Cory Bernardi (SA, Australian Conservatives) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I inform the Senate that at 8.30 am eight proposals were received in accordance with standing order 75. The question of which proposal would be submitted to the Senate was determined by lot. As a result, I inform the Senate that the following letter has been received from Senator Siewert:

Pursuant to standing order 75, I propose that the following matter of public importance be submitted to the Senate for discussion:

The only solutions that the Liberal and Labor parties have to inequality and wage stagnation come straight from the neoliberal handbook, like ever-increasing company tax cuts and free trade deals that hurt workers.

Is the proposal supported?

More than the number of senators required by the standing orders having risen in their places—

I understand that informal arrangements have been made to allocate specific times to each of the speakers in today's debate. With the concurrence of the Senate, I shall ask the clerks to set the clock accordingly.

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

I rise to speak on the matter in the letter that, in fact, I put in for this matter of public importance. This week is Anti-Poverty Week. We've heard overwhelming evidence of the level of poverty in this country. But before I articulate that evidence I'd like to go to this notion of inequality in this country.

Just recently, the Productivity Commission released a report that has, in fact, been widely misinterpreted—some unkind people would perhaps say misquoted—in terms of what it does and doesn't say about inequality in this country. Some in the media have used it to say that inequality in this country isn't an issue. But, if you bother to look into the detail of the report, you will see that it talks about the fact that, despite all those years of economic growth, we have not seen a decrease in the number of people living in poverty. We also see that some of the facts in there are being misquoted and glossed over to misinterpret the level of inequality that does exist. I will come back to some of those issues shortly. But, of course, what goes hand in hand with inequality is poverty, and, given that this is Anti-Poverty Week, I thought it was important that we look at some of the issues and facts around poverty in this country.

ACOSS has just released its latest report and, in fact, Dr Cassandra Goldie was down in the Press Club today talking about the report that they have just released, giving us an up-to-date picture of poverty in this country. The report was done by ACOSS and the University of New South Wales. It points out that Australia is rated as the second-wealthiest country in the world but we still have over three million people living below the poverty line, including 739,000 children. It finds that those experiencing poverty at the highest rates are those on youth allowance, at 64 per cent, and Newstart, at 55 per cent. The poverty rate for people on Newstart has risen by 17 per cent in the last 16 years. The highest 20 per cent of income earners are receiving more than the lowest 60 per cent combined. I'll repeat that: the highest 20 per cent of income earners are earning more than the lowest 60 per cent combined.

Most people below the poverty line, 53 per cent, rely on the social security system as their main source of income. We're seeing that the poverty rate for sole parents has risen from 35 per cent in 2013 to 59 per cent in 2015, which is a large increase of 24 per cent in just two years. I'd like to give some context to that figure. In 2006, the Howard government started moving sole parents from parenting payment to Newstart once their youngest child turned six. People who were here in this place at the time will remember that the Greens spoke long and hard, and voted, against that measure, and I have been pursuing it ever since. At the time, the parents who were on parenting payment single were grandfathered. In other words, they weren't shifted over to Newstart. But, in 2013, 80,000 sole parents—the previous group that were grandfathered—were moved by the Gillard government off parenting payment single and onto Newstart.

Can you see the correlation with the very steep increase in the number of sole parents living in poverty by 2015? It was a 24 per cent increase, because those grandfathered single sole parents were moved off parenting payment single to Newstart in one fell swoop, sending those people into poverty—hence my claim that both the opposition and the government have neoliberal policies that drive people into poverty and increase inequality. Foodbank released their latest report on their work on Sunday, and they found that there had been a three per cent increase in the number of people experiencing food inequality. To put some figures on that, that's four million people in the last 12 months experiencing food insecurity, and the most common cause of that was low income.

In my remaining time I want to address this issue of inequality and the misinterpretation of the Productivity Commission report. The report clearly demonstrated that people are living in poverty, that there is inequality. If you look at the detail in the Productivity Commission report, the 'damned statistics' can actually be misleading, showing that all income quintiles are supposed to have increased. But if you actually drill down and look at what happened particularly in those lowest levels of income, where it is claimed that inequality was reduced, it was for age pensioners. That's because the Rudd government, after a concerted campaign by the Greens to increase the age pension, did increase the age pension, which basically instantaneously lifted the income of age pensioners and addressed some of those issues around inequality. But that masks the rest of the people who are stuck on income support payments that leave them below the poverty line, such as those on youth allowance and Newstart, neither of which have had an increase since 1994. Those people are still living in poverty. It increases inequality for those people because they have not had that increase.

