Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Treasury Laws Amendment (Personal Income Tax Plan) Bill 2018. I want to state at the outset that what we are witnessing with this legislation isn't a fair dinkum plan for tax relief for those who need it most. It is a political stunt designed to blackmail the Senate into signing up to a tax package that is both fiscally irresponsible and unfair, a tax package overwhelmingly biased towards some of the wealthiest people in the country, a tax package for the wealthiest parts of Sydney and Melbourne, not for the suburbs or the regions or states like Tasmania, Queensland and South Australia.

We know the extent to which it's a political stunt because, if the government was serious about its claim of wanting real tax relief for the battlers—10 million working Australians and low- and middle-income earners—it could have that right here, right now. The so-called step 1 of the tax relief has the support of just about every senator in this place, I think, except the Australian Greens. So we could put it to a vote right now and it would pass tonight.

But that's not what the government want. They want to play a bit of politics. They want to play a bit of politics with what happens in 2024 in order to try and gain what they perceive as a political advantage, and they are prepared to stand in the way of tax cuts for 10 million working Australians. Let's make it clear: the only people standing in the way of the tax package that starts next month are Malcolm Turnbull and his senators in this place. They are holding hostage the tax relief for these Australians on low and middle incomes which will apply from 1 July by tying them to tax cuts for the highest income earners that aren't due to be delivered for six or seven years. You have to elect Malcolm Turnbull twice; dear me! These tax cuts won't eventuate for not one but two elections.

It begs the question: what is it about the so-called stages 2 and 3 of the government's income tax plan that the government doesn't want to take to an election? These are unfunded tax cuts for high-income earners that come at a staggering cost to the budget, and we don't actually know the full details of the cost because the government has refused to make all of that information public. The government—the Prime Minister, the Treasurer and the finance minister—consistently refused to provide the parliament with the year-by-year cost of each stage of the government's tax plan. We saw that this week in question time. We know the tax cuts will overwhelmingly flow to those earning more than $120,000 a year. Guess how many people in South Australia earn that amount? I think it's around five per cent. In fact, there's not a single electorate in South Australia that even makes the top 25 of those who'll benefit the most from stages 2 and 3 of these tax cuts. But do you know which electorate is at the top of the list? Wentworth is the electorate which will benefit most from this tax package. What about Queensland? How many people in Queensland earn more than $120,000 a year? It's eight per cent. In Tasmania it's four per cent.

Senators in this place from South Australia, Queensland and Tasmania are being told, 'Agree to this package that spends billions of dollars on people in the most exclusive parts of Sydney and Melbourne or we'll ensure millions of hardworking low- and middle-income earners in your states get nothing.' What an extraordinary thing for a Prime Minister to do. To say to the senators in this place, 'We will hold back tax cuts for millions of Australians unless you benefit, Tasmanian senators, four per cent of the people in your state and, Queensland senators, eight per cent,' is political blackmail of the highest order. There is a much better way of doing this, a simple solution that delivers tax relief right here right now to those who need it most and makes it clear this Senate will stand up for all the people it represents and won't be bullied by a Prime Minister who is desperate for a political tactic for the by-elections and for the federal election.

Labor's position on this is crystal clear and we have been up-front from the start. On budget night, we said we will support the government's proposed changes taking effect next month. We support the change to the top threshold of the 32.5 per cent personal income tax bracket from $87,000 to $90,000 and we support this just as we supported the change to the threshold from $80,000 to $87,000 announced in the 2016 budget and passed through after the election of that year. We also support the low- and middle-income tax offset providing tax relief for taxpayers earning up to $125,333. Of course, Labor has a superior tax offering with our tax refund for working Australians, but I'll come to that later.

This parliament can guarantee that the tax changes due to take effect in just a couple of weeks could pass immediately. Labor and just about every other senator in this place could vote right now in support of tax cuts for 10 million Australians. If Labor is elected we will almost double these tax cuts and we will make them permanent. Labor's bigger, better and fairer income tax cuts would see those earning up to $125,000 a year better off when compared with Malcolm Turnbull's plan over the next four years. But what we do not support and we do not think is reasonable is someone on $200,000 paying the same tax rate as someone on $40,000. It's a simple issue of values. We don't agree with Mr Turnbull giving more tax cuts to the top tax bracket. This is after the Turnbull government cut that tax rate last year, which is why we will move amendments in the Senate to the Treasury Laws Amendment (Personal Income Tax Plan) Bill to ensure the passage of the tax cuts starting next month.

When approaching this legislation, Labor will hold true to the position we have outlined since budget night. We will move amendments to this bill to ensure the passage of tax cuts starting next month and we will also seek to implement better, fairer tax cuts through our tax refund for working Australians, which will come close to doubling tax relief to up to $928 per year.

Mr Turnbull needs to stop standing in the way of this tax relief for the majority of working Australians. Why should tax cuts for teachers and for tradies be held hostage to tax cuts for bankers in six years time? If Mr Turnbull doesn't allow the passage of legislation for tax relief for 10 million Australians before 1 July, let me make clear a Shorten Labor government will ensure that these taxpayers receive it regardless. As the Treasurer himself has conceded, the legislation does not actually even need to be in place by 1 July for the tax relief to be received at the end of the next financial year. A future Labor government would act on Mr Turnbull's failure and make sure that Australians have tax relief and would go further and lock in a bigger, fairer tax cut.

Budgets are always about priorities and so too is tax policy. Because Labor is not giving millionaires another tax cut or giving big business an $80 billion tax handout, including $17 billion for the banks, we are able to put more money into the pockets of working Australians. We are able to fund better schools and hospitals and we're able to pay down the debt quicker. I did enjoy today in question time when Senator Cormann started to talk about the budget and fiscal responsibility. This is the finance minister who has presided over higher debt levels than any finance minister we have previously seen.

Let's come to fiscal responsibility. As well as being deeply unfair, this entire package is fiscally irresponsible. Evidence to the Senate inquiry indicated that the tax cuts would put at risk the long-term sustainability of the budget and, given economic uncertainties, this is a risky thing. It also makes the tax system less progressive. The total cost of these tax cuts is $13.4 billion over the four years of the forward estimates and a staggering $143.9 billion over the medium term. This has a major structural impact on the budget over the medium term, particularly when combined with the government's big business tax cuts, which are due to mature over this period. Taken together, if implemented, the Turnbull government's step 3 tax cuts and the company tax cut for big business will cost the budget at least $25 billion per year by the end of the medium term. Let me say that again: $25 billion a year.

Independent analysis by the Parliamentary Budget Office showed that step 3 of the government's tax cuts is set to grow at 12 per cent a year, much faster than any other component of the income tax package. It's extraordinary, isn't it? We heard so much in the context of the 2014 budget, and until recently, from this government, this Treasurer and this finance minister about the need to contain spending growth. Understand what they are asking this Senate to do. They're asking this Senate to pass a component of a tax package which grows at 12 per cent a year. That is almost four times faster than the rate of increase in defence spending, twice as fast as the increase in spending on schools and six times faster than the annual growth in assistance to families with kids—12 per cent growth in a tax package that massively, massively benefits high-income earners.

Leaving aside the fact that this is a fundamental restructure of the tax system, what sort of fiscal package is this that enables that kind of growth in effective expenditure—that is, by revenue forgone—to higher income earners? The government would never tolerate a 12 per cent annual increase in any other area of government expenditure. If we had child care, schools, hospitals, the family tax benefit or even defence growing at 12 per cent a year, you would hear them baying for expenditure cuts, but they're happy to dole the money out to high-income earners. It is unfair and it is fiscally reckless, and it locks in an unsustainable tax package into the future that would render this country far more vulnerable to economic and fiscal shocks. Does anyone here think that a responsible government or parliament should be allowed to lock in spending a decade from now on a program set to grow at 12 per cent a year, when no-one can possibly predict what might happen to the domestic or global economy over that period? As the Grattan Institute's John Daley said in a submission to the Senate inquiry:

… economically, the chances of a significant economic downturn over the next six or seven years are pretty large …

…   …   …

… we do not think it is prudent to be providing tax cuts of this magnitude that far in the future—certainly not to be legislating them—when there are so many economic uncertainties between now and then. And there is no need to legislate them.

There is no need. I have not yet once heard this Prime Minister, the Treasurer or the finance minister articulate why this Senate has to pass tax cuts which won't start for six years. Has anyone heard an explanation as to why it is so urgent that we have to pass legislation for tax cuts six years hence?

These tax cuts are also a fundamental restructure of Australia's tax system. Put simply, they make our tax system less progressive. They make our tax system less fair and less progressive. As Miranda Stewart of the ANU Crawford school's Tax and Transfer Policy Institute said, these changes are both 'an inefficient and a retrograde step that undermines 100 years of a progressive income tax rate structure in Australia'. The ANU's Ben Phillips has estimated that, after the government's full plan is in place, someone in the highest quintile will see a 2.2 per cent rise in their income, compared to a 1.1 per cent rise for those in the middle quintile and a paltry 0.2 per cent rise in the lowest quintile. Of the tax cuts, by 2027, around 60 per cent will go to the top 20 per cent of households. NATSEM modelling suggests that this new tax system from 2024-25 is less progressive than the current system, which means higher income inequality. The rich will get more of the tax cuts than the poor.

The Prime Minister says it's not a problem because everyone can aspire to be something more. Well, you know what? I think a cleaner deserves a decent tax cut now. Rather than telling a cleaner or a tradie, 'You can aspire to be more,' how about we give them a fair deal now? That's the right thing to do, and that's what a Labor government would do.

Then, of course, there is the great uncertainty caused by having this parliament legislating for tax cuts that won't come into effect, as I said, for at least a couple of elections. I know Mr Turnbull has a bit of a view that he was born to lead, but I do think it's remarkable that he thinks he might still be Prime Minister in 2024. Anyway, for the government to say they're certain that they can deliver tax cuts in 2024, frankly, is a joke. I'm not sure what the international economy will be like in 2024, but I tell you what: I don't reckon the Treasurer does either. Now is the time to be strengthening fiscal buffers and building Australia's resilience to a shock. As the IMF stated recently:

Decisive action is needed now to strengthen fiscal buffers, taking full advantage of the cyclical upswing in economic activity.

This government is committing billions of dollars on the back of what is likely to be a temporary global economic upswing, and we have seen what happens. We've seen that play out before. As Peter Martin writes:

We've been handed a budget for the good times that pays out as if those good times will last, even though they may not.

At a time when the government should be locking in strong surpluses, it's failing to adequately insure the nation for the future. The government's own budget papers state:

… risks appear more balanced in the short term … In the longer term, the global economy faces further challenges.

To put it bluntly, by signing up the next two parliaments to these tax cuts this month, the government is proposing to endanger the long-term health of the budget and putting at risk the ability to fund essential services into the future.

As I said earlier, there is a better way and there is a fairer way. There is a way to deliver bigger, better, fairer tax cuts right now for those who need them most, and that is to effectively split the bill and to vote for Labor's tax plan to deliver better, bigger, fairer tax cuts for 10 million working Australians. Under our plan, every Australian earning less than $125,000 a year will receive a bigger tax cut compared to the Liberal Party's plan, and more than four million people will be better off by $398 a year compared to the Liberals' plan. For example, Labor's plan will ensure a teacher on $65,000 will receive a tax cut of $928 a year, and a couple earning $90,000 and $50,000 respectively will receive a tax cut of $1,855 a year. Ours is a tax plan for all Australians. The government's is a tax plan for Malcolm Turnbull's electorate. Compared to the five or six per cent who receive most of the benefits of stages 2 and 3 of the government's plan, under our plan more than seven out of 10 taxpayers will benefit in every state and in every territory, including three-quarters of taxpayers in South Australia, Queensland and Tasmania. By opposing Labor's tax plan, the government is denying greater tax relief to 74 per cent of Victorian taxpayers, 73 per cent of taxpayers in New South Wales, 75 per cent of Queensland taxpayers, 71 per cent of taxpayers in WA, 76 per cent of taxpayers in South Australia and 77 per cent of taxpayers in Tasmania.

Fundamentally and finally, I close on this point: this tax plan is not a tax plan for a stronger future for this country. This tax plan is not a fair dinkum plan. The government's tax plan is a political strategy. It is entirely about trying to blackmail this Senate into passing the totality of the government's legislation. Not once has any minister from this government explained in any terms which make sense why tax cuts for high-income earners and a fundamental restructure of our tax system to take place in 2024 should hold hostage tax cuts starting next month. Not once have they explained that, and that is because it is inexplicable. It can be explained only if you get into the recesses of the Prime Minister's mind and understand what political strategy he thinks he is playing at. So I urge this Senate: do not allow this government to hold the chamber hostage. Do not allow this government to hold millions of Australians who are entitled to a tax cut from next month hostage to a political strategy for a Prime Minister desperate to find some way to wedge people in this place in the by-elections and in the federal election. Do not lock in an unsustainable, unfair tax package, which is what this is. It is both fiscally reckless and deeply unfair.

Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

One suspects that it's nearly curtains for this government. Going into a long break and five by-elections, with talk of an early federal election in the cold winter air, the passage of this legislation may well be part of a final scene in the sordid tale of this 45th Parliament. In viewing this past few years as a performance, it's certainly been no Homer's Odysseyan epic tale of courage, of facing adversity, endeavour and achievements. Nor has it been in any way a virtuoso performance. Perhaps history will judge it more as a Greek tragedy or perhaps a calamity or a comedy of errors, with all the scandals, mishaps and stuff-ups, and at the end of this the showcase of the 45th Parliament and the Turnbull Liberal coalition tax cuts. Maybe if it wasn't so serious it might have been funny. But, whatever you believe it's been, as an elected representative, as a member of parliament, wherever I go I certainly hear no applause for this performance. More likely I see grimaces. And I doubt very much that the Australian people will call for an encore.

What has been revealed in this final scene of the tale? In an election budget full of gimmicks designed to thrill and please, there was one big surprise—a trick of sorts—for the audience. Mr Malcolm Turnbull wants to give you some of your money back, refund some of the cost of your admission to this show—$140 billion in tax cuts, the signature policy of this government, the piece de resistance of this term in government. Is it a trick? Yes, of sorts, and it's a bloody expensive one; it's certainly no cheap trick. Is it a con? Yes. Let me tell you why, and I will expand on these points in more detail in the committee stage. Firstly, the government's claims that these cuts target middle-income earners and would therefore benefit most Australians are wrong. In fact, most Australians won't see any tax cuts at all. The need for these cuts to compensate for bracket creep has been overstated. The key reason propagated by this government—that this tax package will counter bracket creep—has been debunked, torpedoed by many expert witnesses, including the Senate Economics Committee, which I attended. Indeed, some expert witnesses suggested that in the long run it may make bracket creep worse in this country. The government's claim that tax cuts will improve work incentives are totally spurious and without evidence. And it's gender biased. Men will get almost twice the tax benefit as women in Australia. And $144 billion in tax cuts will inevitably mean harsh spending cuts later. Certainly the Greens, and I suspect also others in this chamber, fully understand that there still isn't enough revenue now for those many people who are doing it tough and need those services.

Contrary to government propaganda, Australia is not a high-taxing nation and desperately in need of personal income tax cuts. There is no doubt, from the evidence before us, that these cuts will erode our progressive tax system. I note with interest the language the government's used, saying that the tax system will still be progressive when it's finished. But of course that's ignoring the point that if this legislation gets up it will be a lot less progressive or a lot more regressive than it is now. Regarding one of the great challenges of our time, rising inequality, this legislation will make inequality worse in this country: the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer, and you cannot dispute that. Everything we do in this place should be run through the lens of tackling inequality—everything we do! This is the biggest piece of legislation we have seen in this parliament in terms of funding commitments, yet it will worsen inequality in this country.

