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

I move:

That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

The need for the Albanese Labor Government to support the Greens plan to tax Australia's billionaires and use the revenue to help fund urgent cost of living relief, including getting dental into Medicare and making it free to see the GP.

Australia's billionaires are making off like bandits. There are just 150 of them and, collectively, their wealth has doubled in the last six or seven years. Collectively, the 150 billionaires in this country have now hoarded an eye-watering, a staggering $585 billion between them.

If you are a nurse, teacher, carpenter, plumber or cleaner, you go to work and you work hard, but you don't get to keep everything you earn. You pay taxes on what you earn—in income tax. That is actually a good thing that people pay tax because it allows governments to provide services. Some of those services are universal, others are deliberately targeted—and rightly so—at the people who most need assistance.

What about the billionaires? Why don't billionaires have to pay a tax on their wealth? If billionaires paid just a 10 per cent tax on their net wealth over $1 billion that would raise about $50 billion over the next decade. That just happens to be exactly what the Parliamentary Budget Office have costed for the Greens of what it would cost to allow every Australian to see their GP, for free, whenever they needed to. If we as a country were prepared to make billionaires pay their fair share of tax, that would raise enough revenue for every Australian to be able to see a GP whenever they needed to with no out-of-pocket expenses.

Let's weigh this up. This should not be a difficult calculation. Let's weigh it up. On one hand, we could ask 150 people who collectively have hoarded nearly $600 billion in personal wealth to pay a 10 per cent tax—over billion dollars—on wealth they own so that every person in this country could see a GP whenever they need to with no out-of-pocket expenses at all. Let's think: every person could get a free GP visit, or we could just keep looking after the billionaires and keep allowing them to accumulate even more of their already eye-wateringly large hordes of money.

The billionaires, or everyone getting a GP visit for free with no out-of-pocket expenses—this should not be a difficult choice for our country. Somehow it is a difficult choice for the Labor Party, the Liberal Party and the Nationals. In fact, it doesn't seem such a difficult choice for them because they're just going to end up on the side of the billionaires. In doing so, they're basically saying to Australians that in a wealthy country you should keep having to pay to see your GP.