So it shows that government intervention can impact very significantly on income support payments. The mistruth that the government speaks—that people on Newstart don't need an increase because the Productivity Commission said that inequality's not such an issue—are wrong: a significant increase in Newstart of $75 a week will significantly impact on people living in poverty and inequality and will start addressing that issue. Look at that report. Read the details of the report. (Time expired)

James McGrath (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have a confession to make: I am a neoliberal. I don't have the handbook; it's just something I learnt with my parents: to believe in freedom, to believe in cutting taxes and to believe in free trade. But, if there is a handbook, I would love the Greens to be able to perhaps use their communications allowance to buy copies of this neoliberal handbook, read through it themselves and understand that free trade and cutting taxes are good for Australia and good for people. If you want to get people out of poverty, if you want to diminish inequality in society, the best thing to do is give people a job. And how do people get a job? They get a job through business. Governments don't create jobs; they create the environment for business to employ people. And this government, more than any government in the history of Australia, since our election in 2013 has created jobs—over one million jobs for people who have been employed by big, medium and small businesses. If you want business to grow, if you want Australia to grow and if you want to have a strong social safety net for Australia then you must have a strong business community.

For the Greens to come in here and talk about the welfare of Australian workers and the welfare of Australians is absolute hypocrisy, because the greatest threat to the Australian economy and our ability to look after those who need help comes from those on the Left, those who want to tax more and those who want to stop free trade agreements. We've got the Greens, with their support for crippling renewable energy targets that have helped push up the price of electricity in this country and brutalise businesses. If can ask a member of the Greens, 'What is the greatest impost upon businesses in Australia today?' they will say, 'The price of electricity,' and then they'll say, 'Taxes.' This government is cutting taxes and dealing with the price of electricity in Australia.

I want to focus on tax cuts, because I think that tax cuts are good. I think that tax cuts are brilliant. The more taxes we can cut, the happier everybody in Australia will be. The more free trade agreements we can have, the happier everybody in Australia will be. The sad thing is that tax cuts and free trade agreements—two quite simple concepts—are concepts that both the Labor Party and the Greens have trouble understanding. How many free trade agreements were enacted while Labor were last in power, between 2007 and 2013? It's pretty simple, for those listening at home, sitting on your tractor or on the back verandah having a cheeky cup of tea: zero free trade agreements. It's this government, since 2013, that has been pushing strongly for free trade agreements.

Let's just focus on tax cuts. Let's just focus on our long-term economic plan to cut taxes for Australian businesses. Why do we want to do that? It's for those who run those small and medium businesses, those mums and dads, those people who want to give it a go and those people who see that empty shop in a shopping centre or on the main street—where my office is in Nambour it's Currie Street—and say: 'I want to start a business there. I have a dream to start a business there, just like so many other people have done.' Every medium business and every large business in Australia started off with someone's dream: someone looking at an empty shop space, someone starting off in their garage and someone in their lounge room or at their dining room table late at night working out how to get people to pay their bills, sending out invoices. What we want to do for those aspirational people who want to get ahead is cut their taxes. That is a good thing.

I note, for those listening at home, that none of the Greens are here. There is an empty space over there. It's the most intelligent those benches have looked for a long time, with no Greens sitting there. It's a pity. I hope they're watching on the TVs in their offices and learning why the mum-and-dad businesses—or the mum businesses or dad businesses; whatever it is; I don't care—want tax cuts. Why do they want tax cuts? It's so that they can reinvest back into their businesses, so they can grow their businesses and so they can employ more staff. Do you know where the staff come from? They come from other businesses, school leavers, people leaving university or people who have been out of work, who've been unemployed, which is why this government has facilitated the conditions for businesses to employ over one million Australians since 2013. That's an additional one million Australians.