To frame all those things up, this legislation shows that the government's true priorities are protecting the rich and running down the role of government in our lives. These tax cuts will further entrench rising inequality, the great challenge of our time, and to hide that the government is employing a simple bait and switch trick to help sell these tax cuts. There is a little bit of candy to start with—in some instances, for low-income earners, only a couple of dollars a week—and then, in the out years, nearly six to 10 years into the future, those at the top end of the income-earning brackets in this country will take home the bacon. The fact is that most Australians won't see any benefit at all. Sixty per cent of taxpayers will get nothing from the government's top end tax cuts. The majority of the benefits will flow to the top 20 per cent of income earners. The Greens' own Parliamentary Budget Office numbers showed this. More than half of the overall tax benefits will flow to the top 10 per cent of income earners in this country.

This bill makes a choice that successive governments have made in the neoliberal era. I would also lump Labor's history well and truly into that. It is a choice to contract and constrain the ability of governments to provide services and make investments for our collective benefit. Inevitably, this choice is one that better serves individuals with the means to support themselves than it does those who are battling to make a go of it. There is nothing in this legislation for many of Australia's most vulnerable battlers.

If you're unlucky and don't have a job, no work, and if you live in poverty, there is nothing in this legislation for you. That's why the Greens want to prioritise raising Newstart above the poverty line by $75 a week to combat this, and we can pay for it. I note with interest that a significant number of Tasmanians, including in the north-west seat of Braddon, support an increase in Newstart. If you can't get enough work, or if you're a young or part-time worker or a struggling student, there's nothing in this legislation for you. That's why the Greens want to prioritise legislating to raise the minimum wage.

What's in it for the country's highest income earners, who are most likely to be our most wealthy? The answer is: plenty. This bill shifts the 32.5 per cent marginal tax rate up a threshold, firstly to $90,000, then to $120,000, and finally to $200,000. This flattens the tax system. It makes it regressive and skews it to benefit the wealthy. In fact, this is potentially the end of a progressive tax system in this country. It is a full-frontal assault on one of the most important tools we have in Australia for raising revenue. The fundamental concept that if you earn more money you can afford to pay a higher rate of tax is critical for funding services and other things that we need.

Of the estimated $144 billion loss in revenue over 10 years, half will go exclusively to those earning more than $87,000. The Treasurer would have you believe that somehow $87,000 makes you an average worker in this country, but we know that is absolutely not true. Most of the beneficiaries will be men, as I mentioned earlier. For example, the stage 2 shift in the 32.5 per cent upper threshold from $90,000 to $120,000 will cost $36 billion over 10 years. The Greens estimate, using the budget's heroic wage growth forecasts—and they are heroic, given recent history—that the point at which this takes effect will be to the benefit of the top one-third of wage earners, and two-thirds of those are men.

What are the opportunity costs of spending $144 billion on tax cuts and not on other things? To put it more simply, if I ask the average Australian, 'Which would you prefer: would you rather see a few extra bucks in your pocket every week, or would you rather see the government doing its job and investing the $144 billion on your behalf in world-class schools, teachers, universities, child care, health care, law and order and so on?' how would they respond? Would you rather have a couple of bucks a week—$5 maybe, if you're really lucky—or $10, if you're the biggest beneficiary of these tax cuts? If you're a millionaire and you get $7,000 a year in extra income after tax, would you rather have that money in your pocket, or would you rather invest it in the society that you live in and that you want your children to inherit? That's a question that I don't believe anyone has been putting to the Australian people.

What else could we invest that money in as a priority? Have no doubt: the tax debate we are having tonight is about priorities. It is about what you want to spend the money on—$144 billion. What would you spend it on? Perhaps it would be conquering the problem of violence against women, building a proper NBN, fully funding the NDIS or, as I mentioned in the MPI this afternoon, funding a proper threatened species plan to hold back our national shame at having the highest species extinction rate on the planet. Instead, we continue to see more cuts in the environment department and to the threatened species unit. What about an infrastructure revolution, with $144 billion going into building productivity-enhancing infrastructure and all the jobs that would go with that? What about public-good science, especially climate science? Critically, on the responsibility to get on board with the energy revolution needed to combat climate change and transition workers out of coal and into the jobs of the future, $144 billion would go a long way. To neglect these issues is in effect to steal from future generations. If the question were framed in this simple way, I'd be surprised if most Australians didn't express that they would rather forgo the few dollars a week they're going to get than risk not tackling these imperatives or properly funding our services into the future.

To be fair, if you were to put this question to Australian citizens, I'm guessing many would say: 'Well, that's your job: to make the best decision. That's what I elected you for.' So what does the best evidence inform us? I can tell you: no-one's looked at the opportunity costs of investing $144 billion in other things such as infrastructure, action on climate or better services. That's why it's important that we have this debate in the Senate. In fact, there's been surprisingly little public debate on this critical point, and it goes to the heart of whether you should accept or reject this legislation in the next few days.

What the Economics Legislation Committee did hear on this bill is that there is no doubt at all that services will be impacted. You cannot take $144 billion of revenue and not expect that future governments will have to make that up in other areas in the future. You can't have your cake and eat it. So, if you take $144 billion out of the system, expect cost savings and cuts down the line, particularly if this Liberal government is re-elected. I believe the work the Greens have done this week shows that my home state of Tasmania has the most to lose, or the most at risk. For every $1 gained in tax cuts, we have at risk $1.69 in services that we receive.

So why? If you ask the government, they will tell you that these tax cuts are necessary for two key reasons. The first reason is that people will be incentivised to work. As I mentioned earlier, there is no evidence for that at all. The second reason is to tackle bracket creep, but I've also said that committee evidence suggested that that was not going to be the case. This will not effectively tackle bracket creep. So I ask again: why are we having these tax cuts put to us now? The answer's simple: because we're going into an election and maybe it is an appropriate question to be asking why of a politician. As I alluded to at the beginning of this speech, it's about politics, it's about getting elected, it's about political self-interest and it's about holding on to power. When you really think about it, if the best this government can do after its couple of years in office is give a tax cut of a couple of dollars a week to most Australians, when we face so many fundamental challenges to our society, our economy, our environment and our future, it's pretty pathetic.

With these challenges come opportunities, and the Greens are ready to meet those opportunities; that's why we are in parliament. We're not afraid to debate the big issues and meet the challenges and we're not afraid to take a strong view on legislation such as this. We have been 100 per cent consistent since budget night that we will not be supporting tax cuts. We want services, not tax cuts. We won't be part of a political arms race: 'Who's got the biggest tax cuts?' We want to see services, especially Newstart, properly funded for those battlers who are doing it real tough and for those people who can't get a job. So far we've been unable to secure a commitment from the government, the Labor Party or others on getting an increase in Newstart.

We've got a lot of ideas on how we can generate the jobs of the future and, more broadly, secure the future for our children and for future generations. We've always come up with good ideas, we've always been able to pay for them and we've always stood in here with conviction proposing those ideas—and, may I say, seeing many of them through. We believe that now is the time to be getting commitment to increasing money for the services that Australians most need. Now is not the time in the election cycle, in the political cycle or in the budget cycle to be funding $144 billion tax cuts, many of which won't even kick in for nearly a decade. They are simply a trick, a bribe, to get votes going into an election. With two election cycles before many of these tax cuts kick in, Australians would be rightly sceptical that they are even going to happen. But they make for good headlines and they make for good campaigning going into an election. One thing I do know is that Australians are very, very sceptical about politics. They're disengaged, disenfranchised and distant from us because they've lost trust in our institutions, and we need to regain that. I don't believe that this kind of policy is tackling the issues Australians do care about. I now move a second reading amendment to the bill:

At the end of the motion, add:

", but the Senate notes that the bill:

(a) significantly reduces the progressive nature of the income tax system;

(b) does not target low income earners, who are most affected by bracket creep;

(c) does not improve the living standards of those who are unable to find work;

(d) will not help reduce inequality; and

(e) locks in tax cuts that:

  (i) are premised on economic forecasts that have a high degree of uncertainty; and

  (ii) in 7 years' time, will constrain a future government's capacity to provide public services and to invest in public infrastructure."

I also move, at the request of Senator Di Natale:

At the end of the motion, add:

", but the Senate is of the opinion that:

(a) the bill should not be considered until the minimum wage is lifted to 60% of the median wage, and Newstart, Youth Allowance and related allowances are increased by $75 a week; and

(b) the revenue used to fund the government's Tax Cut Plan should be invested in health and education services, public infrastructure and the social safety net, instead of being used to fund tax cuts."

Doug Cameron (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Human Services) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Treasury Laws Amendment (Personal Income Tax Plan) Bill 2018. Put simply, the Turnbull government's income tax plan presented in this bill is fundamentally flawed as economic budgetary and social policy. It will fail to deliver for the Australian community in four key ways. Firstly, it is reckless with our nation's finances and is yet another example of the fiscal irresponsibility that has characterised this government and the previous Liberal governments of John Howard and Peter Costello. Secondly, it will actively undermine the progressivity and therefore fairness of our income tax system. This will weaken the foundations of future inclusive growth and increase intergenerational inequality. Thirdly, it will severely diminish the capacity of future governments to support Australian jobs and to make vital investments in areas such as health and education. Finally, it will hamper our ability to respond in the event of an economic shock overseas or a broader economic downturn.

Labor recognise that, as a society, we are confronted by a series of very real economic challenges that ought to be the top priority for any government. That's why it's important to consider this tax package in the context of the broader economic challenges we are facing—particularly inequality, which is the biggest threat to our economy and our cohesion as a society. We're experiencing a rapid rise in inequality in both wealth and income that's unprecedented in the modern history of our country. We're in the midst of a prolonged period of depressed wage growth. Australian workers are currently experiencing the lowest wage growth in 30 years. Indeed, many ordinary working people have been denied a pay rise in real terms for years and have seen their living standards decline. The coalition has certainly played its part in that outcome, with industrial legislation that has consistently attacked the ability of unions and workers to bargain for improved conditions and wages.

Homeownership rates for young Australians have collapsed to their lowest level in the past 30 years. Fewer than 40 per cent now own their own home, compared with 60 per cent just a generation ago. This has significant ramifications for intergenerational equity. Perhaps the starkest indication of our increasing inequality is that, over the past 30 years, the top one per cent of income earners in this country have doubled their share of income. Yet, at the opposite end of the income scale, the proportion of Australian workers who rely on the minimum wage has risen to a record high of 22.7 per cent, increasing by 3.9 percentage points in just the two years between 2014 and 2016.

These are just a few of the issues that we, as a nation and a parliament, must confront. Taken separately, they are serious and difficult public policy challenges worthy on their own merits of the parliament's urgent attention. But, when taken together, they are something altogether much more serious. That's because, without prompt and meaningful action by government, these issues pose an existential threat to the most quintessentially Australian promise of a fair go. Left unaddressed, these issues threaten to permanently entrench intergenerational inequity in this country, and it's something we should not countenance. Given the severity of the inequality challenge we are facing, it's fair to ask, 'Are these the issues that the Turnbull government is addressing with its economic policy and in this bill?'

Regrettably, the answer is a definitive no—and that's exposed by even a cursory examination of the detail of the government's income tax plan.

Australia has a long tradition of progressive taxation that aims to ensure that those with the greater ability to pay are the ones who contribute a larger share of all personal income tax revenue, yet the plan announced by Treasurer Morrison on budget night in May would constitute a radical and regressive refashioning of our income tax system over the course of the next seven years. Professor Miranda Stewart agreed in her evidence to the Senate economics committee inquiry into this bill that this tax package was 'both inefficient and a retrograde step and that that undermines 100 years of progressive income tax rate structure in Australia.'

While the first stage of the government's proposed changes would provide modest but inadequate tax relief for low- and middle-income earners, it is stages 2 and 3 of this package that are the most consequential. Funnily enough, this happens to be the element of the tax plan that this government doesn't want the Australian people to pay attention to—neither who will benefit the most nor how much it will cost.

Should the Turnbull government be successful in passing this legislation, the upper threshold for the 32.5 per cent tax bracket would rise dramatically from $90,000 to $200,000. Along with this change, the existing 37 per cent tax bracket would be totally abolished. What this really means is that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Treasurer Scott Morrison believe it's fair and appropriate for someone earning $200,000 a year to pay the same income tax rate as a worker on $40,000 a year.

Analysis conducted by the Australia Institute has exposed the deep unfairness of the government's package. It found that, if fully implemented, in 2024-25 the benefits of the proposed tax cuts will go overwhelmingly to the highest income earners. The Australia Institute's research has revealed that removing the 37 per cent tax bracket in 2024-25 would see 80 per cent of the benefit flow through to the top 20 per cent of income earners in this country. Sixty per cent of taxpayers—those on the lowest incomes—would receive no benefit from this tax cut. In a broader sense, the government proposal would see middle-income earners shoulder a greater share of tax overall. That was the finding of the Grattan Institute, which in its submission to the Senate inquiry, confirmed that the full package would decrease the tax burden on high-income earners while increasing the tax burden on middle-income earners.

Most telling is what all this means in dollar terms. Members of parliament on salaries in excess of $200,000 a year stand to benefit by as much as $7,225 a year in 2024-25, yet the hardworking cleaners, security guards and hospitality workers who we share this building with stand to receive just a little over $540. Those are the very same cleaners who have not received a pay rise from this government for six years and are still fighting for a fair go from this terrible government.

Frankly, it shouldn't surprise us that those on the other side of the chamber think that that's fair. We've already seen in the media this week a government senator claiming that a $200,000 salary isn't a lot of money. They're completely and utterly out of touch with the Australian people. But that's this government's agenda. That's what this government thinks is fair. And it's even more unfair when you consider how they'll pay for it. The fact of the matter is that someone will have to pay for the government's unprecedented largesse in providing income tax cuts for the wealthiest individuals and for their $80 billion corporate tax giveaway, including $17 billion to the banks. Someone will have to pay for this.

Those who will pay for this stupid economic incompetence were revealed again in the government's 2018-19 budget. It will be the same working- and middle-class Australians who have borne the brunt of the coalition's attacks against them since this government was elected in 2013. It will be young Australians pushed off Newstart and onto youth allowance, resulting in a cut of around $48 a week, or almost $2,500 a year. So the most vulnerable young people in the community get a cut of $2,500 a year, and the rich and powerful in this country get thousands of dollars in tax cuts. That is totally inequitable, totally unfair. It will also be the 70,000 new mums and families worse off due to cuts to paid parental leave. It will be the carers, pensioners and people with disabilities, who stand to lose a billion dollars of vital support with the scrapping of the energy supplement. So pensioners, the vulnerable, get hammered by this government and the top end of town walk away with their wallets bulging. It will be those Australians who are reliant on life-saving medications. They will be slugged an extra $5 for each prescription. It will be hardworking older Australians seeing their retirements pushed out to the age of 70—the oldest pension age in the developed world.

I could continue for the rest of my allotted speaking time listing those Australians who will suffer, those who will be made to pay by this government. They are always the ones this out-of-touch government makes pay. Middle-class Australians, working-class Australians and the poorest in our community are always targeted by this coalition. They're the ones who are targeted. As Senator Wong so succinctly put it in her contribution to the corporate tax debate in this chamber, on every occasion the Liberal and National parties have had a choice:

They choose big business over middle- and working-class Australians and they choose multinationals over Medicare.

