David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Do you know who isn't doing it tough right now? Billionaires. While those on low incomes and government support do it ever tougher, billionaires are making bank. Their incomes are increasing at a staggering rate. According to Oxfam, last year Australian billionaire wealth surged by $28 billion. That's $3.2 million per hour. That's 47 people who each made $67,000 per hour every hour last year. The cost-of-living crisis that this lot want to talk about is really an inequality crisis where the richest people hoard money and resources and have the ear of government. The rich get richer, and the poor stay poorer. The major parties talk big about ordinary people, but their solutions are poor. They simply won't take on their rich donors.

The solution is pretty simple. It's not more finger-pointing between Labor and the coalition; it's to tax billionaires to fund a decent life for everyone else. When you look at the cost of living, it's housing that's hitting people the hardest. For anyone in New South Wales, especially those in my home city of Sydney, the scale of the housing crisis cannot be addressed by just trimming the edges. A survey by Everybody's Home shows four out of five renters are spending more than 30 per cent of their income on housing. That is not a surprise. It's been a year-on-year increase in rent of nine per cent in Sydney—so much so that the median house price in Sydney will set you back $1.6 million. The median wage, meanwhile, is about 67 grand a year. You have Sydney housing costing more than 24 times someone's average salary.

Why is it all happening? It is because the government has given up on providing public housing and defending renters. Instead, they've thrown in their lot with the coalition on negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts. These tax handouts collectively push up prices of housing to astronomically high levels and cut out renters. It needs to change.

If we wanted to do one thing we could right now to strike a blow in this place, it would be dealing with cannabis. Bear with me. The Greens have a proposal for legalising cannabis: a system where you could grow some at home—very cost effective, very thrifty—or you could also buy cannabis from a well-regulated legal market. The best cost estimates we have from the PBO say that, even with a cannabis sales tax and GST, the recreational price of cannabis declines once you have a legal market and generates billions of dollars of public revenue. In fact, the recreational price halves in a decade, with almost no increase in overall cannabis use. It's public health control and would lead to less spending on police, courts and jails. It's a cost-of-living measure we should all get behind. Of course it won't fix the housing crisis. It won't jail supermarket bosses for price gouging or make Medicare free. But still—more money, more jobs, safer product and all for 50 per cent off? Sounds like a win all round.