If a business makes half a million dollars in turnover, it will have an additional $7,500 in 2021 or $12,000 in 2021-22. That will be invested back into businesses and back into employing more people. That is good for Australia. If people have jobs, they are better off. This Greens motion is about inequality and getting people out of poverty. The best way to get anyone out of poverty—or to diminish inequality where it exists—is to have them get a job, because once they get a job they're earning money. They then understand the importance of money and they understand how they can start a business themselves. They can see how their bosses operate and go, 'I want to start my own business.'

What we want to do through our neoliberal agenda—this scary neoliberal agenda that those on the left talk about like it's the bogeyman but don't really understand—is make it easier for people to get on with their lives without a heavy-handed government coming in, bossing people around and telling them what to do. We think, if you have tax cuts, you know what's best to do with your own money. Whether you're a PAYE taxpayer, a small-business person or a medium-business person, the money you get back is actually your money. It's not the government's money and it's not the politicians' money; it's your money.

This is one of the fallacies of this argument in Australia when people talk about giving money to business or to PAYE taxpayers. It's not giving money. It's their money. It's their money that they give to the government to fund services. And what we say on our side of politics is that government is at its best when it's small—to enable people to get on with their lives, to get on with making those decisions without government bossing them around. We've finished seven free trade agreements since 2013. That's pretty good. Compare that to Labor. Between 2007 and 2013, they didn't do anything. They were asleep at the wheel. When Labor and the Greens were in power, they were having a good old doze at the wheel when it came to free trade agreements. That is because we understand that, if Australia is to grow and if our economy is to grow, we cannot just trade amongst ourselves. That is a false economic argument. We've got to get out there and sell our goods and our services to the world. And the best way to do that is through free trade agreements.

Five years ago, only 26 per cent of our goods and services received duty-free or preferential access to overseas markets. After completing a range of negotiations, we have now signed agreements with countries that account for nearly 70 per cent of our trade, with current negotiations potentially taking that figure up to 88 per cent. So we're going to keep working hard for those farmers and those businesses to make sure that we get the conclusion of more free trade agreements. Why is this important? Because each new overseas market opportunity we open up for Australian businesses is a chance to grow. That is good for Australian families and workers and good for the economy.

In 2017-18, we achieved record exports of $401 billion and our global trade surplus was $6.3 billion. We know that Australian businesses that export pay their employees, on average, 11.5 per cent more than businesses that do not export. And household incomes are estimated to be $8,448 higher due to the trade liberalisation taken in Australia since the 1980s. For example, our agreement with the United States has served us well by enabling cheaper inputs to be imported into Australia to feed our high export growth to countries like China, Japan and Korea. This free trade agreement, recognised by the United States as a model free trade agreement, allows the Liberal-National government to secure the only country exemption from recent US tariffs on steel and aluminium.

Let's talk about the TPP-11, those five letters that send the left into spasms. They're so scared about this. This will eliminate more than 98 per cent of tariffs for 11 countries with a combined GDP of $13.8 trillion and close to 500 million consumers. Australian farmers, manufacturers, service providers, small businesses and exporters and small businesses are all winners from the TPP-11 because it will be easier to sell their goods and supply services to a free trade area that spans America and Asia.

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

I'm pleased to be able to contribute to this matter of public importance. Every now and again, it would be really nice if the Greens would actually come together with the Labor Party and attack the reality of this coalition government, who are about ensuring more and more inequality. It would be really good if you could once in a while actually focus on the Liberal and National parties for the damage that they are doing, instead of roping us in—the Labor Party—as being exactly the same as the Liberal Party. The Greens know that's not the case. But the Greens have a view that the enemy, to them, is the Labor Party. I've got a lot of respect for Senator Siewert. I looked at this resolution where she says that the only solution the Liberal and Labor parties have to inequality and wage stagnation comes straight from the neoliberal handbook—like ever-increasing company tax cuts and free trade deals that hurt workers.

I wasn't surprised that Senator Siewert didn't go there. She actually dealt with issues of inequality. I really can't understand why the Greens, at every chance they get, attack the Labor Party, who are in there arguing for penalty rates to be given back, who are arguing to ensure we have a decent health system and a decent education system and who are making sure big business pay their proper amount of tax.