It is not the choice that Labor has made. Labor wants to ensure that a future government can properly fund public services such as health, education and infrastructure, while recognising that low- and middle-income households are under pressure.

In contrast to the government, a Shorten Labor government will deliver permanent tax relief for the Australians who need it most, prioritising that tax relief going into the back pockets of middle-income and working-class Australians. As a matter of principle, Labor do not support someone on $200,000 paying the same tax rate as someone on $40,000. This is reflected in the amendments that we will be putting forward. We also cannot agree to the elements of the government's plan that will provide even more tax cuts for the highest-earning individuals in the top tax bracket, noting that the coalition already cut their tax rate last year. The plan Labor have put forward is a far fairer and more fiscally responsible package than the government's. Under Labor's plan, working and middle-class Australians will pay less tax. In fact, everyone earning less than $125,000 a year will receive a bigger tax cut under Labor compared to that under the Liberals. More than four million people will be better off by $398 a year with Labor's tax refund compared to that of the Liberals. With our refund, a teacher on $65,000 will receive a tax cut of $928 a year. A couple earning $90,000 and $50,000 respectively will receive a tax cut of $1,855 a year.

Under Labor's proposal, people living in my duty electorate of Banks, including suburbs like Mortdale, East Hills, Peakhurst and Revesby, will see 74 per cent, or 67,000 people, better off. In Tasmania, 76 per cent, or 39,000 people, in the electorate of Braddon will be better off. The choice is clear in that upcoming by-election. You can vote for Justine Keay, and 76 per cent of the electorate will benefit more. It's a similar story in the Queensland electorate of Longman. Voters can support Labor's Susan Lamb, and 75 per cent, or 69,000 people, will be better off. It's the same right around the country.

Labor's plan recognises that low- and middle-income households are more likely to spend any additional income they receive. Our targeted tax cuts will put more money back in the hands of Australian families who will support future growth. This will provide a much stronger foundation for demand than the government's poorly targeted proposals that overwhelmingly favour those on high incomes. These are targeted and paid for and will deliver a bigger stimulus to consumption while not risking the medium-term budget position and important investments in our hospitals and schools.

We have indicated publicly today that we will support tax cuts for 10 million people on 1 July. But we will go further. We have committed that, if we are elected, we will almost double these tax cuts and make them permanent, while asking those in the top tax bracket to pay a little more to help reduce the debt.

The onus now is on the government to stop playing political brinkmanship about not being willing to split the bill and accept our sensible amendments. By continuing to insist that the bill be taken as a whole and yet refusing to release even basic fiscal and distributional impacts, this government is treating the Australian public and the Senate crossbench as fools.

Labor has a very different set of priorities to this government, and that absolutely includes dealing with inequality in this country, not undermining our progressive tax system. It's for this reason that we cannot support unsustainable levels of tax cuts that put essential public services at risk. We want a fair go for all Australians, not just the top end of town. We want to ensure that we can make the necessary investments in vital issues for our future, including areas such as health, education, housing and homelessness, skills, apprenticeship and TAFE. Labor has spent its time in opposition listening to the community. That's how we are able to put forward superior policy agendas, including our income tax package. Labor's approach on income tax is fairer and more responsible and takes a much more holistic view of the current circumstances of both the economy and the needs of Australians. We will deliver genuine tax relief for working Australians, protect those most vulnerable in our community and improve the budget bottom line.

Let me be very clear. Any crossbench senator who supports the government's tax package will bear responsibility for making our tax system less fair. They will be making life tougher for working-class Australians, putting on increased pressure and worsening inequality. The Australian people won't forget, and there will be a political price to pay at the next election for supporting this bill.

I heard the National Party. I heard Senator Williams scoff at our position. Here is a senator who looks after some of the poorest people in his electorate, and he is not prepared to give them a fair go. Senator Williams is out there supporting tax cuts for the banks, supporting tax cuts for big business and supporting tax cuts for the richest people in this country while ignoring the electorate of New England. The National Party are a disgrace. They are the lapdogs of the Liberal Party. They don't look after their own people, and they submit to the Liberal Party at every chance they get.

David Leyonhjelm (NSW, Liberal Democratic Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to confirm my vote in favour of the bill to implement the government's Personal Income Tax Plan, the Treasury Laws Amendment (Personal Income Tax Plan) Bill 2018. If the bill doesn't pass, those earning $120,000 will pay a whopping $34,432 on their income. If the bill does pass, those earning $120,000 will pay $34,217 next year. This is still, without question, an unwarranted and immoral tax take, but at least it is $215 less tax. And, if the bill passes, those earning $120,000 will pay $32,407 on their income in four years time. This remains an unwarranted and immoral tax take well in excess of the value that such a taxpayer gets from the government, but at least it's $2,025 less tax. So I will support the bill not because it makes tax fair but because it makes tax ever so slightly less unfair—albeit after a painfully long wait. The bill doesn't go anywhere near enough in reducing the excessive tax burden that Australians face every day. According to answers given by the tax office at budget estimates, the top one per cent of income earners in Australia pays 17 per cent of total income taxation. A further 65 per cent of total income tax is paid by those earning between $87,001 and over $180,000. This means that around 82 per cent of income tax in Australia is paid by fewer than three million people.

Our system of taxation creates a disincentive for financially successful Australians to stay in the country or come back from overseas. Our top marginal tax rate is 45 per cent, to which we need to add the two per cent Medicare levy. The top marginal tax rate cuts in at just $180,000—just 2.2 times average full-time earnings. This compares with four times average earnings in Canada and the United Kingdom and eight times average full-time earnings in the United States of America. This is wildly unfair, and what a shame that this bill doesn't address that. The problem is that the government simply does too much. There seems to be no limit to the intrusion of the government into the everyday lives of Australians and the expansion of its powers and authority. The answer to any question, whether posed by the media or posed by a celebrity, is for something to be banned or something to be subsidised, with either option involving the hiring of more and more public servants. It seems that there's a bill for everything and for everything a bill, and a very small minority of Australians are the ones called to settle the account.

The Liberal Democrats believe Australia needs a low-tax future. Continuing to tax at such high rates discourages us from working and saving, discourages our potential entrepreneurs from taking the risk of starting a business, and imposes unnecessary compliance costs on individuals and businesses. High taxation also requires the hiring of thousands of bureaucrats in the ATO. For these bureaucrats, being called a mongrel bunch of bastards should be considered the price of taking such a well-paid but ignoble job. Tax collectors were rightly reviled in biblical times. The onus is on the defenders of the ATO to explain what has changed since then to warrant a change in our assessment. We need to reduce the scope of government and, in turn, the amount the government demands from us in taxation. Progressivity is also not something we should be seeking in a tax system. When someone has double the income, what moral code justifies taking more than double the tax?

The Liberal Democrats have a fully costed and fully funded policy to have a 20 per cent flat tax rate that leaves all taxpayers better off. Even this level of taxation is too high, but at least it would leave us with more of our own earnings in our own pockets, and it would, increasingly, be the citizens who would decide what to do with their earnings, not bureaucrats. Until we get to grips with this basic principle, we are doomed to become a less appealing place in which to do business and for individual successful Australians to remain. I will help pass this bill, but I look forward to the day that I can help pass a bill that ends this disease of excessive taxation.

Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

One of the very good things about this place is that we get to hear a range of views. I can assure those still in the chamber that you are about to hear some very different views to those that you heard from Senator Leyonhjelm, because some of us accept and believe that it is important to collect taxes from people, especially those who are well-off, in order to fund the social services, the infrastructure and the various other benefits that society so much depends upon.

I've spoken a little bit already about the government's tax plan, particularly in the adjournment speech last night, so I don't intend to use my full 20 minutes, but I did want to reiterate some of the key points that I think are extremely important for those members of this chamber who are still contemplating how they will vote on this bill. I should say, also, how proud I am that the Labor caucus and our leadership today took the right decision to oppose, particularly, the second and third stages of the government's tax cuts, which are unfairly weighted towards wealthier Australians. I think that is the right decision to take on grounds of principle.

We want to make sure that we retain a truly progressive taxation system in Australia, and I've listened, over the recent weeks, to the Treasurer and many other members of the government try to conflate ideas of what it means to have a progressive taxation system. They've been trying to mount this argument and eliminate one of the tax thresholds, which will actually have the practical effect of meaning that someone like me on $200,000 a year or thereabouts, a very high income, ends up paying the same rate of taxation as someone who cleans my office or drives me to and from parliament and who earns a middle income or a low income. There is absolutely no way, in Australia, that Australians believe that it is fair that someone earning such a high wage should be paying the same level of tax as someone on a low or middle income. But that is exactly what the government are trying to do with this bill, and I think they are about to get a rude shock when they actually get back out into their electorates and talk to Australians about what they're seeking to do here and once Australians have more information about what the government are trying to provide.

For the Treasurer and other members of this government to argue that, even with these changes, high-income earners will still pay more tax in dollar terms than people on low- and middle-income earners, and that is what makes this tax system progressive, is complete nonsense. Of course someone earning $200,000, $300,000 or $400,000 year is going to be paying more tax in overall dollar terms than someone earning $40,000, $50,000 or $60,000 a year. I would be willing to wager quite a lot of money that someone who is earning a high income like that is not going to miss the extra taxation that they would otherwise be paying as much as someone who is earning a lower income. A progressive taxation system is all about making sure that people who are earning higher amounts of money pay their fair share to ensure that we have the social services that we all depend upon. That's the way it should stay, and I'm very confident that most Australians support that view.

Arguably, the worst thing about this government's tax plan that we're debating now is that it so grossly discriminates against poor electorates right around the country. Then, to make the problem worse, it gives the biggest tax cut to the wealthiest electorates in this country. I am not aware of a more unfair plan for taxation that has ever been brought into this parliament than the one we are debating now. It is so clear that this tax plan will be delivering so little to low- and middle-income earners from the poorest electorates in this country, only to provide a massive tax cut to the wealthiest individuals in our community—a tax cut that in many instances they don't actually need.

The Australia Institute has published some very revealing data about what the practical impact of these tax cuts will be. They have been able to show that, if you look at all 150 electorates around the country, the 10 electorates that will get the least benefit from the tax cuts the government is proposing here—effectively the 10 poorest electorates in the country—are mostly in regional areas and in the outer suburbs of our big cities. I previously rattled off a few examples, but I will just say them again. Of the bottom 10 electorates in Australia in terms of the amount they will receive from this tax cut, three of them are in my home state of Queensland: the electorates of Hinkler, Wide Bay and, interestingly, Longman, which is the subject of the by-election that we will be fighting on 28 July.

Just to focus on Longman for a little bit: if anyone has spent any time in Longman—I've had the great fortune to do so, having already done about three door-knocking sessions in this campaign, and I'm sure I'll be doing a lot more before the campaign is over, and I'm yet to find anyone in Longman who is excited about the idea of a massive tax cut going to high-income earners, people earning $200,000 a year or more, at the expense of people earning low and middle incomes. That is because in an electorate like Longman, as is the case with so many other electorates around the country where people are largely on low and middle incomes, there are very few people who are earning six-figure salaries in the order of $200,000 a year or more. So it's no surprise that, when you're out there door-knocking in Longman and you ask people, 'Are you aware that what the government is trying to do is to cut taxes for people earning more than $200,000 a year, but there's very little benefit coming to households on $40,000 or $50,000 a year?' they're rightly outraged about that. If you mention at the same time that this government is also the one that is trying to give massive tax cuts to the big banks and to big business, you should see the reaction on their faces. I would encourage members of the government to spend a little bit of time in electorates like Longman, like Braddon, which I know Senator Urquhart will speak about, and which is also in the bottom 10 electorates nationally in terms of the benefits here. The government members here and any of the crossbenchers who are thinking of voting with the government are making a very big mistake if they think they are going to get political rewards in the by-elections in those electorates from people who are getting very little out of this government's plan.

To spend a little bit of time on regional Queensland: as I have mentioned in a previous speech to this chamber, every single regional Queensland electorate, mostly held by National Party aligned members of parliament, will be getting a below-average tax cut under what this government is putting forward. We've been raising this over and over during the course of this week, and I don't know if the National Party senators who are here actually know this and are actively turning their backs on their constituents by continuing to vote for tax cuts that will deprive their own constituents in regional and rural electorates and deliver a massive tax cut, on the other hand, to Liberal held electorates in wealthy parts of Australia. I'm glad Senator McKenzie, the Deputy Leader of the Nationals, is here. I don't know whether senators like Senator McKenzie and other National Party senators have actually looked at the information here and are aware that what they are doing is condemning their own constituents to getting a tax cut well below the national average. Every single National Party electorate in Queensland will get below the national average, and I think about four out of the bottom 10 electorates in Australia that are going to be getting the least benefit from this tax cut are National Party held. I don't know how many times we have to come into this chamber and point out to the National Party that, if they want to be serious about representing rural and regional Australia, like they say they do and say they are committed to, it is about time they stood up for the interests of these people and took on the Liberal Party.

The Liberal Party is doing so well out of this deal. They are ensuring that their own voters are pocketing huge amounts of money, but poor old National Party voters and people in National Party electorates are being left behind. What's worse, they're actually getting their services cut by this government in the form of funding for health, for schools, for training and for pensions. All of these cuts are happening right across regional Queensland and, no doubt, other parts of regional Australia, all to help fund a massive, unaffordable tax cut that is going to electorates like the Prime Minister's own in wealthy parts of Sydney. Our National Party representatives either know what they're doing and know that they're ripping off their own constituents to help out rich Liberals—it would be disgraceful, if they actually know that—or they haven't bothered to ask the hard questions in their party room and haven't bothered to ask the Prime Minister why it is fair to give Liberal Party-held electorates in wealthy parts of Australia a massive tax cut when regional Australia is being left behind.

Of course, there is one tax plan that is before this parliament that actually would offer some benefit both to regional Australia and to low- and middle-income earners right across Australia, and that is the plan that Labor is putting forward. The reason it has so much benefit to most people in our community, whether they be in regional Australia or urban Australia, is that the Labor tax cuts are heavily targeted towards low- and middle-income earners. If anyone's going to get a tax cut in this country, it should be low- and middle-income earners. It shouldn't be millionaires. It shouldn't be people earning $500,000 a year when we are actually cutting services in order to pay for those tax cuts.

I will give you a few examples. If you run down Queensland, from the north to the south, every single electorate actually stands to gain a lot more from the Labor plan that is before this chamber than what the government is offering. Starting in Queensland's far north in the electorate of Leichhardt, where I know Senator Moore spends a lot of time as the duty senator, 77 per cent of taxpayers will be better off under Labor's tax plan than under the government's. In the electorate of Herbert, so ably represented by Cathy O'Toole, 79 per cent of taxpayers will be better off under Labor's plan than under the government's. In the electorate of Dawson, 76 per cent of taxpayers would be better off under Labor. In the electorate of Capricornia, where I spend a lot of time as the duty senator, 74 per cent of taxpayers would be better off. In the electorate of Flynn, 70 per cent of taxpayers would be better off under Labor's plan than under the government's plan.

And it's not just regional Australia. Let's look at some of the marginal seats held by government members in South-East Queensland. In the electorate of Dickson, 76 per cent of taxpayers would be better off under Labor's plan. In the electorate of Petrie, 78 per cent of taxpayers would be better off under Labor's plan. In the electorate of Bonner, on Brisbane's east side, 74 per cent of taxpayers would be better off under Labor's plan. And in the electorate of Forde, between Logan and the Gold Coast, 78 per cent of taxpayers would be better off under Labor's plan than under what the government is offering. So, if there's anyone on the government side who's actually serious about trying to give low- and middle-income earners a leg-up via a tax cut, the simple thing to do is to support what Labor is putting forward to separate this bill. Let's hive off the high-income tax cuts that the country can't afford and actually aren't needed and concentrate our efforts on providing tax cuts to low- and middle-income earners. That's what Labor want to do, that's what we think is the fair approach and, frankly, that's what we think most Australians want to see.

