Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the response provided by the minister representing the Treasurer to the questions I asked her earlier today.

Labor's budget is handed down while the climate is collapsing around us, while ecological systems are crashing and while millions of Australians are getting smashed by cost-of-living pressures. Labor's response is a managerial, business-as-usual budget that proposes to solve those great challenges by continuing the very actions that cause them or that allow them to happen. It's a turgid, bland, chaff-ridden budget. It's a betrayal of Australians who want action on climate change, action to protect nature and relief from the cost-of-living pressures that are smashing them. It's classic modern Labor: talk up an absolute storm on climate change and cost of living, then abjectly fail to take the strong and urgent action needed to respond to those challenges. It locks in worsening economic inequality and exacerbates the breakdown of the planet's climate and ecosystems. It's a budget for the wealthy, it's a budget for corporate interests and it's a budget for the donors that line the coffers of the Labor Party.

Australians are crying out for genuine government intervention to stop price gouging, to stop corporate profiteering and to have genuine, meaningful relief from cost-of-living pressures. Yet this budget does next to nothing to support those who really need our support. It has a pittance of rent relief for a handful of renters while containing tens of billions of dollars every year in subsidies for property investors who own multiple investment properties. There's lip service to renewables but over $50 billion worth of subsidies to encourage the burning of fossil fuels. There's handwringing about the pain people are feeling at the supermarket checkout but nothing to make price gouging illegal, nothing to break up the supermarket duopoly and no new money or measures to bring down food and grocery prices.

It's becoming harder and harder to tell the Labor and Liberal parties apart. At the last election people voted for change. They didn't vote for a Labor treasurer to bring down a Liberal budget. This budget reflects a party doing everything it can to cement the status quo that allows corporations and the wealthy to profit to the detriment of people and the planet. Where Labor is claiming to help people, it is providing the bare minimum of relief, and it's doing that because it's not really interested in solving problems; it's interested in trying to reduce the political pressure on it to solve problems, whether it's student debt, housing, rent caps or income support payments. Remember, Labor used to be a party of free education. It used to be a party of universal health care. It used to be a party of affordable housing. Now it is a party that bows to corporate vested interests, and nowhere is that more stark than in relation to coal and gas corporations.

On the very same day that scientists warned we are on the edge of a climate abyss, the Labor Party announced a plan to make Australia reliant on gas expansion well beyond 2050. This is an absolute capitulation to the coal and gas corporations—enforcing the burning of our planet, watching our coral reefs bleach and die, watching our ecosystems collapse, with thousands of species marching towards extinction. This is what state capture looks like. It is unconscionable and it is shameful.

To renters struggling to afford rent hikes, to mortgage holders struggling to cope with record rate rises, to students skipping meals to keep a roof over their heads or dumpster diving to put food on the table, to everyone who can no longer afford to insure their own homes because vast parts of the country are becoming uninsurable because Labor continue to approve more coal and gas mines, know this one thing: Labor could have, in this budget, acted to help you. They simply chose not to.

Question agreed to.