But let's have a look at the Greens' record over a period of time. They did a dodgy deal with the Liberal Party to give Tony Abbott of all people—former Prime Minister Abbott—a massive victory in voting down the CPRS. We could have had 10 years of dealing with carbon pollution in this country if not for the purity and the inability of the Greens to actually focus on a long-term position, rather than take cheap shots at the Labor Party. We could have been making a big difference right now. The Greens teamed up with the Liberal Party to do a backdoor deal to cut the pensions of 370,000 Australians. That did a lot for poverty alleviation in the country! They teamed up with the Liberals to water down the tax transparency bill. Imagine the Greens teaming up with the Liberals to make how tax is paid in this country less transparent!

I had a long working relationship with former senator Lee Rhiannon. What happened when former senator Lee Rhiannon stood up for public schools? She was expelled from the Greens' party room. That was a great service to inequality in this country! That was fantastic! And then you look at Senator Peter Whish-Wilson. One of the big issues facing workers now is cuts to penalty rates, and Senator Peter Whish-Wilson believed that the Greens could double their vote by courting small business. And he backed a 'bigger national discussion' about weekend penalty rates, suggesting they are outdated. Then he said:

I think it's just a white Anglo-Saxon cultural thing that we've inherited.

Penalty rates, to just remind the Greens, put food on the table of working families in this country. Penalty rates were absolutely essential for me as a blue-collar worker. I could never have survived without penalty rates when I first came to this country. I needed penalty rates to take my kids on holiday every now and again. I didn't go on holiday every year—I couldn't afford it—but my penalty rates gave me an opportunity to take my two kids on a holiday now and again. My penalty rates made sure I could pay my mortgage. My penalty rates made sure I could pay my rent when I didn't own a house. And yet Greens Senator Peter Whish-Wilson wanted a 'bigger national discussion' about penalty rates, saying they were an 'Anglo-Saxon cultural thing that we'd inherited'. No. Let me tell the Greens that penalty rates were actually about putting food on the table of working-class Australians.

I'm not surprised that some of the Greens have got no idea about penalty rates, never having had to actually depend on them and representing some of the richest Australians in the country. That's fine; I don't have a problem with that. But don't attack working-class people because you don't understand how working-class people survive in this country.

Instead of drafting resolutions like this, why don't you come to the Labor Party and say: 'We want to do something about neoliberalism. We want to do something about ensuring that inequality is dealt with in this country'? Instead of pulling stunts like this attacking the Labor Party, when we've got a rabble of a government in this country that day in, day out demonstrate how out of touch they are, why don't you attack the Liberal-National Party now and again instead of constantly tying Labor in with the Liberals and the Nationals? It's an absolute joke. We know why it is. It's because the Greens see Labor as their competitors. The Greens see Labor as their opponents. They don't see the Liberal-National Party as the people who are destroying decent wages and conditions in this country. They don't target the Liberal-National Party on these issues. They attack Labor. It's an absolute nonsense.

Let me just turn to Senator McGrath's contribution and this idea that the best thing for people in this country is tax cuts and free trade agreements. Maybe we'll hear from the Greens' contributors on this when they have an opportunity. Give us a break. 'Free trade agreements and tax cuts will resolve poverty in this country' is the argument you hear all the time from across the chamber—the argument that 'the best form of welfare is a job'. There are not enough jobs in this country to give a job to everyone who needs a job. That's the reality. You've only got to look at some of the National Party seats in this country to see the poverty there. Why people continually vote for the National Party has got me beat, when the National Party attack their social security payments, attack pensions, attack welfare, attack provisions for women who find themselves in domestic violence situations and have nowhere to go, and take $44 million a year out of support for temporary accommodation for women in crisis.

How about attacking those over there instead of drafting a stupid resolution like this? You could have easily come to us and we could have been on a unity ticket on the issue of inequality. Labor has never had a better raft of policies across the board to deal with inequality. I'm proud to be a member of the Labor Party.

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

It may be that Labor has never had better policies on inequality, but, as Senator Cameron well knows, that's because they've pinched them all from us and then watered them down. I agree with senior political commentators in this country who say that, if you want know to know what Labor's policy is going to be in five or 10 years time, have a look at what the Australian Greens' policy is now. I'm actually quite fond of Senator Cameron—and that's a dangerous thing to say on the public record—but it's fair to say that that was one of the worst contributions I've heard him make in this place. At the top of that contribution, Senator Cameron attacked the Australian Greens for fixating on the Australian Labor Party and for having a crack at the ALP, and then he spent 95 per cent of the rest of his speech having a crack at the Australian Greens. So, tick one in the box for hypocrisy, Senator Cameron.