In conclusion, the other group in this chamber who have got a massive test awaiting them as this debate continues are the two remaining One Nation senators. I've had a lot to say previously—and I won't go into it in too much detail—about the number of times our One Nation senators, particularly from Queensland, despite all their claims about supporting battlers, come down into this chamber and vote with the government to hurt battlers on penalty rates, pension cuts, apprenticeship cuts, health cuts—the list is so long, I can't even remember them all. This one will be a very good test for One Nation. If One Nation want to follow through on their claims to support battlers then they will back Labor's amendments, they will oppose the government's plan to give tax cuts to high-income earners and they will ensure that all of that money is directed towards tax cuts for the people who really need them in electorates like Longman, Capricornia, Flynn and Dawson, battlers in our urban and regional areas who need support from our government and deserve more than what the government is offering and, in fact, deserve what Labor is offering. This will be a real test once and for all of whether One Nation are really about battlers or whether they're for the billionaires that the Prime Minister and his Liberal Party colleagues seem so intent on supporting. So I'm going to be very interested to see how this debate unfolds over the next few days.

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

The Treasury Laws Amendment (Personal Income Tax Plan) Bill 2018 and the tax cuts proposed within it are framed by this government as a bonus to Australians, a gift, but this bill and these tax cuts would strip away so much of what makes Australia great as a society, widening the gap between the rich and the rest of us. It's a gap that we know is growing. It would take away essentials like health services, educational opportunities, public infrastructure and community services. It's dressing up these tax cuts as a sugar hit for us all when really it delivers most of these cuts to the wealthiest people, like the investment bankers and the hedge fund managers who live in the Prime Minister's own electorate, while simultaneously severely undermining our capacity as a nation to get the services we need and to look after each other.

The Greens oppose this bill in its entirety, and I welcome the chance to lay out why. The Greens want to see an Australia where our hospitals are properly funded so that, if you're a pensioner who needs a hip replacement, you don't need to wait 18 months. The Greens want to see an Australia where every single child, whether they live in inner-city Melbourne or Mount Isa, has access to a world-class education and can choose to continue that education right through from preschool to TAFE and university. The Greens want to see an Australia where, through government addressing the chronic underinvestment in the essential infrastructure we need as our population grows, people aren't packed in like sardines on public transport or stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic. In short, these tax cuts are not just tax cuts; they're cuts to schools, hospitals, infrastructure, scientific research and our beloved ABC. The Turnbull government, in proposing these tax cuts, is telling Australians that what they're getting from government at the moment is more than they need.

The Turnbull government is trying to tell people surviving on Newstart, who are already living massively under the poverty line, that they don't deserve the first rise in Newstart in real terms since 1994—that they're already getting too much—but that someone earning $200,000 needs a tax cut. Instead of giving tax cuts, the Turnbull government should be helping young people living on youth allowance to have enough income to actually look for work and study. These people are saddled with HECS and TAFE debt, can hardly afford to rent a crappy room in a share house, let alone afford to buy a house, and absolutely can't find a job. The Turnbull government should be helping carers who are slogging away caring for their loved ones. The Turnbull government should be helping those locked out of the housing market or languishing on a minimum wage as the cost of living goes up and up. These Turnbull tax cuts offer nothing at all to these people. These tax cuts are just another leg-up for the rich.

The Greens believe in quality public services that are accessible to everyone, not a privatised dystopia where your parents' income determines your lot in life. Every Australian should be able to share in what makes this country great, not just the select few wealthy people and multinational corporations who are writing the government's policy and demanding a tax cut. The Greens stand for investment in people's health and education. We want to see proper investment in critical infrastructure to modernise our cities and regions, to shift to a clean economy and to look to a future that's innovative and progressive. These tax cuts will do nothing to further that vision. They will hold us back. They will trap us in an outdated 'dig it up, chop it down' economy.

Over the last 10 years Australians have been sold the lie, by politicians on both sides of this chamber, that we can't afford to properly act on climate change or protect endangered species; that we can't afford to properly fund shelters, refuges and legal services to help women fleeing from family violence, or programs that would prevent violence against women—while more than one woman a week is killed. We've been told that we can't afford to pay people on Newstart, who rely on $38 a day—many of them living in areas where there is massive unemployment and no chance of landing a job, and where they are absolutely struggling to make ends meet—an increase of $75 a week for the costs of housing, food, transport, bills, mobile phones, clothing and sanitary items like tampons and pads.

And yet, in the face of this inequality, at the first chance they get, the coalition and Labor are in yet another race to the bottom over who can give the biggest tax cuts. Australia is already a low-taxing country. How much lower do they want to drag us? Our Public Service is so understaffed that people are waiting hours and hours on the phone trying to get through to Centrelink to find out why their welfare payment has been cancelled.

The Greens will not join in this race to the bottom, a race that will only end up in the widening gap between the rich and the rest of us, a race that will leave millions of Australians struggling, locked out of secure housing, stuck in traffic on their way to an insecure job. No, the Greens will not join this race to buy votes by dishing out billions for a short-term sugar hit. The Greens want to face the challenges in a way that doesn't leave any Australian struggling to make ends meet, stuck in poverty. We can show you how we can afford to make sure that everyone has equal opportunity to live a happy, healthy and productive life and to have access to the same essential services regardless of people's income, regardless of where they live.

How can Prime Minister Turnbull look Australians in the eye and say that we can afford to give people earning well above the average wage a massive tax cut and we can afford to give multinational corporations billions in tax cuts but we can't afford to give someone living on Newstart or youth allowance a $75-a-week increase to lift them out of poverty or we can't afford to give people a minimum wage, a wage that's supposed to be a baseline for someone to be able to afford basic necessities and not be in poverty—we can't afford to increase that to an income that's pegged to 60 per cent of the median wage? We can afford it, but these tax cuts will mean we are further away from affording it than ever.

There's nothing more Australian than a fair go. Real Australians believe in the fair go, but not this government. The Prime Minister and the coalition need an education in what the fair go means. They need an education on what it means to be Australian, because their backwards policies that belong in the last century are un-Australian.

When this plan was handed down on budget night, it immediately became clear that the big winners were the high earners in Australia. That means, for the most part, blokes. On budget night, in my office, we used Australian Taxation Office statistics to highlight that the Turnbull government's tax cuts for high-income earners will disproportionately benefit men and leave women in low- and middle-income jobs at a comparative disadvantage. We know that women are much more likely to be on a lower income, and the budget's disproportionately higher tax handouts to high-income earners show just where this government prioritises the equality of women.

This stuff matters. Gender equality matters. Choosing to give tax cuts to high-income earners is unfair. Seventy per cent of the beneficiaries of the abolition of the 37.5 per cent marginal tax rate will be men. Coupled with inadequate funding to address family and domestic violence, cuts to foreign aid, nothing to address housing affordability and no further detail about its women's economic security commitments, this government's income tax plan and its budget are making inequality worse for women.

I can tell you that, like many Australians, I've been closely reflecting on the challenges that we face as a nation when it comes to the equality, wellbeing and safety of our women and girls. It's been devastating to bear witness to the growing death toll from gendered violence, harassment and abuse. It makes me recommit to the challenge of setting in place meaningful, impactful policy to address this crisis.

I hope this government is thinking about this crisis too, but I despair when faced with a bill like this, because what this bill is saying is, 'We don't prioritise funding and resourcing for essential services like violence prevention programs or crisis services for women.' Instead, it says: 'We are happy to erode the funding base for these programs. Even if you value them as a society, we are going to give the top end of town a big tax handout.'

This year's budget has a pretty pathetic offering when it comes to addressing violence against women. This government talks a lot about safety and security but is apparently happy to put a tax cut for the big end of town before the core business of fixing the biggest safety threats to Australian women: domestic violence and sexual abuse. I want to credit the National Foundation for Australian Women, who off their own bat applied a gender lens to this year's budget and produced a detailed report responding to the government's budget. They noted that, if this government is going to meet its own objectives in the National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children:

There is a need for significantly greater funding across the nation including for primary prevention, one-stop-shop support and safety hubs, victim assistance, support and counselling, specialist family violence courts, and an expansion of legal assistance for victims, locationally, culturally, and age specific strategies and support services, emergency and longer term accommodation, services for children, specialist legal services, reforms to family law, better policing, improved court supports, improved perpetrator accountability initiatives, and programs in prisons.

That's the challenge. We need to step up to it. That means not cutting our revenue base away. It fundamentally conflicts with the Australian values that so many of us hold so dear to hack away at the community services that women and children need and that ultimately benefit us all. Indeed, we all benefit when violence is reduced, when harassment is addressed and when our streets and homes are safe.

As well as women, when I look at this bill, I reflect on what it means for our children and our grandchildren. These tax cuts are setting up the next generation for more inequality, more of a dog-eat-dog-world and less opportunity. These tax cuts mean that our kids and our grandkids are going to spend more time battling congestion in our cities, with abysmal public transport infrastructure. They'll have even worse internet connections than they do now, if that's possible, while our global neighbours and competitors steam ahead. While we hack away at the funding base for environmental protection and restoration, our next generation will be left with polluted skies, a dead reef, horrific water scarcity and Australian native species consigned to the history books. This bill represents a choice being made by this government to divvy up our kids' future and give it away in short-term sugar-hit tax cuts. It's fundamentally inefficient. Individual tax cuts do not allow us as a nation to maintain clean air, clean water and liveable cities. There's a point at which we say, 'Yes, that's a job for government.' But if the government is intent on shooting itself in the foot by cutting away the revenue streams that manage our society, our economy and our environment then that's when the Greens will stand up and say, 'No.'

I work a lot on public transport issues as the Greens spokesperson for transport, and I'm regularly presented with the evidence. It is very, very clear that growing urbanised communities need efficient, smart public transport if we're going to get from A to B without being caught up and jammed in traffic for hours every day. People want quick, safe, efficient public transport. When we build it, they do come. The issue is: we're not building it. People are stranded and left with only the car to commute with, and many can't even afford that. Again, there's that equality gap continuing to widen under this government. The absolute shame here is that this government isn't even spending what it trumpets it's spending on its transport infrastructure. When I asked the government about the budget spending on transport during estimates—its $75 billion spend—and I finally got a breakdown, I was shocked that infrastructure spending is actually declining over the next decade not just on a per capita basis but on a real-dollar-value basis. It has nothing to do with equity investment versus grant investment or any of the other sleights of hand that the government performs to cover its lack of spending. The department actually admitted that the average spend will go from $8 billion a year in the decade to 2021-22 to less than $6.4 billion a year in the second half of the next decade. In the period when the full weight of these tax cuts will cut in, we will see the real value of infrastructure spending at its lowest point since 2012. We went away further, after learning that, and looked at the numbers and the projected population growth, and we found that real spending per person will go from $379 a person in the 2016-17 financial year to only $226 per person in the years from 2022 to 2028. This is a 40 per cent cut in per capita spending.

That is what we need to overcome. We need more revenue. We need more investment in our public transport, not less—not $144 billion less in revenue over the next decade. Imagine what we could do with $144 billion in revenue if we decided to spend it on public transport. We would transform our cities. We would be able to afford every public transport project. That would mean that our cities would be able to function well—whether it was airport rail, Doncaster rail or the Melbourne's Metro 2 underground. These sorts of projects are what would transform our cities, creating a huge amount of employment, investment—economic activity—as well as creating the sort of society and the sorts of liveable cities that we know we need. That is what we need government revenue to be spent on—projects like this. We need smart, substantial investment in our cities and in public transport. Tax cuts do not help gridlock. Do you know what does? It's smart government investment with a vision for our kids' future. And these tax cuts in this bill would prevent this investment.

The Greens' opposition to this bill, the Greens' commitment to us having enough money to spend on essential services, to spend on housing, on schools, on education, on health services and on infrastructure, is not some whacky vision of the future. This view—that we need to be able to maintain those quality services—is supported by mainstream Australia. Peter Lewis wrote in The Guardian last week, as part of its series of 'Life on the Breadline', that 92 per cent of Australians agree with the proposition that no-one should go without basic essentials like food, health care, transport and power—92 per cent. Yet people today are in that position of having to go without those basic essentials. But the vast majority of Australians want to see a society and an Australia that is fairer and better than that. As Peter Lewis said:

It is enough to make you think people are starting to look at themselves as part of a society, rather than just the economy.

We do live in a society. Taxes that are imposed progressively and the spending of them determined in a transparent, accountable, equitable way are an absolute cornerstone of that society. We need to be maintaining our tax base to be able to pay for the things that make Australia a great country. It still is a great country, but it has been going in the wrong direction for many years, particularly under this last government. We need to be maintaining our tax base to be able to pay for those services, to be making Australia that place that we can be proud of calling our home, where we can be proud to be together as an Australian society. So I urge all members of this place to join the Greens in rejecting this regressive, harmful legislation.

Anne Urquhart (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak against the Turnbull government's Treasury Laws Amendment (Personal Income Tax Plan) Bill 2018 in its current form. I do so for the 39,000 workers on the north-west coast of Tasmania, the west coast of Tasmania and King Island, who will be better off under Labor's bigger, better, fairer income tax plan. I do so for my late mother, a woman who chose to be an aged-care worker, a woman who gave her all for the people that she cared for, a union woman who organised her colleagues to get a better deal around our family's kitchen table decades ago. I do so for the more than 360,000 aged-care workers across the country who this Prime Minister attacked just hours ago in the other place.

I say firmly to Prime Minister Turnbull, for saying that a 60-year-old aged-care worker in Burnie should aspire to get a better job, it is clear that his definition of 'better' demonstrates how little he values our aged-care workers, it is clear how little the Prime Minister values the women workers who fill 87 per cent of Australia's aged-care workforce and it's clear how little the Prime Minister cares about people in our aged-care homes and that he sees caring for them as something that people should not aspire to do. This type of patronising comment from the Prime Minister hurts. It hurts deep in your guts and deep in your heart. I think, worst of all, it was totally unnecessary.

The Prime Minister was asked a simple question today about who government should prioritise for income tax cuts. Should a 60-year-old aged-care worker from Burnie aspire to be an investment banker so that they can get a bigger tax cut? The Prime Minister responded:

The 60-year-old aged-care worker in Burnie is entitled to aspire to get a better job, is entitled to get a promotion, and earn more.

This is a 60-year-old worker who is highly trained as an aged-care worker. Why would we want them to retrain and get a different job? Why would we, as a society, not want them to be earning a good income from the job that they actually love, staying in the workforce, training their younger colleagues and continuing to provide care and support to their residents on a daily basis—residents who are our mums, dads, grandparents, aunties, uncles and cherished friends? Why do we not prioritise giving them a little bit more in take-home pay so that they can continue to provide an invaluable community service? That is what this debate is about tonight: work at its most basic principle.

I believe you'll never get a better comparison of Labor versus Liberal than on this issue where the Prime Minister defines 'better' as something other than work. Labor values all workers. Where the Prime Minister thinks people should just get a promotion, Labor values all workers. Where the Prime Minister promotes aspiration as fundamental, Labor promotes and values all workers.

