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

AUKUS is not about defending Australia; it's about projecting force in the South China Sea and tying us to the warmaking ambitions of the United States and the UK. This is a dangerous move that makes us less safe. The AUKUS deal compromises Australia's sovereignty. Accessing these nuclear submarines comes at the price of having to uncritically follow the US into its next war. AUKUS only leaves Australians worse off. Under this deal, we are giving up our ability to exercise independent foreign policy, risking destabilising the region and losing upwards of $360 billion in public money to spend on unnecessary nuclear submarines.

Labor has a long, rousing rhetoric of helping the disadvantaged, yet time and time again we see them locking in the policies of the right-wing Liberal Party and ignoring the calls of people living in poverty. With the obscene amount of money that Labor is spending on this rotten deal, we could actually be helping Australians struggling to survive in this cost-of-living crisis by finally bringing dental care and mental health into Medicare, boosting public and genuinely affordable housing and raising the rate of all income support to above the poverty line.

Right now millions of people on Centrelink payments have to make impossible decisions between putting food on the table, shelter and their medicines because their payments have not kept up with the cost of living. But, instead of giving these people the support they need and providing them with an actual safety net as well as $360 billion in submarines, today Labor has decided to congratulate itself for the 96c a day increase to JobSeeker and other payments as a result of indexation. JobSeeker and related payments are routinely increased through indexation. It's not a new process. It's absolutely astounding that the Labor government is taking credit for this automatic, already-legislated indexation increase. It's even more incomprehensible that Labor is trying to claim that today's indexation will help those doing it tough make ends meet. A measly 96c a day doesn't even get payments close to the poverty line, let alone make it enough to live on.

Poverty is a political choice, and Labor is refusing to listen to the calls of unemployment advocates, social service organisations and their very own Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee to substantially raise the rate of income support. Instead, Labor are opting for inadequate, piecemeal changes. Instead, Labor chose recently to leave people on income support and everyone earning less than $18,000 a year out of their cost-of-living tax measures, instead choosing to give a tax cut of $4,500 a year to us politicians and to the ultrawealthy. Labor, your choices have real and devastating consequences.

In response to today's indexation, the Australian Council of Social Service put out a media release calling on the government to urgently raise the rate of income support. They shared the heartbreaking story of former truck driver Cliff, who relies on JobSeeker after suffering a series of injuries. He and his wife have been forced to move into a caravan and skip showers to save money. Cliff told ACOSS:

"We have no social life, we don't go out …

'When we go into town to Bendigo, we go to the swimming pool and have a shower. We're on tank water in the caravan, and we need to conserve that and buy as little water as possible.

"Half of our meals are mince and anything else is the cheapest cut. We'll go into the supermarket late in the day if we want biscuits and buy what's on special."

In the last 15 minutes, one of my Facebook friends has shared a post with me from someone they know who's homeless in Devonport. The post said: 'I have woken with high pain levels and a tent bending in the wind. If you know the owner of a vacant building, please introduce us.' Yet our government, the Albanese government that profess to be leaving no-one behind, are spending the obscene amount of more than $360 billion on AUKUS deals and giving tax cuts to the ultrawealthy, but doing nothing to help Cliff and the millions of other Australians living in poverty.

Labor must urgently raise the rate of all income support payments above the poverty line to $88 a day. They must abolish all punitive elements of our social security system. And they must abandon AUKUS to properly fund essential public services.