The second point I would make to Senator Cameron and his colleagues is: aren't they a bit touchy on the TPP? Of course, the reason Senator Cameron is touchy on the TPP is that he was comprehensively rolled inside Labor's caucus. He personally doesn't support the TPP, but do you know what he's going to do?

He's going do what Labor people always do, put aside their principles in a convenient place to pick up later when they've ended up their political careers, and he's going come in here and vote for it. Every single time that's what he's going do: vote for the TPP, just like he voted to lock up refugees on Manus Island and Nauru. Just like Labor, last time they were in government, slashed the single parenting pension. Do you remember that one, Senator Cameron? If you want to play these silly games, I can play them all day. The fact of the matter is that one of the only true and reasonable things you said in your contribution was that the enemy are sitting over there. The enemy are sitting over there. They are a rabble of a government. They deserve to be kicked out of office at the first available opportunity and, as far as the Australian Greens are concerned, that opportunity cannot come around quickly enough.

I want to talk about tax cuts, because I think the Australian people understand that the TPP cedes our sovereignty and hands over matters that should be left under the sovereign auspices of this parliament to foreign multinational corporations. There's another reason, by the way, that the Labor Party should be ashamed that they've rolled over and abandoned their principles on the TPP. On tax cuts, again, one of the absolute foundations of neoliberalism is trickle-down economics, and trickle-down economics does not work. It has never worked and it never will work. There are people in this country who were told many, many years ago that, if we cut taxes for the well-off and big business, the wealth would trickle down to them. Well, they are still waiting at the bottom of the pile, with their hands outstretched, for the first drops. Do you know what? They're not going to arrive, because trickle-down economics is a demonstrated policy failure. It is actually about reverse income redistribution. It's about making the well-off even more wealthy and the big corporations even more wealthy and powerful. It has terrible impacts on the lives of far too many people and on the environment that ultimately sustains us all.

The big narrative arc of recent decades is parliaments handing over power to the big corporations. That has resulted in environmental degradation—trashing that beautiful environment—and, in fact, in the wealth of this country being concentrated in the hands of far too few while far too many have missed out. In my home state of Tasmania we have a wilderness World Heritage area of incredible beauty and diversity, with habitats including rainforests, alpine meadows, ancient pines, saltwater lagoons and glacial lakes. The rich, vibrant cultural heritage of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people, and their awe-inspiring survival through the last ice age, is represented in the Tasmanian wilderness World Heritage area, with shell middens, stone tools and petroglyphs dating back over 20,000 years. In fact, the Tasmanian wilderness World Heritage area is one of only two properties on earth to meet seven of the 10 World Heritage criteria. It's critical to understand the essence and value of wilderness, which is a decreasing commodity on earth, in large part because governments and corporations have handed over too much power to the great profiteers—the rent seekers, the rapers of our commons.

People have spent decades in Tasmania defending our wilderness from logging, mining and dam construction, but right now we face a new threat: the selling of our wilderness to tourism developers, to private sector profiteers. It's all happening behind closed doors in the Coordinator-General's office run by the Tasmanian Liberal government. That government said in 2014 that it would open up our reserves to commercial tourism and invited the private sector to make submissions. We have seen submissions for inside our pristine wilderness areas, inside our World Heritage area and inside national parks around lodges, tracks, bike trails, helicopter pads, roads, boats and cable cars. I'll tell you what: many Tasmanians are appalled. Enough is enough.

Attracting high-end tourism in our wilderness areas is a focus for the rich. It necessitates helicopter access, plane access and boat access. The World Heritage Committee has recommended strict restrictions on tourism developments, which the Tasmanian and federal governments have given lip service to and agreed to but failed to carry out. The state government has approved intrusive developments after confidential environmental assessments and lease arrangements, with taxpayers' money. We've got to stop the handover of our wilderness to the private sector and protect it for the beautiful values that it has.