One worker who I want to highlight tonight is Jeanette Parsons from Wynyard, a beautiful seaside town that is just a 10-minute drive west of Burnie. Jeanette is a member of the Health and Community Services Union Tasmanian branch. She spoke at the Change The Rules launch in Davenport earlier this month, which I attended with a number of my Labor colleagues. Jeanette and her colleagues are enduring a four-year enterprise bargaining agreement negotiation with their employer Wynyard Care Centre. The Wynyard Care Centre is owned by Synovum Care who promote on their website:

A new direction in aged care … 'as normal life as possible'.

The aged-care workers at Wynyard Care Centre have been fighting for four years just for a conversation on their EBA. The aged-care workers at Wynyard Care Centre don't need a new direction in aged care; they need their employer to sit down and bargain in good faith. Jeanette spoke at the Change the Rules campaign launch in Devonport. She told the room:

It has been a very long, tough struggle with no advantages in that time. We need that to change. We need to be able to go into an EBA, have a conversation, a negotiation, and work it out fairly and sign off on it and get on with our everyday work.

I hope someone from Synovum was listening that day and, if not, that they sit up and listen after today. These aged-care workers in Wynyard, just like the other 360,000 workers across the country, just want a fair EBA signed off so that they can get on with their everyday work, so that they can get on with caring for their residents. They don't have to aspire to a better job, as our Prime Minister suggested, just to get a fair deal at work and a decent tax cut from the government, and neither do millions of other Australians working in retail and hospitality, in health, education and community services, in our ships and on our docks, in construction and manufacturing, or in forestry, mining or agriculture. I congratulate the Australian trade union movement for its Change The Rules campaign. I was pleased to join thousands of unionists out in front of Parliament House today to hear of the severe issues plaguing our workplaces right across the country.

This tax debate clearly fits into exactly the same narrative. It's about choices. The people of Burnie and Wynyard and across the electorate of Braddon, down the west coast, over on King Island, up in Circular Head and in Devonport, Ulverstone and Latrobe will make a choice on 28 July. On tax, the choice is between a Shorten Labor government, which will deliver permanent tax relief to 39,000 people in Braddon, and Prime Minister Turnbull's out-of-touch tax cuts, where the biggest benefits will go to his own electorate of Wentworth. Braddon sits 147th in the national pecking order and is the fourth-smallest beneficiary in the whole country.

Justine Keay and Bill Shorten will almost double the Turnbull government's tax relief for 39,000 workers on the north-west and west coasts of Tasmania and over on King Island. This will see everyone earning less than $125,000 up to $928 a year better off over the next four years. In comparison, Brett Whiteley and Prime Minister Turnbull want someone on $200,000 to pay the same tax rate as someone on $40,000. This legislation, with our amendments, will deliver tax relief to 10 million Australians on 1 July this year. But Brett Whiteley and Prime Minister Turnbull are trying to hold Australian workers to ransom while he defends a tax cut for millionaires—a tax cut that doesn't take effect for six years, a tax cut that will benefit only four per cent of income earners in Tasmania, a tax cut that is deeply unfair and unjust.

Tax cuts for working Tasmanians should not be held hostage to tax cuts for bankers in six years. Brett Whiteley and Prime Minister Turnbull need to stop standing in the way of tax cuts for teachers and tradies, for shop assistants and carers. We all know that former banker Brett Whiteley voted six times against a banking royal commission and that he is totally locked in behind Prime Minister Turnbull's $17 billion taxpayer funded handout to the big banks. People in Braddon know what Brett Whiteley stands for. They booted him out of office twice. I'm confident that when the people of Braddon compare the policies and values of Justine Keay and Labor with those of Brett Whiteley and the Liberals, he will be defeated again.

I will finish where I began: paying tribute to the 360,000 aged-care workers in this country, 87 per cent of whom are working women. I say this to the women and men who work in aged care: I value your work. I value your labour. I value the real contribution that you make to the lives of our precious aged-care residents. Labor will give you a bigger, better tax cut. Labor will work with you and your unions to improve our aged-care sector. And Labor will never ever devalue your hard work.

Jordon Steele-John (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have had many a reason and opportunity to wonder whether the workings of this place are in any way in touch with the needs, desires and aspirations of the Australian people, but never so clearly has an example been given to me that we are so disconnected from the Australian community than this tax package. The Australian community that I know—that I love and that I have called my home for most of my life—the values that we hold are of community, are of coming together to get things done and are of fairness. What this means for our taxing contribution system is that we believe that if you are a bit better off you pay a little bit more and if you are less well-off you pay a little bit less. We pool our resources and we fund education, health and transformative programs such as the NDIS. We help our farmers, our young people and our older Australians. We lend a hand.

What this bill seeks to do—what this toxic, greedy package seeks to do—is rip apart the foundation of that fairness and take away from the Australian community the ability to make those changes in people's lives and to invest in the services that they need to live a good life.

You have heard this evening that the view of the Australian people is that everybody believes—the overwhelming majority of us believe—that it is the right of every Australian to live a good life, to have a job, to have a home, to have an education and to live in an environment that is safe, and yet this package systemically seeks to undermine this place's ability to provide those rights for people.

The Liberal government has spent the best part of the last 10 years telling the Australian electorate that there is simply not enough to go around; that we must slash, burn and cut essential services and advocacy groups, and tear down infrastructure spending simply to get a magical budget back into balance. Then overnight—the minute the opinion polls require it and you've got a sniff in the right direction—all of a sudden there's $144 billion sloshing around waiting to be spent. It's $144 billion over the next 10 years and the best this government can think to do with it is give it to the big end of town, not to health, not to education, not to the NDIS, not to ensure that young people have safe and secure work, not to ensure that young people can buy a house affordably, not to ensure that we can go to university, not to ensure that we can go to good-quality TAFE. No, Malcolm Turnbull says: 'Give it to the big end of town. Give it to Gina. Give it to Clive. Give it to Twiggy. They need it. God knows they need another yacht. God knows I need a second house. God knows I just can't take the burden of paying my share.'

It is a disgrace. I sit within this chamber, ashamed of it. There are thousands of people who this very night will go to sleep on the streets of this nation's capitals. There are thousands of farmers who do not know where the next month's pay will come from. There are thousands of women suffering in domestic violence situations. There are thousands of young people struggling with addiction. And yet this chamber is being asked to consider that its highest priority be that billions of dollars be given to billionaires. It is disgusting.

As a former Labor supporter, as a member of a former Labor household, I have to say how disappointed I am to have heard the contributions so far of the Labor Party and to have read in the newspapers today—and over the last couple of months—of their position. I come from a strongly Labor area. My local member is a Labor MP. I live, and proudly so, in the South Metropolitan area of Western Australia. If you want to know what unemployment looks like, what youth unemployment looks like, what lack of services looks like, come to my local community and my local area.

I will tell you now that what the people of my community need is not a double-the-size-because-we-can't-think-of-anything-better-to-do tax cut. They need an increase to Newstart. They need a mandated living wage. They need health. They need education services. They need addiction services. They do not need a tax cut. They need essential services and they need them now, and I am so disappointed to see the Labor Party join in with the government on the rhetoric around this tax auction: 'Who can one-up the other on offering this side or that side a bigger tax cut so we can win the next election, win the next by-election? Let's make sure that we can stay here, rather than thinking about those who need us.'

I have spent too long talking with people who do not know where their next meal will come from and I have spent too long talking with people who do not know if they will have a roof over their head to indulge either side of this chamber in its fantasy that what it is seeking to do will go anywhere near addressing the real needs of Australians who are vulnerable, Australians in need, Australians who should be the focus of the work of this place.

I sit here as the youngest person elected to the Australian Senate. Young people speak to me frequently about their desires and fears and aspirations for the future, and not one of them has ever said to me that the No. 1 priority of Australian politics should be giving billions of dollars to billionaires. Not one of them has said to me, 'What I would like to see is a more greedy society, a more selfish society, a society where we turn on each other and away from each other.' Universally, they say to me that they want to live in a community which cares for each other, which says no to poverty, which says no to fear, which is brave and inclusive and innovative, a community where they know that there will be a job for them when they graduate, a community where they know that their family will be safe.

Those things can only be ensured, those rights can only be safeguarded, when we have the resources to make it so. This package fundamentally undermines our ability to do that. It is greed. It is selfishness. It is political expediency above the needs of the people in its most grotesque form. It is a cold and absolutely atrocious attempt to buy an electorate.

I tell this government that the Australian people are far smarter and far kinder than we so often give them credit for. They see through this. They see through you. They will demand, when they are given the next opportunity, that all of those who participated in this horrendous exercise, which undercuts the community's ability to care for their most vulnerable and safeguard a good future, answer for their actions over the next two days. I take some solace in the knowledge that we in the Australian Greens are at least brave enough to argue that, if there is money to be invested, it go to those who need it, not to those who want it and are able to get the ear of this parliament the most. I thank the chamber for its time.

Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Australia has a progressive tax system. That's something that we've had since very early in our history, and it lies at the heart of our conception as an egalitarian nation. I start with that historical fact because there has been quite a lot of commentary from members of the coalition here and in the other place and in the media about how unfair it is to have people on higher incomes pay a higher rate of income tax than those on lower incomes. They have a way of talking about this in the tech world. They say, 'This is a feature, not a bug.' It is by design that we ask people who earn more to contribute disproportionately more. That is because we are a society that has always said: 'We will not leave people behind. We will use our resources to lift up everybody.'

When asked by my colleague Senator Hume at the Senate Economics Legislation Committee inquiry into the Treasury Laws Amendment (Personal Income Tax Plan) Bill 2018 what the effect of this package would be on Australia's tax system, the head of the Grattan Institute, the centrist think tank, replied, 'It will be less progressive than it is at the moment.' We know from analysis of the package that this is primarily the result of tranche 3 of the government's package. The consequences of that shift to a less progressive tax system should be the feature of tonight's debate. The effect of moving to a less progressive tax system is that money begins to flow to where it already is—our tax and transfer system does less work to address inequality. Practically, the benefits of this package overwhelmingly flow to groups and sectors that are already doing well. That is the basis for Labor's decision to support only stage 1 of this package, because the balance of the package will make our tax system less progressive and less fair.

I want to take some time to look at two dimensions of this: gender and geography. I'll start with geography. I think senators know that I grew up in a small regional town. When I was growing up that town had very high rates of long-term unemployment. It was a town where very few people had been to university and very few people hoped to go to university. Some things have got better in regional Australia—certainly things have got better in my town—but all of the data tells us that it is in our regions that people still do it hard.

The Brotherhood of St Laurence released a report a few months back that showed that the hotspots for youth unemployment are in rural and regional Australia—67 per cent in outback Queensland; 30 per cent in the Southern Highlands and the Shoalhaven, in my home state of New South Wales; and well above 16 per cent in Tasmania's south-east, in the Murray and on the Coffs Coast, up on the North Coast near where I grew up.

What does this tax package do for the people in those places? Well, not much. The National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling, NATSEM, did some work to have a look at how the benefits of the government's income tax package are distributed geographically. The results are pretty stark, because the lion's share flow to the very wealthy electorates in our capital cities. The analysis they provided lets you rank the federal electorates in order of the benefit that they receive from the package, from the most to the least, and the top 10 electorates—every single one of them—are from Sydney and Melbourne. None of them are regional. Average households in any of the top 10 electorates would get at least 50 per cent more than the average Australian household when you look at all households. Of course, as has been widely noted, it's the Prime Minister's electorate, the electorate of Wentworth, that gets the largest benefit. One-quarter of the National Party electorates are in the bottom 10. It's an unbelievable concentration of disadvantage, represented allegedly by the National Party in this place. There's only one National Party electorate in the top half. Where are the National Party in all of this? Where are they? They're not in this chamber standing up. They are sitting next to the Liberal Party with their mouths closed. They're sitting next to the Liberal Party, being held hostage by the ideologues who have never pretended for a moment that they give a fig for the people in the regions who are doing it tough, the people experiencing 30 per cent youth unemployment.

I want to talk about women too, because this has been a week when people have wanted to speak a great deal about their commitment to women, to their safety, to their equality and to their economic opportunities. The Labor Party has raised, during the course of the debate, the very different impacts that this package has on men and women. The analysis shows that the final stage of this tax plan delivers three times as much benefit to men as to women. That's $30 billion going to men and just $11 billion going to women. Across the total package, it's still pretty stark: $90 billion in tax cuts delivered to men compared to $50 billion delivered to women. There's an opportunity cost when you do these things because, when you take $143 billion out of the budget, it lessens the government's ability to undertake measures that address the economic position of women.

When confronted with these facts, how did government react? The Treasurer went from angry to silly. He decided his approach would be merely to mock these things. He started talking nonsense about pink and blue forms. The Treasury secretary was more sober, but he dismissed it by saying that the tax cuts are gender neutral. He simply denied the facts. During the Senate committee hearings, I asked the National Foundation for Australian Women about these comments. I asked: is this tax package gender neutral? Do you know what they said? Marie Coleman said:

That's just a nonsense. The intention was gender-blind, I would say, rather than gender-neutral. The statistics that are there clearly indicate that these tax cuts are a long, long way from being gender neutral.

Let's think about it for a minute. The government is taking a decision to distribute $143 billion over 10 years. It is, by some accounts, the largest single tax cut in a budget ever. Let's be clear: if you're going to distribute $143 billion, if you're going to try to put that into the discretionary earnings of households, there's more than one way you can do it. This government has deliberately chosen to design its tax intervention in a way that delivers the vast bulk of the money to the men of Australia.

Women are already earning less than men. They have less wealth than men. They retire with half the superannuation of men. Women bear a significant economic penalty for the caring responsibilities that they take on in looking after women, looking after older residents and looking after children, including children with disabilities. Government policy should respond to this. It is not good enough to say this is merely a response generated by the market. That is what government is for. It is to see inequality and to address it, and the failure to address it in this package is disgraceful.

The worst thing is that the government didn't even look. On every occasion in the last three years when I have asked Treasury officials, 'Have you undertaken analysis on how this impacts women?' the answer has been no. They do not care to look. The truth is this: you cannot come into this place and say that you're interested in defending and supporting the economic interests of Australian women if you do not even bother to find out how your measures, how your decisions in government, will impact on Australian women and whether they will support them or, indeed, harm them. This government doesn't even know. It doesn't know because it doesn't care to look.

Ironically, had the government chosen to look, it may have found some information that would have assisted it in better meeting its stated aims in introducing this package. The Treasurer claims that this bill aims to deliver fairness and remove disincentives to work, but the evidence is that it fails on this front. Mr John Daley, from the Grattan Institute, indicated that the benefits in this bill flow to high-income earners. Those people are, of course, already working full time. There's not going to be a huge increase in labour market participation because men working full time on high salaries get a tax cut. They're already working at capacity. The real economic opportunity, if you want to lift labour market participation, is actually to reduce the very, very high barriers to women working. Women who are the second earner in a family can, in some instances, face almost a 100 per cent effective marginal tax rate when they take on an extra day of work. The reason is that when they go to work that third day they tip over that threshold and they start to lose their childcare benefit, start to lose their family tax benefit and pay more income tax. The combination of those things means that they take almost no extra money home at all. It is literally not worth it financially to attend work. And that is a policy design problem. If you tackled it, you would lift the number of hours being worked in the Australian economy. That is something that does have the potential to lift economic growth.

All of the evidence suggests that if we can increase women's participation we can grow the economy. But the government didn't think about that. The government didn't think about it because it dismisses out of hand any argument that suggests you ought to take care about how your policies impact on women. It dismisses them. It laughs at them. It treats women with contempt. I tell you what: I think the women of Australia are noticing.

