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

In the reception area in my electorate office in Gladstone is a free community pantry. Every day my team and I fill it up with basics like cereal, tinned beans, pasta, rice and toiletries. Anyone is welcome to come and take what they need. We don't ask questions, we don't ask for their names and we don't make them fill in paperwork. It took a few months for word to get around the community, but now the pantry has become an indispensable service for many desperate and hungry people. And the need is growing. It's not unusual for people to be waiting outside our office when we arrive in the morning, hoping to grab something for breakfast. On Fridays it gets used really heavily, with people stocking up for the weekend. On Mondays, with kitchen cupboards cleaned out, the need is great again.

When we first started we were topping the pantry up once a day. Increasingly, we are having to refill it several times. Young families, teens, older people, employed people, people looking for work, locals from right across the demographic spectrum come to our office every day for a handful of basic grocery items, because it's the difference between being able to eat a simple meal or going hungry.

What did Labor's budget have to say to those people? What hope did it give them? None. 'A budget for all Australians', they said. 'Everyone gets a tax cut', they said. Labor was elected in part because it promised Australians that no-one would be left behind. Forgive me, but we must have missed the fine print where it said 'except people on income support and pensions, renters, first home buyers, university students, public school students and women escaping family and domestic violence'.

Yesterday more than three million people lived in poverty in Australia. Today three million people are still living in poverty. Yesterday JobSeeker and youth allowance were poverty payments. Today they are still poverty payments. For years now experts, advocates and people with lived experience of poverty have been united in one single call: raise the rate. Even the government's own economic inclusion advisory committee, chaired by a former Labor minister, no less, has recommended for two years running that the single best method for tackling the cost-of-living crisis and alleviating poverty is to substantially raise the rate of income support. For two years running Labor has rejected that advice.

Meanwhile, Labor is high-fiving itself for delivering a $9.3 billion surplus. We need to be very clear about what that surplus represents. It represents a decision by Labor, in the middle of a poverty crisis, to refuse to spend public money—our money—on helping the people who need it the most. Could Labor have increased income support payments? Yes, absolutely. Did they? No, they did not.

In a cost-of-living crisis, a surplus isn't an achievement; it's an unmitigated moral failure that doesn't even stack up economically. A surplus won't help a young person pay their rent. A surplus won't help a struggling family pay their bills. A surplus won't help a young family who have to choose between seeing the dentist, buying their medicine or keeping a roof over their head. And a surplus won't do anything to help those hungry people who come to my office pantry in Gladstone every single day.