John Williams (NSW, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to contribute to this discussion, which I think is a crazy topic, to be frank. I agree with Senator Cameron. What this topic put forward by the Greens says is:

The only solutions that the Liberal and Labor parties have to inequality and wage stagnation come straight from the neoliberal handbook, like ever-increasing company tax cuts and free trade deals that hurt workers.

I find this amazing. Let's turn the clock back to the Hawke-Keating government. What happened? They opened up trade, and it hurt us, I can tell you. My brother Peter and I were pig farmers. We built a large piggery. It was hard yakka. We got 100 tonnes of gravel out of the creek and we got 16 tonnes of bagged cement, and we shovelled it into a cement mixer to lay the floors, the slabs, the drains et cetera, only to find that the Hawke-Keating government allowed the importation of pig meat. It was not a very good time, especially come 1994 and the drought, when we sold our pigs as bacon, as heavy pigs at the end of the month. What we sold them for did not cover the cost of the grain we were buying to feed the pigs. Cheap imports came in. Even if the imports didn't come in, they could quote a price, and that was enough to make the market stay low here, because the buyers could say, 'Hang on, I can buy it for $2 from Canada or Denmark; I won't pay more than $1.80 in Australia by the time I add the processor to it.' So that put a dampener on it, and the five or six large piggeries in our area, the Inverell area, shut down, costing jobs. So I thought: 'What's Australia doing? It's crazy with all these trade deals, removing all our barriers—removing the excise, the tariff and the quotas—and letting everything come into Australia.' I tell you that it hurt. However, we've gone past that, and now the other countries are doing the same thing Australia did in the late eighties and early nineties. We're doing these deals where they're removing their barriers and quotas, and it's working.

During my life in rural Australia, you usually got one commodity that was good. It might be wool at the time when cattle were bad, lamb prices were bad and wheat prices were bad. There are exciting times in rural Australia now when we have record prices for wool and we just had a record price for lamb. I pity those who have to buy legs of lamb in the shop at the moment. Lambs made over $300 a head just recently, which is amazing in a drought. All of my life, whenever there was drought, livestock markets just crashed and sheep and cattle sold cheaply, but not this time, because people need and want our food.

Alex Gallacher (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You've only got 67 million sheep left.

John Williams (NSW, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You make a very good point, Senator Gallacher. During the boom times for wool in the late eighties and early nineties, we had 180 million sheep. Now we're down to fewer than 70 million sheep. Why? Because people are staying with the cattle. The price has been good. So you're not going from commodity to commodity. Normally cattle would crash when wool was good. There was a guaranteed floor price for wool in those days. People sold the cattle, turned tractors off, went into sheep and oversupplied the sheep market and the wool market, and of course it all crashed. Now it is much, much better and the future looks brilliant, except for the rainfall, and we know that will come in time anyway.

What has brought these good times on in rural Australia? I will tell you: trade agreements—$60-odd billion worth of agricultural trade each year and the price going up. It is very exciting. I know it's hard for Australian consumers when they have to pay so much for their beef, lamb and mutton these days, but the trade agreements are bringing wealth into our country. We talk about wages, poverty and lack of wage growth. I'll bet you that good workers on farms today who have been at those farms for some time are getting paid above award wages, and they're probably getting free accommodation, electricity, fuel for their vehicle and some meat provided as well, and the farmer would be paying the fringe benefits tax, because good workers are scarce.

We talk about jobs, yet we are desperate for workers in many areas in rural Australia. Getting good workers is the problem.

These agreements have brought wealth back to rural Australia. When the Rudd government was in power, what saved us from recession? Agricultural exports saved us from recession. It has been so many years since we've had a recession in Australia, and I hope that continues. The wealth from exports through these free trade agreements means that we can employ more people and we can pay them more. Sure, it's a tough time. It's probably a poor analogy I'm giving now, because of the drought we're experiencing, but that will break. Of course, the price of land has gone up, simply because they're not making any more of it. That's just a fact. Agricultural land has gone up because it's earning more. It's more valuable. It's providing equity. It's providing a relief to many people on the land through the drought because they can go to their bank and borrow some money to help them keep going, along with government support et cetera.