There are people in this chamber and in the community who believe in small government. They believe in a flat tax, and they believe that for ideological reasons. They think it's okay to ignore the consequences for less-privileged members of our society. Those people—like Senator Leyonhjelm, who was here in the chamber earlier—argue for their beliefs clearly and openly. But the government, ostensibly, doesn't claim that it's among them. The government, in its public rhetoric, claims to care for the economic wellbeing of women. It claims to care about regional Australia. It claims that its package will incentivise aspiration and convince people to work longer and harder for more. It claims that the package is about fixing bracket creep for ordinary Australians, not about reducing the tax burden for the well-off. But the problem for the government—and it is a problem—is that none of these claims are really true.

This government is stuck defending a package that its far-right base and its donors desperately want, and it's stuck defending the package using arguments it doesn't really believe. If the government wanted to, it could put tranche 1 of its plan up for a vote tonight and this Senate would deliver tax relief for millions of average Australians—Australians that those on the other side claim to care about. But if the government's not going to do that, it should be honest. It should be honest with the Australian public about its actual reasons for wanting a less egalitarian, less progressive tax system.

Chris Ketter (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to contribute in relation to the Treasury Laws Amendment (Personal Income Tax Plan) Bill 2018. There are a number of things about this bill that are a mystery to me. We know that this bill has failed the fairness test, particularly in respect to tranches 2 and 3. We know that this bill fails the test of being fair dinkum, because if you were genuinely interested in providing relief for low-income households you wouldn't tie that to tax cuts for the big end of town. Thirdly, it fails the test of being fiscally responsible. So I'm mystified as to why this government wants to take the approach that it does. I want to add my plea to the government to split the schedules of this bill and have a proper debate over stages 2 and 3 of the never-never tax plan.

Labor support tax relief for low- and middle-income earners, and we are very happy to vote right now on stage 1. We've been very clear about that. But, as I said, this plan fails the fairness test. It is based on ideology and on some twisted political strategy that I do not think the people of Australia will appreciate. It's based on an ideology; it's not about achieving outcomes, such as workforce participation and economic growth. And, as I said, it's fiscally irresponsible. Labor have a bigger, better, fairer tax plan. We will almost double the relief for taxpayers earning up to $125,000. If the government refuses to split this bill now, for 10 million Australians, then an incoming Shorten Labor government will do it.

I will come back to Labor's commitment, time permitting, but let's look at the government's proposal. The cost of these personal income tax cuts over the medium term is $143.95 billion. This deserves proper scrutiny and analysis, as speakers tonight have indicated. What I get concerned about when we talk about that sort of money, that sort of loss of tax receipts for the Commonwealth, is: are we gambling on the fact that we've now had five minutes of economic sunshine, with tax receipts coming in at the moment fuelled by, amongst other things, commodity prices, when we know that down the track, with all the global headwinds that we have ahead of us, we see the potential for a trade war out there in the global economy? With all these clouds on the horizon, we are now saying, 'Let's gamble on all of that and give tax cuts six years down the track after two general elections.'

That's why Labor pushed for a Senate inquiry into this bill. I've already spoken today on some of the evidence that we obtained in the course of that inquiry. It's also why Labor senators asked the Parliamentary Budget Office to provide figures on the package after repeated requests of the government to release its figures. This is a ridiculous situation—the government ordering Treasury not to release costings beyond the forward estimates, despite basing this never-never plan on those same costings. This government's lack of transparency is woeful, and politicising the Treasury is not on. So, on behalf of Labor senators, I wish to thank the PBO for doing this work and providing us with the figures to examine in relatively tight time frames.

The figures tell us that step 1 carries a relatively modest cost of $15.9 billion over the medium term and is targeted at low- to middle-income earners. Step 2, which contains a number of different tax changes, contains the majority of the costs of this package over the medium term, given that step 3, which ultimately is very expensive, only commences in 2024-25. When we come to step three, it's very expensive at the end of the medium term at $10.35 billion per year compared to the full package final annual cost of $24.6 billion per year, and the cost of step three grows at about 12 per cent per year—twice the rate of projected nominal GDP growth. If you are looking at fiscal recklessness and trying to put something into the budget which is, essentially, a time bomb for future generations, then this is, in my view, fiscal irresponsibility.

I reiterate our support for step 1 of the package. It's unfortunate the government decided to try and push through the rest of this stealthy plan under the cover of relief to low- and middle-income Australians. We know the standards of how the Liberal-National Party operate in this place are pretty low. We know that they dress up their ideological attacks on unions and workers in superannuation bills. We know that they skip out on estimates when the questions get tough. Most recently, we saw them sneak in a super amnesty bill under the cover of the budget to protect businesses that have been ripping off workers since 1992.

Unfortunately, those opposite have no qualms about holding the first round of personal income tax cuts hostage to avoid debate on their long-term ideological agenda. That is why it is crucial that the Senate holds this government to account. That's why having an inquiry into this legislation was so important. I want to take a moment to thank all of those witnesses and participants in the inquiry. We heard from the Grattan Institute, the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling, or NATSEM, the Australian National University, the National Foundation for Australian Women, the Council of Small Business Organisations Australia, the ACTU, Industry Super Australia and, of course, we heard from Treasury officials. Our report was tabled in the Senate on Monday night and is now available on the aph.gov.au website for anyone interested who is listening at home.

I want to quickly run through some of the key things that emerged and some of the evidence we heard. First, it is unfortunate the government is tying this short-term relief to distant promises in the never-never. Second, the long-term benefits of this package will flow more to higher-income earners. That point has been made very strongly by previous Labor speakers. Third, flattening the tax rate—in this case, making people earning $41,000 a year pay the same marginal tax rate as those on $200,000 a year—is a regressive measure. In fact, we heard from one of the witnesses that this schedule, were the tax plan to be finally implemented, would make it the least progressive tax schedule that we've had in the history of our country. And it does nothing to address structural inequality—things like regional inequality and gender balance.

There are national and global factors about which we don't have certainty—I've touched on these—which could impact on the government's and Treasury's forecasts. Earlier today, I talked about some of the heroic assumptions that underpin the surplus predictions. I won't go back over those, but it does give cause for worry if wages growth does not meet the predictions of the budget. We know that Treasury has highlighted some of the geopolitical risks we are facing in the future. But, in order to justify the package that we are debating today, the government continues to rely on its budget projections—projections that predict the wafer-thin return to surplus at the end of the forward estimates period. It is wafer-thin. Whilst we are in the middle of an economic upswing at the moment, NATSEM points out in its analysis of the federal budget that Treasury did not predict this growth even five months ago in MYEFO. So, if that was not predicted, there is absolutely no guarantee that the government has got it right now. How do we know that this unexpected windfall in terms of tax receipts is going to continue for much longer?

What we didn't hear during our inquiry and what I was hoping we might hear in this debate tonight was any compelling evidence that top marginal income tax rates need to be lowered to attract or keep high-income earners in Australia. We did hear that high effective marginal tax rates are often faced by taxpayers not in the top income brackets and can act as a deterrents to workforce participation, particularly in the case of women juggling a return to work with caring for children. Based on evidence, both given to our inquiry and available globally, Labor senators have expressed a number of concerns, and I commend our dissenting report to anyone listening. It was interesting that, during the course of our inquiry, we noted that there was evidence that in fact, just recently, 10,000 millionaires had taken the step of coming to Australia, and virtually none had decided to leave. It was the AfrAsia Bank that had come forward with this interesting information. So obviously our current marginal tax rates are no disincentive for bringing high-wealth individuals into this country.

As I've alluded to, we are deeply concerned that the cumulative impact and loss of revenue flowing from the coalition's corporate tax cuts and from stage 2 in this package will put the budget in a very precarious position. We believe that the budget needs to be in a responsible, sustainable position over the long term to ensure access to fiscal stimulus where needed to protect jobs. This is another one of the areas that the Grattan Institute touched on: we need to have the 'fiscal firepower'—in their terminology—that's necessary if there is going to be a downturn in the future, so the government can take steps. The actions of the last Labor government during the global financial crisis prevented widespread unemployment, and it's important that future governments be afforded such capacity.

We're concerned that, if these personal income tax cuts are passed by parliament, such reductions in revenue could be used by a future coalition government during an economic slowdown to justify cuts to essential services such as health, education and infrastructure. These are the cuts that we know coalition governments want to make.

And we've got serious reservations about the ability of the coalition to balance the books. We should never forget the fact that in 2014 we were confronted with the rhetoric about the 'debt and deficit disaster' that we had. We had to justify all sorts of horrendous cuts in the budget as a result of this so-called debt and deficit disaster. That has now disappeared. Obviously the government isn't interested in talking about those sorts of things, despite the fact that gross debt has crashed through the $500 billion barrier and is on an upward trajectory, and net debt in this coming year is double what it was when the coalition came into office. We know that gross debt will remain well above half a trillion dollars every year for the next decade, yet the government pushes on with its plan to give banks and big business, amongst others, $80 billion in tax cuts. Clearly the coalition have abandoned all hope of repairing their abysmal record on debt and deficit.

I could talk more about Longman. I am concerned about the voters of Longman and the choices that they make, but I do want to reiterate the point that 75 per cent of the good people of Longman would be better off under Labor's tax plan, and that equates to 69,000 voters in the seat of Longman.

In closing, I want to make the point that those opposite want to talk about gaming the tax system, but they do nothing about employers gaming the industrial relations system. They're happy to talk about low- and middle-income earners needing tax relief because of cost-of-living pressures, but they do nothing—as I said earlier today—about the rising gig economy, underemployment, stagnating wages, cuts to penalty rates, the theft of superannuation or the gender gap. They laud the tax package as an incentive for people to work longer hours but ignore the fact that over a million Australians want more work and can't get it. Infighting has crippled them on energy policy, and they're ripping billions out of our education and health systems. Yet the company tax proposal is still a priority, giving billions of dollars to multinationals and banks.

We're not afraid to look at these issues and to take the tough decisions. We're not afraid of the analysis, unlike those opposite. That's why we've been up-front and transparent in releasing our policies earlier. Now more than ever we need a Labor government to tackle inequality and restore trust in government. Labor is ready to govern. We have a better, fairer plan for our tax system, and I urge the government to let go of its fiscally irresponsible and unfair tax plans. I urge those opposite to finally see sense and work with Labor to deliver bigger, better, fairer personal income tax cuts to Australians.

Tim Storer (SA, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I do not plan to take up too much of the Senate's time. I simply pose one question: what is it that we are trying to do here? Are we trying to inject a modest degree of fairness into the tax system for those who have struggled most in recent years—low- and middle-income earners who have suffered from wage stagnation which shows little sign of recovering and who are struggling to pay the bills for services which keep them warm and cook their meals—or are we holding out for the promise of tax cuts which would overwhelmingly benefit wealthier taxpayers but not for another six to seven years and then only if they still prove to be affordable?

Reputable research from the Grattan Institute suggests that only the top 20 per cent of taxpayers would receive more than a one per cent cut in average tax rates over the 10-year lifetime of the tax package, but the cost of stages 2 and 3 of the program is a staggering $120 billion. Why? It is because the vast bulk of the benefit of these two stages goes to the top 20 per cent of taxpayers. On the other hand, according to Grattan, a person earning $36,000 today would see their average tax rate climb by six per cent. A six per cent increase for a low-income earner; substantial tax cuts for the well-off—that seems hardly fair, even a denial of our much-celebrated national characteristic, the fair go.

As I've said many times now, I am right behind stage 1 of the package. It is fair, modest, well targeted and neatly designed. The less well off get some relief to reduce the headaches of household bills. It comes in immediately, although the low- and middle-income tax offset would not be paid until workers submit their tax returns for the next financial year. It recognises the delicate state of the current budget. The price tag is reasonable along with increasing the threshold for the 32½ per cent tax bracket to $87,000 to $90,000, which is at no more than $4½ billion a year through the forward estimates. For that the government would have my support right now.

But they say it's a package only to be taken as a whole. It is almost as if they are suggesting that removing the first step—the only step, by the way, that would come into effect in the term of this parliament—would make this whole thing collapse as if it were a house of cards, but nothing could be further from the truth. Step 1 is tangible. It would be law within weeks. Stages 2 and 3 are aspirational—a word bandied-about quite a bit in the building in recent days—but is it an admirable aspiration or a rash objective?

In the last few hours we've seen the Australian dollar fall below 74 cents for the first time in more than a year, the Reserve Bank's latest minutes have removed any mention of the next movement in interest rates being more likely to be up than down, and stock markets around the world have plunged as fears of a global trade war take hold. These tremors may pass, but they are an immediate reminder of how uncertain not just the global but also the domestic economic environment may turn out to be. If the ripples of fear about Trump and trade turn into waves crashing on the shores of the world's trading nations, Australia will suffer more than its share of the consequences.

Locking future parliaments into massive reductions in revenues—$80 billion in the case of stage 2 and another $40 billion in the case of stage 3—is risky business indeed. Should Treasury's optimistic projections for the period beyond the forward estimates undershoot by just a little—and it is hard to find a respected economist who believes there will be a rapid return to trend in wage growth—then the consequences for the state of the budget and the affordability of the tax cuts will be significant indeed. Either gross debt, already well above $550 billion with interest payments of $18 billion a year, will continue to rise or the services which Australians have demonstrated they expect at election after election will once again have to be cut: fewer nurses, fewer teachers, fewer of the new roads and bridges my home state of South Australia is demanding. Who of us will be thanked for that should that turn out to be the case?

The solution is simple: vote for stage 1 and extend the low- and middle-income tax offset beyond the forward estimates. Those of us who are fortunate enough to be in this place after the next election can then address tax relief more certain in the knowledge that we have the data we need to ensure the reforms fit the economic circumstances. It is irresponsible to do otherwise.

The government's insistence on treating the package as a single entity that cannot be broken down into its individual elements is both bad policy and tricky politics. The very structure of the government's package is revealing. The fact that stages 2 and 3 are so far over the horizon that you can't see them is an acknowledgement of the still-precarious state of the budget. If they were unequivocally affordable, all three stages would be coming into effect right now. The fact that they are two or three elections away is a reminder that returning the budget to balance remains a difficult task. In effect, the government is offering voters a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but it is a rainbow that is as much as seven years away.

None of those who support the latter stages of the tax program have anything to lose by splitting the bill. That is why I will be moving amendments in committee to remove all but stage 1 from the legislation, while ensuring that the less-well-paid, who would benefit from its introduction, would not subsequently lose out in four years' time. There is no reason to legislate tax cuts four and six years away except to hold future parliaments to ransom and hold out what may well prove to be a false hope to voters.

Catryna Bilyk (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to speak on the Treasury Laws Amendment (Personal Income Tax Plan) Bill 2018. I hope people listening aren't fooled by the government's budget and its so-called tax plan. Although Australia has enjoyed 27 years of recession-free economic growth, the government's tax package is predicated on Australia enjoying 37 years of recession-free economic growth. The Treasurer is promising tax cuts out in the never-never, beyond the forward estimates and way beyond this term and even the next term of government. For this government to say that they know and are certain they can deliver tax cuts in 2024 is just a joke. To make this tax plan remotely workable, the government is relying on an overly optimistic view on how the economy might proceed over the next decade. Mr Morrison is looking more like the Wizard of Oz—all smoke and mirrors—than the Treasurer of Aus, and we all know that the Wizard of Oz was just a rather ordinary man.

There is one thing this government has achieved that is quite remarkable—a rare trifecta. The tax plan is fiscally reckless. It will lock in a less-progressive tax system and it will leave Australia less able to support Australian jobs in the event of a downturn. As it stands, Labor will be the only major party presenting a responsible and fair budget plan at the next election. Despite the government's claim that this tax cut will benefit low-income earners, its plan overwhelmingly favours higher-income earners as well as attacking the foundations of Australia's progressive tax system.

