection of culture war grievances more than a political organisation. Substantively, there is very little separating the old parties anymore. Friendly to big business, backing in more coal and gas, torturing asylum seekers and cutting taxes for the rich, they are on a unity ticket. At a time when we need to be investing more into our public services to support people, Labor is continuing the bipartisan, neoliberal project of shrinking the government and redistributing public money upwards into the hands of the rich.

Members of this government are very adept at putting on their serious faces and talking about how people are doing it tough. People aren't doing it tough. They're working two or three jobs just to keep from falling behind. They're dipping deeper into their pockets to pay for so-called public services like public schools and health care. They're sacrificing meals so that they can buy their kids clothes, and they're worried that their rent is going to go up $100 next month and they won't have a place to live. People are suffering from social isolation. People are poor and hungry. And here we have Labor trumpeting its fiscal rectitude while throwing wads of cash at millionaires.

It's tempting to say that it's surprising that a Labor government is so deeply hostile to the idea of well-funded public services and a robust and fair social safety net, but that would be to ignore the evidence of the last 40 years.

Labor's fingerprints are all over the mess we're in. Take public education, for example. In 2011 the Gonski review handed down its report. It wasn't without its flaws, but its most significant recommendation was that school funding should be sector blind and needs based. To achieve this, governments would need to wind back their spending on the overfunded private sector and ramp up spending on the underfunded public sector. This was roundly endorsed. But Labor, being Labor, blinked. Julia Gillard, who as education minister under Kevin Rudd commissioned the review, undermined Gonski's recommendations almost immediately, caving to pressure from the private school lobby by assuring them that no school would be worse off under the new funding arrangements. Out of this emerged a kind of Frankenstein funding model, where underfunded public schools were put on a pathway up to full funding, while overfunded private schools were put on a pathway down. It's now more than a decade since Gonski, and public schools are still trudging along that pathway. Even worse, since Gonski, on a per student basis, government funding to private schools has increased at twice the rate of funding to public schools. There's that upward wealth redistribution again.

Before and after the election Labor pledged to repair the damage they caused post Gonski by finally providing full and fair funding to public schools. But, having postponed negotiations on new funding agreements by a year to conduct yet another pointless review—and there have been 30 since Gonski—the statement of intent they signed with the WA government suggests they're not planning on delivering full funding at all. In fact, the deal they made, which is the model they intend to roll out to other states and territories, according to the minister, will lock in underfunding for the foreseeable future. That is because Labor has refused to rule out removing the Morrison-era accounting trickery that allows states and territories to include in their share of funding four per cent of non-school costs. I asked the government in Senate estimates to rule these dodgy clauses out of future bilateral agreements, and they would not. On Insiders on the weekend, the Minister for Education was asked if they would remove the clauses. He dodged the question. So here we have a Labor government gifting cash handouts to the wealthy while penny-pinching when it comes to the education of our most disadvantaged kids.

The Greens are the only members of this parliament who opposed the stage 3 tax cuts from day one. We were right to oppose them in 2018 and we are right to continue to call out their unfairness today. It took years of pressure from the Greens, the community and civil society organisations to finally shame Labor into amending stage 3. We were elected to resist Labor's worst tendencies and to push them to go further and faster on the issues that matter, and that is what we will continue to do. These tax cuts are not a win for Australia. While many Australians will gratefully welcome some more money in their pockets, the vast benefit of these cuts will go to the wealthiest Australians, who don't need it. Less than half of one per cent of the total value of these cuts will go to the poorest 20 per cent of Australians, while the wealthiest 20 per cent will bank half of the total value. Politicians and CEOs on incomes of more than $200,000 will pocket three times the value of tax cuts compared to the average worker. The tax cuts will widen the gender pay gap, with 42 per cent of the tax cuts going to women and 58 per cent to men.

Ultimately we will all pay from this wasteful extravagance. Starving the budget of $318 billion over a decade means the government will have less money to fund the public services that are needed now more than ever—things like aged care, the NDIS, income support, public schools, the health system and housing.

Meanwhile, the people suffering the most during this cost-of-living crisis get nothing. If you're on income support or you earn less than $18,000, sorry, you're on your own. Labor can afford to give politicians and CEOs a $4½ thousand annual bonus, but you'll still have to try your luck at the food bank. The government could have quarantined these tax cuts so that people earning over $200,000 a year didn't get anything. That would have freed up billions to invest in things like bringing mental health and dental into Medicare, proving free child care, wiping student debt and making the transition to renewable energy.

Next time Labor complain they just don't have enough money to do the things they really want to do, remember this moment, Madam Deputy President. Remember that they chose to give billions to the rich while services languished, Australians suffered and the inequality gap widened. The Greens will keep funding for well-funded public services, a fair social safety net that lifts everyone out of poverty and precarity, and an end to the neoliberal consensus that harms us all.