Labor supports fair and responsible tax cuts and Labor understands that workers are doing it tough. We know many workers in Australia are struggling with energy costs and health costs that are higher than ever and we also know that under this government workers in Australia have suffered the worst wages growth since records began. The most recent national accounts highlight, once again, that average compensation for workers is not keeping up with the general cost of living. Let's not forget that many casual workers have had their penalty rates slashed as well. This is exactly why Labor has outlined its plan for bigger, better and fairer tax cuts for 10 million working Australians. Labor's policy will see pay-as-you-go taxpayers who earn up to $125,000 a year better off when compared to the Liberal Party's plan. These are targeted and paid for, will deliver a bigger boost to consumption and won't jeopardise the medium-term budget position and important investments in our hospitals and schools.

Labor's tax refund for working Australians increases the tax cuts currently being offered under the government's tax offset proposal. Labor will support the government's measure that begins on 1 July this year and a Shorten Labor government will deliver bigger tax cuts from 1 July 2019—and they will be permanent. With Labor's tax refund, a teacher on $65,000 will receive a tax cut of $928 a year. A couple earning $90,000 and $50,000 respectively will receive a tax cut of $1,855 a year. More than four million people will be better off by $398 a year compared to the Liberals' plan. Around 77 per cent of Tasmanians—my home state—will benefit from Labor's plan, and 39,000 taxpayers in the electorate of Braddon in north-west Tasmania will be better off with Justine Keay and a Shorten Labor government.

Costed by the independent Parliamentary Budget Office, Labor's policy has a budget impact of $5.8 billion over the forward estimates. Labor has got the big calls right and has made the difficult budget decisions that will allow us to put in place a better plan to tackle debt and deficit. Labor's budget plan provides the fiscal space to deal with international shocks while delivering bigger and better tax cuts for low- and middle-income Australians and protecting essential investments in health and in education.

When it comes to the budget Labor has the responsible and superior plan. Unlike the government, we are not giving $17 billion in tax cuts to the same banks whose shameless behaviour is now being exposed at the banking royal commission. Unlike the government, we are not giving $80 billion to big businesses, including multinationals who will just take the extra funds offshore.

Let's talk about some of the unfairness in the bill before us tonight. Labor in good faith cannot support stage 2 and stage 3 of this tax plan. It's unjust and it's unsustainable. The Australian National University's Ben Phillips has estimated that after the government's full plan is in place someone in the highest quintile will see a 2.2 per cent rise in their incomes compared to a 1.1 per cent rise for those in the middle quintile and a 0.2 per cent rise in the lowest quintile. By 2027 around 60 per cent of the tax cuts will go to the top 20 per cent of households. NATSEM modelling suggests this new tax system from 2024 to 2025 is less progressive than the current system, and that means higher income inequality—those on higher incomes get more of the tax cuts than those on lower incomes.

As part of the new proposal, low- and middle-income earners get a tax offset in 2018-19 with high-income earners getting very little. This part of the plan is progressive as more money goes to lower income earners, and Labor's happy to support this part of the plan. Labor will support the government's proposed changes that are to take effect 1 July 2018. Labor supports the change to the top threshold of the 32.5 per cent personal income tax bracket from $87,000 to $90,000. We support this in the same way as Labor supported the change to the threshold from $80,000 to $87,000 that was announced in the 2016 budget and passed through after the election of that year. Labor also supports the low- and middle-income tax offset providing tax relief for taxpayers earning up to $125,333.

This parliament can guarantee that the tax changes due to take effect in two weeks can pass immediately. That's why Labor will move amendments in the Senate to the Treasury Laws Amendment (Personal Income Tax Plan) Bill 2018 to ensure the passage of the tax cuts starting on 1 July. However, we don't agree with the rest of the package. By 2024-25, the Liberals' tax plan means high-income earners gain $7,225 per year while those earning $50,000 to $90,000 gain $540 per year and those earning $30,000 gain $200 per year. The total cost of the government's tax plan is $13.4 billion over the four years of the forward estimates and $143.9 billion over the medium term. This has a major structural impact on the budget over the medium term, particularly when combined with the government's big-business tax cuts, which are due to mature over this period.

The Grattan Institute has calculated that once the three-stage plan is completed $15 billion of the annual $25 billion cost of the plan—that's billion dollars—will result from collecting less tax from the top 20 per cent of income earners. In comparison, $25 billion is what the Commonwealth spends on Medicare each year.

We also now know why the government tried to conceal the cost of its income tax plan. Stage 3 of the tax cuts, due to be delivered in six years time, not only reduces the progressivity of the tax program but is the fastest growing component of the package, coming with a $10 billion annual price tag by the end of the decade. When quizzed about whether it was responsible to commit to $143 billion in new tax cuts, much of it delivered years down the track, the respected Chief Executive of the Grattan Institute, John Daley, astutely told the Economics Legislation Committee:

… we do not think it is prudent to be providing tax cuts of this magnitude that far in the future—certainly not to be legislating them—when there are so many economic uncertainties between now and then.

One of the key progressive features of the Australian taxation system is that the income tax rate increases as your income increases. The government's plan to have one taxation rate for those earning between $40,000 and $200,000 is ludicrous, and it's an attack on the progressive nature of our taxation system. I know that many on the Liberal side of the chamber don't believe that $200,000 a year is a lot of money, but ordinary Australians know that those on $40,000 and those on $200,000 are living completely different lives. The government claims that the need for a single tax bracket between these two incomes is to streamline the tax system. It's just the first step in introducing a flat-rate income tax system across the board.

The government's changes overwhelmingly favour taxpayers on higher incomes more. The Australia Institute made this point to the Senate Economics Legislation Committee:

The problem is that the benefits from the latter stages of the tax will overwhelmingly flow to high-income earners. These latter stages are also worth considerably more in dollar value than stage 1. Increasing the top threshold to $200,000 and removing the 37 per cent tax bracket will mainly benefit the top 20 per cent of tax payers. By 2024, 80 per cent of the benefit of that top end tax cut will go to the top 20 per cent and the remaining 20 per cent will go to the next 20 per cent of taxpayers. This means that the bottom 60 per cent of taxpayers will get no benefit at all.

So it's clear that the government's plan is unaffordable, it's irresponsible and it's unjust. I believe Australians want a fairer Australia, they want a fairer tax system and they're sick of the Liberal Party, whose ideology is for people to only look out for themselves and that their neighbours can go to hell. Australians aren't a selfish people. Australia isn't a selfish nation—at least not the Australia that I grew up in. But the policies of this government inherently are. They appeal only to greed and cause only division. They are focused on creating a less fair and less just society, and the politics of this Liberal-National government are at odds with the notion of a fair go that most Australians hold dear. While we support the first stage of the government's bill, we cannot support the second and third stages. Labor has a fairer and a better tax plan, a plan that wants to build a better Australia, not diminish it.

Lee Rhiannon (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Greens stand against this tax cut giveaway to the big end of town because people deserve better. In this debate, members have already heard from a number of my Greens colleagues, and I strongly endorse their comments. We have a very strong position against the Treasury Laws Amendment (Personal Income Tax Plan) Bill 2018. It's a very destructive bill—destructive to the very fabric of Australian society—and it will create greater inequality. It will be a disaster if it comes in. Everyone deserves well-funded essential public services and proper wage rises, but we won't get them from the bill that's before us now.

What do we get from the Turnbull government? You could really say it's just like crumbs from the table. If you vote for these tax cuts and if they come in, the great majority of Australians will be incredibly disadvantaged. What some of them will receive is just, in the end, a few dollars a week. Overall, what will happen to Australia is less money for the essential public services that are so badly needed—less money for the essential services that we need to extend and to get on with the job.

The Turnbull government is choosing to give cash to the rich instead of putting it towards the vital services that we need and the wage rises for people who need it. What we also see—you can really guess how this government operates; we've seen their track record for too long—is that they would really be rubbing salt into the wound. If these tax cuts go through and if the Liberals and Nationals get re-elected, you can bet that it wouldn't be too long before they would be wailing about another budget emergency and out there grinding the axe—this time on public services. How this Liberal-National government works is that it's always looking to run down services and bring advantages to those who are already wealthy. Whose interests does this government serve? It's corporate Australia. That's what's going on here. Who benefits from these tax cuts? It's going to be made out that it's ordinary salary earners, but what we see coming down the track is cuts to company taxes. That's all part of the package. That's what the real intent here is.

It's interesting to look at the messaging that is being run out here. We heard Senator Cormann either yesterday or today—but we also hear it from many of the government ministers—abusing those who oppose these tax cuts, saying that people who oppose what the government is trying to impose are running class warfare. Those who are running class warfare include everybody from Prime Minister Turnbull down to the members of the Liberal-National government. They are waging class warfare because this bill will drive inequality, and inequality is precisely what makes people angry and want to fight back. In this case, corporate Australia—those people who are very rich, the one per cent; those who already have plenty of wealth to lead a very grand lifestyle—want more. Sadly, this government is out there to deliver more money to this section of society.

Let's just look at the amounts that we're talking about here. If this bill were to go through, it would result in a $140 billion three-stage income tax cut over 10 years. That's $140 billion robbed from public services—public services that urgently need to be extended because they've been run down for so long. Then again, remember—I just mentioned them—the company tax cuts that are coming down the pipeline under this government. If the company tax cuts go through at the level this government wants, it would mean a cut-back of $35.6 billion. Those company tax cuts will benefit businesses with turnovers of more than $50 million a year. It's not even good for those companies, because the way the government run this show is that there have been low wage rises now for a long time. It is one of the factors that is having such a big impact on this economy. But the government are so obsessed—they're the ones waging class warfare—that they are not even willing to structure the industrial relations system to how the economy works so that the minimum wage can go up and all workers can get a fair wage rise. This government is so blinded by its ideological obsession that it can't even see what is good for the economy overall. So we do have a really serious problem before us.

It is interesting to analyse why the government works in this way. I'm not saying that they've sat behind closed doors with those big companies that give them donations, and the companies have worked out, 'Well, give us a tax cut and we'll give you a donation.' We never know what goes on behind closed doors and what deals are done, and I'm not suggesting that that was the deal. But what you see is that the Liberals and Nationals in this government know whose interests they serve and, at the same time, they're getting in big money from the different sectors who will benefit from the whole package of tax cuts that the government intends to bring in—particularly the property industry.

If you look at the donations that have come in from the property industry over many years, it's astronomical. From 1988, it's actually $64 million. Let's look at the current figure. In 2014-15, about $2 million came from the property industry in donations to the political parties—certainly not to the Greens—in this country. In 2013-14, it was about $4 million. That's just not a healthy deal. There you have companies making donations and you end up with governments who think: 'These are our mates. These are people we've got to look after.' So it's a really rotten system. I hear Senator Cormann badger people about class warfare. He is the one leading the charge. He's certainly the main person trying to badger the people of Australia with this very shocking tax arrangement.

We know that the public aren't fooled. A very encouraging poll was released in the lead-up to the budget. People were asked what their priorities were. They were asked what they wanted the government to do. They said that they wanted increased spending. This has come through not just in this poll but so many polls of Australians. The majority of people recognise the need for public money to go into public services.

Again what's going on here is this government representing only a very small section of Australian society. In this poll where they were asked where they wanted public money to go 67 per cent named health care as a top priority, 56 per cent named age pensions as a top priority, 55 per cent named education as a top priority and 52 per cent named affordable housing as a top priority. There we have Australians getting it right, recognising what this country's needs and priorities are. What do we get from the Turnbull government? We get a really mean budget that comes forward with this really ugly tax plan, which will drive inequality and cause so much damage on an individual level, on a family level, on a community level and on our economy because it is just so out of kilter with what any economy needs.

In this poll people were asked to rank the most important issues to be addressed in the budget. More interesting is that only 17 per cent nominated income tax cuts. Again you can easily conclude here that people get it. They can see that inequality is increasing in this society. They know that's wrong and they know that we need funding for our public services. People understand that essential services are more important than a few bucks a week—if you're lucky enough to get that in your pocket. They know it's an insult to just get a few crumbs from the table. No matter how Senator Cormann and Mr Turnbull dress it up, that's what's going on here.

It's worth looking at the issue of wage rises. My colleague Senator Peter Whish-Wilson dealt with this in a very important way when he really examined the minimum wage. The Greens are calling for an increase in the minimum wage. If you listen to the government and believe them, you would think that they were serious about wanting to improve people's lives. But, if you dig a bit deeper, you will see that that's not the case. If the government were serious about it, one, they'd stop waging class warfare and, two, they'd ensure that there were real wage rises. It's pretty obvious how this can be achieved. The government is failing in this area. I'd say that this is another example of their class warfare. They still have the mindset of workers and unions—'We mustn't let them get anything. We need to cut back on wages. We need to stall wages. We need to really make it hard for unions to work.'

The government has many levers available to it to ensure that workers are getting a fair deal, that they're getting a good wage. Often the majority of the wage of low-paid workers is going back into the economy. This is where this government gets it wrong. Many of the businesses or companies that support the government—or the government make out they support them—would prefer a bigger turnover in the economy. These are some of the levers any wise government would be using. They'd be protecting penalty rates. They'd lift the ridiculous public sector pay cap. They'd empower workers to organise through unions to demand a better deal. That's part of how society works. Unions are part of helping workers organise on a collective basis so that they can get a decent wage rise. They'd push to raise the minimum wage. The government is totally silent on this. They've done none of it. They've just about, effectively, frozen wages.

The Australia Institute have done some analysis on whether real wage rises or small tax cuts would put more money in people's pockets. I congratulate them and urge everybody to look at this research. Again, it sums up in a nutshell how wrong this government has got the bill presently before us. Just to give you a couple of examples, if your current earnings are about $40,000, under the coalition tax plan what would you get back? It is $290. If there were an annual 3.5 per cent wage increase—not real high; that's pretty average these days—you would get an increase across the year of $4,780. If you are earning $125,000 per year, what would you get under a coalition tax plan? It's $135 in your pocket. What's that? Depending on where you shop, it's a sandwich and a cup of coffee a week. With annual 3.5 per cent wage increases, you get $11,617 in your pocket. That's what would be coming back to you. That, again, reflects how wrong the direction is that the government are taking us in. That's why I keep repeating that we need to ask ourselves why they're doing it. They are doing it because their interest is corporate Australia.

Essential public services from this Turnbull government are now under threat. They're under threat at the moment because this legislation could go through. They are also already under threat because the government is ideologically opposed to collectively funded services that everyone can use. As we know, these tax cuts would make it worse. The $140 billion that will be given away is money that will be not spent on essential public services. That's why the Greens are fighting these tax cuts so strongly.

There are four areas I will name that would really cop it if this bill goes through. There is housing, one of the most essential areas for people's wellbeing. There is education—public education would be smashed. You can't take $140 billion out of the system without there being serious consequences. Then there's health and the essential infrastructure of public transport. How can we even consider such a giveaway when we're got queues in our public hospitals, overcrowded public schools and public housing waiting lists that have blown out over 10 years and so many people are not even being able to get a home? It is a deeply shocking system.

Housing is one area that is really set to get worse, because we already have a system in Australia where housing has become a commodity. It's worth remembering how the system works. Since the late 1990s, much of housing investment has been driven by speculation on future price gains, not to serve the needs of communities. That is because housing has become a commodity. It's like another form of money. It's a way people can increase their own profits. The purchase prices have become untethered from other housing fundamentals. This situation is so serious that the number of homeless people in Australia is just disgraceful for a rich country like Australia. In 2016-17, 288,000 people were assisted by official homelessness services. This is a really tragic figure. Every day last year, 261 people were turned away because of a lack of capacity for the services to assist them. Then we have 1.5 million households under housing stress. That is where they are paying more than 30 per cent of their income on various housing costs. Housing stress means that you're one disaster away, possibly, from being on the slippery slope to being homeless. One disaster like the kids get sick, you're injured at work or you're out of work. These are the sorts of things that can happen to people very quickly and turn their lives around.

Why I'm speaking about this is to underline why we need to be injecting public money into a strong public housing system in this country. Other nations have it. Other nations have a very good system. I'm not talking about wiping out the private housing market—those ridiculous insults that people from the coalition parties often bring out when we get to this point in discussing the housing needs of this country. The European example is quite fascinating on this. In Norway, they have a scheme called Housing First where, believe it or not—and it's probably hard to believe it when you come from a country like Australia—if you're homeless you're given a home. In many cases, they find it saves money. It saves money because the people get their lives on track. The kids can go to school. They've got security of tenure. People's health improves when they've got a secure home. This is a really fine way to go. In many other countries in Europe—Denmark, Sweden and Austria—20 to 30 per cent of the housing stock is public and social housing, universal housing, where anybody can apply. The housing is awarded according to need.

Again, you need a government that is committed to having a progressive taxation system, a taxation system that ensures that we have that revenue stream coming into the public purse so these essential public services can be paid for. They're so urgently needed. That money is so urgently needed to remain in the public purse, because right now in this country we have a housing crisis that is set to worsen. As I said, in how this government views it, housing isn't seen as a human right, which it is actually recognised as internationally; it's become a form of how you make more money. But how housing should work is in a system where there's universal access, there's stability through guaranteed tenancy and it's affordable, and where the rents are capped and any repayments are capped at no more than 30 per cent of the income. That's an accepted standard of how housing should be provided, and that's why I'm giving strong emphasis to the need for a universal housing scheme.

This is a responsible way to go, and it's very relevant to the debate that we're having here now about the taxation system of the future. It would be a disaster if this bill were passed. It would rob billions of dollars from the public purse for the public services that you've heard many of my Greens colleagues talk about—public services in the education sector, transport, other sections of infrastructure and our health sector, and I've added housing to that. We have a housing crisis. If this bill goes through, it's one of the many areas that will deteriorate, put a greater burden on so many Australians and drive greater inequality. As to the class warfare that Senator Cormann tries to abuse people with, they will be creating it because they're the ones who are driving class warfare with this bill before us.

Sue Lines (WA, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak about what Labor believes is wrong with this government's tax plan. I want to start by just reiterating some of the comments that Labor senators have made in this place tonight. Australians believe in fairness. There's no question about that. It's part of our DNA. It's part of who we are. Fairness is what we believe in. You can see that with the most recent marriage equality debate, where, at the end of the day, people voted because they saw it as fair that marriage in this country should be made available to all of those people, regardless of their gender, who wanted to get married. Ultimately it was a question about fairness.

This tax package will come down to fairness. Australians that I talk to when I'm out knocking on doors still believe in this concept of fairness. For the Turnbull government particularly to design a tax package where the biggest tax cuts go to the wealthiest in our community is just not fair. It is not fair. Mr Turnbull is our Prime Minister. For his electorate of Wentworth to be the electorate, out of all the electorates in Australia, that benefits to the greatest extent—Australians are not going to cop that. They're just not. They are absolutely going to see through it.

I have really tried to understand because I know that some of those in the government are also motivated around concepts of fairness. I don't know how they can, with their hand on their heart, stand up and support this tax package when it's the electorate of Wentworth, of all the electorates in Australia, the Prime Minister's electorate, that's going to benefit the most from this supposedly gold-standard tax package. I know the government will somehow complain that Labor can't bear people who make a buck. That couldn't be further from the truth. If someone is successful in life and they make a good living, 'Good on them,' I say, but they need to pay their fair share of tax. They need to be part of a progressive tax system. If they're earning more, they should pay more—it's that simple. That is what Australians will sign up to. They want to sign up to a fair tax package. So never let it be said—although I'm sure the government will try it on—that somehow it's the politics of envy. It's nothing to do with that. It is absolutely the politics of fairness. Good on people who make a buck. Good on people if you are making a lot of money, but pay your fair share.

Wentworth, the Prime Minister's electorate, is going to get the biggest tax cuts in this country. I can tell you Australians will not cop that. It's at a time when we've got by-elections in Tasmania and in Queensland. We know that the electorates of Braddon and Longman don't have much advantage from this tax package at all. In fact, most of them—more than 70 per cent of them—will be much better under Labor's package. Here we have a government that thinks it can go out and sell a message that says, 'Yes, I'm the Prime Minister, and people in my electorate are getting the biggest buck out of these tax cuts, but, sorry, Braddon and Longman, you'll just have to battle along.'

Then today, of all things, the Prime Minister said that an aged-care worker caring for the most vulnerable people in our society should just aspire to a better-paying job. Maybe those opposite don't know what happens in aged-care facilities. I do. It was part of my working life for about 11 years. I can tell you that old people die in the arms of aged-care workers. Often, when people go into an aged-care facility, their families no longer visit or their families have also passed on. Many aged-care workers I know have said to me, 'I am often the last person that a resident has a conversation with.' Aged-care workers have told me people have died in their arms. And yet today the Prime Minister said that aged-care workers should just aspire to a better-paying job.

Let's just backtrack a couple of years to when Labor was in government. We put a package together which would have improved the lives and the pay packets of aged-care workers. It was a bargaining framework. The employers agreed with it. All of the employers, whether they were part of the church and charitable sector or part of the private sector, saw it as a fair deal where there would be enterprise bargaining to lift the wages by about $5 an hour. What was one of the first things that the then Abbott government did, which those opposite all voted for? They took that package away. So we've seen the form of this government; it's quite prepared to take money out of the pockets of low-paid workers.

Most aged-care workers in this country—perhaps Mr Turnbull doesn't know this—work part time. It's hard work. It's a lot of lifting. It's a hard slog. It's emotionally draining. Aged-care workers do that job largely because it's their vocation. They really want to make a difference to the residents that they're caring for. But that seemed to have passed Mr Turnbull by when he gave that flippant comment, 'Just get a better job.' Most aged-care workers work part time. Those opposite might think they can just get another job, but, of course, they can't because nursing home managers string that part-time work out to five days. They might have six-hour shifts. The average aged-care worker in this country is on about 30 to 35 hours per week on a low wage of about $20 to $21 an hour.

We've seen the attack on penalty rates. How long is it going to be before aged-care employers go cap in hand to the government, saying, 'We can't afford to pay penalty rates on the weekend'? That would devastate aged-care workers, because a significant part of their take-home pay is from doing night shifts or working Saturdays or Sundays, away from their families. They care for the residents that they look after. Mr Turnbull's already had one go at them—when the coalition first got into government, they took money away from them. Now he's having a second go at them by saying: 'The wealthy people who live in Wentworth are more entitled to a bigger tax deduction than you are. If you don't like that, just go and get a better-paying job.' What kind of solution is that? It's not a solution. It shows how out of touch the Prime Minister is when he can make that slur against aged-care workers, who have been agitating to the Turnbull government for about the last two years to lift their wages and to lift funding. Nursing homes and aged-care facilities are almost exclusively funded by the federal government and, yet, all we've seen the federal government do is reduce that funding, take money out of the pockets of aged-care workers and tell them they are not worthy of a decent wage increase at a time when wages in this country, and wage increases, are at historically low levels.

Things are crook if you are an average-wage earner in this country and you are looking to the government to try and improve your lot in some way. There's no point looking at the Turnbull government, because they think fairness starts in the electorate of Wentworth, not in the electorates of Braddon and Longman. Perth and Fremantle are, really, not much different—they are marginally better than the electorates of Braddon and Longman in terms of income but not much better. They won't see much from the Turnbull government either.

Is it any wonder that the Turnbull government ran a mile and refused to put candidates into those seats? There are no Liberal candidates running in the seats of Fremantle and Perth. I initially thought it was because, if they put candidates into the seats of Perth and Fremantle, voters would surely expect to see the Prime Minister, who never visits WA—in fact, there was a time when he'd spent more time asleep than he had talking to Western Australian voters! I thought the reason was, perhaps, that the Prime Minister didn't want to come back and visit Western Australia, but it's really these tax cuts. The government are too embarrassed to front up to the by-elections in Perth and Fremantle and go, 'Yes, we're delivering to you.' Well, how? How are they delivering? They took money out of the pockets of aged-care workers in their first term of government. They're delivering nothing to them in this tax package. Then, today, the Prime Minister of this country insults aged-care workers by saying, 'Hey, go and get a better job.' What an insult! Caring for the most vulnerable in our community has got to be gold-star worthy, and yet the Prime Minister just dismisses this.

The cost of this package is outrageous. The plan will cost a ridiculous amount of money. Mr Morrison, the Treasurer, has indicated that the 10-year cost of the plan is $140 billion. That is a heck of a lot of money. That's a lot of money that's not going to aged-care workers, for example, in a pay packet. It's not going to the aged-care industry to try to make aged care more available and to ensure that residents in aged care are treated with respect and dignity. It's certainly not going to early childhood workers. Perhaps it'll be tomorrow when our Prime Minister insults them and says, 'Go get a better job,' because they're on about 20 bucks an hour as well.

Most of those workers are women. They're young women, and they're trapped because they're on such a low wage that they can't afford to get into the housing market. In fact, many of them either still live at home, if they are not in a relationship, or, if they are in a relationship, are relying on the income of their partner being higher than theirs to make ends meet. This is the case for many early childhood professionals—and they are professionals. They have qualifications at certificate III level or higher. They have certificates III, diplomas or teaching qualifications. Some of them have PhDs. Yet they are on this poverty wage of $20 to $21 an hour. What's the Turnbull government's tax package doing for them? Nothing. They've got nothing to look forward to. Again, Labor had put a plan in place to raise their wages as well. What did the Turnbull government do? It came in this place and took it away; it abolished it.

We've seen that with the cleaners in this building. The cleaners were on a trajectory to get better pay. In fact, Labor put a floor in under their wages because, when those contracts come up for negotiation, the only big expenditure item that the contractors have to negotiate around is the hours that the cleaners work, so what we always see at contract time is that the hours start to be pecked away. So we thought, 'Well, if we could put a base in and say this is the rate everyone has to tender at, it would take wages out of competition.' But, of course, the Turnbull government doesn't understand that. So what we saw here was the cleaners, over time, getting a wage increase and then—boom, poof!—it was just gone one day. It disappeared. So those cleaners cleaning our offices, cleaning our toilets, cleaning the toilets of the Prime Minister and doing a great job—a great bunch of women, and some men—have had a wage freeze for five years. That is absolutely at the feet of the Turnbull government.

So what are they going to see from the tax package? Very little. Unfortunately, they don't live in the electorate of Wentworth and they don't earn high incomes, so they are not going to see much of a benefit from this tax giveaway to the wealthy in our society. Of course, as you know, for those cleaners at the moment, there's been a contract change, so they mightn't even have a job, and the care factor from the Turnbull government is almost zero, when it's entirely within their remit to make sure that those cleaners are offered employment. I don't know how they can talk to them. Maybe they don't talk to them. I talk to the women who clean my office. I know their names. I know the names of a lot of cleaners. Fair enough—I worked for United Voice. I knew those cleaners before I came in here. Some of them have been here longer than all of us. We talk about grandfathers and grandmothers of the House. Actually it's the two cleaners who clean the Prime Minister's office. They've been here a very, very long time, and they're two fabulous women who came here as refugees. But they won't see anything from this tax package—nothing. They're pretty bold women. I hope that they raise it with the Prime Minister next time they're in there cleaning his loo. I hope they do, and I wouldn't put it past them to do it. These are the real faces behind the unfairness of the Turnbull government tax plan.

It's not as if Labor don't have a solution. We do. We have got a fair tax package that we are prepared to be up-front and open about and to put out there. Ours is not driven by ideology; ours is driven by the notion of fairness. Labor's plan will increase the tax cuts currently being offered under the government's tax offset proposal.

We support stage 1. I think most people in this chamber do, so we could have stage 1 for low-income earners tomorrow—boom, done. It's not a problem. Let's get that done and dusted. But, of course, the government want to hold the country to ransom to try to make out it's someone else's fault. It's Labor's fault. It's the Greens' fault. It's the crossbenchers' fault. It's anyone's fault but their own. It's their tax package. Australians across the country are saying to them, 'It isn't fair.' I think most of us are saying we'll support stage 1. Let's get it done. Let's do something for low-paid Australians—but no.

Our tax plan with a Shorten Labor government will deliver bigger and permanent tax cuts from 1 July 2019. Ours will be permanent. As you've heard today, people earning less than $125,000 a year will receive a larger tax cut under Labor's plan when compared to the plan put by Mr Turnbull, which, in a skewed way, rewards his own electorate of Wentworth. We know that under our tax plan more than four million people will be better off by $398 a year when compared to the Turnbull government's tax plan.

From the inquiries that were held we know that this is ideologically driven and quite frankly is bereft of ideas. By continuing to insist that the bill be taken as a whole and by refusing to both conduct and release even basic fiscal and distributional impacts, the government insults the intelligence of the Australian people. We just had Senate estimates and we tried really hard during Senate estimates. We asked question after question after question, as indeed we have here in question time, about what the true cost of the tax is. And there is the dishonesty of the package. There's no need to bring in the stage 3 right now. It's years away, so we don't need to legislate for it. We would have to have two more Turnbull governments—or whoever the new Prime Minister is—to get to their tax package.

The government is taking an ideological approach to an unfair tax system. Labor, in government, will put in a fair package. We will get the best return possible for taxpayers, and we will take economic circumstances into account. The Treasurer has politicised the Treasury, which a Labor government will be left to fix. Labor supports low- and middle-income tax relief because, ultimately, we stand for fairness and justice. That's what we stand for. We want to make sure that hardworking Australians get the tax relief that they're absolutely entitled to. We also want to make sure that a future government can afford these tax cuts so that we don't bankrupt Australia. The government's approach is not fair and it's not just and Labor will not support stages 2 and 3.

Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In the short time I have available before we adjourn tonight I'd like to contemplate how I, in my portfolio areas, would spend the $23 billion a year that the government is determined to thrust at the most wealthy in our country. I would start by increasing Newstart by at least $75 a week. In fact, with $23 billion I could make that increase much higher and people could reach some parity with the age pension. I would make sure that youth allowance is increased so that there's a liveable income for young people, who we know have the highest level of unemployment in this country and need that support. I would ensure that spending on mental health was brought up to what is called the parity of esteem—in other words, that the money we spent on mental health was equivalent to the percentage of the burden on our ill health that it is. It is far below that at this time. I would make sure that we paid reparations to the stolen generations, something that this government hasn't done and something that the Labor government, when they gave the apology, failed to do. I would make sure that funding for housing in remote communities met the needs of everybody in those communities and that people were not forced to live with up to 20 people to a house. I would make sure that we properly funded programs to address otitis media, which is at pandemic proportions in our remote communities. I would make sure we had properly funded hearing programs and programs to meet the early learning difficulties caused in Aboriginal communities by the burden of hearing loss, which delays learning development—

David Fawcett (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The time being 10:30, the Senate stands adjourned.

Senate adjourned at 10:30