My experience was that we got done over big time by the Labor Party. That's how I saw it. I thought it was crazy times when Paul Keating was removing barriers and letting in all these imports. Why would we want to import pig meat? We had plenty of pigs in Australia. We had our own market: about 99 per cent was consumed here and three per cent was exported. Why would we want to import pig meat? But we did. We freed up the trade. As I said, it hurt us. It hurt me personally and my brother Peter. It destroyed our life as pig farmers, which was seven days a week and a lot of work to set it all up. Now the benefit is here. We have seen other countries removing those barriers, as I said, and now we are reaping those benefits.

The problem with the Greens is that they have no idea of economics. One of the Greens senators is shaking their head; yes, you have no idea, I promise you. When are they going to learn that it is the private sector, the business sector, that derives our nation's wealth? That's where the wealth comes from. The private sector employs the people, and they pay the taxes to keep this place and the government services going. The more you cripple the private sector, the more you cripple a sector which derives our nation's wealth, the more you will reduce our nation's living standards in the future. So they're up the Labor Party and the Liberal-National party government for giving tax cuts to businesses—oh, those terrible businesses that employ people, that create our wealth and that give government the money to provide services! What a shocking mob they are! This is the attitude of the Greens. And, of course, there are these trade deals.

Why can't we get workers? Why do I have to talk to the management of an abattoir in Inverell where they employ 800 people about workers? It's a great business; it's competing in a world market. Why do we have to have so many workers from Brazil and the Philippines working in an abattoir in Inverell? Why won't the locals work there? We've got plenty of unemployment. The fact is that they don't want to work, or, if they do work, they might fail a grog test when they go to work on Monday morning.

Senator Dodson interjecting—

It's a fact, Senator Dodson. It happens—not only the grog test, but the drug test as well. They won't look after themselves on the weekend or at night, and then they get booted out of work because they've failed the grog test or the drug test. Why do we desperately have to train so many people from overseas?

Why can't our people here pick fruit? That amazes me. We had a big argument in this place—and the Greens actually sided with us to solve the problem—about the backpacker tax. There were 730,000 unemployed Australians and we complained about who was going to pick our fruit. Something doesn't add up to me. What doesn't add up is that some simply don't have a work ethic; they don't want to work. Some are not capable of work. They've probably done enormous damage to themselves through all sorts of drugs and other things which they've put into their body. That probably hasn't helped them mentally or physically one way or the other. These are the problems that we've got and that's why we rely on these overseas workers.

As we grow the economy with these trade agreements and with the lower taxes—guess what?—business grows. What does business do when it grows? It employs more people. If businesses can't get the people and demand exceeds supply, they have to put their wages up and then prices must go up. Of course, we have our regulator, Fair Work Australia. The fact is that we need trade. We need those barriers removed. And now it's working. I remember politicians coming round to meetings of the National Party, saying, 'Times are going to be good in the future.' I heard this 30 years ago. Well, finally, it has arrived. The trade agreements are here. We're getting the money into rural Australia, we're employing more people and the future looks brilliant.

The tax cuts we give to those businesses is to let them grow more.

What do you think they're going to do with those tax cuts? They're going to grow their businesses. They're going to spend some of that money and help it go around, especially in rural Australia, where we need money to be spent. The drought has not only affected farmers but also severely affected businesses. The wealth is not coming into those regions, because of the drought and the lack of production, and so businesses are suffering badly. That's why we're putting these million dollar grants now into the councils in the drought areas—to get some money into the local areas. So, thinking that tax cuts are bad and free trade agreements are bad is, to me, simply crazy, and I think this motion by the Greens is outrageous.

Alex Gallacher (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I, too, read the letter containing the matter of public importance, a couple of times, and it does bear repeating. It says:

The only solutions that the Liberal and Labor parties have to inequality and wage stagnation come straight from the neoliberal handbook, like ever-increasing company tax cuts and free trade deals that hurt workers.

I didn't know what a neoliberal was until Senator McGrath stood up and owned up to being one. Now I've got some idea of what a neoliberal is. If you google it, you'll find it talks about something in the 19th century that has become a resurgent philosophy for some.

I've seen Senator Siewert's contributions in this chamber and I've seen her contributions in committees, and I would say that she always comes from a reasonably well thought out position. It's very clear she's very passionate—articulate, coming from the right place—about a lot of these issues, and they are deeply felt. This MPI looks like it's been drawn up by the 16-year-old in the office who wants to be in TheWest Wing or some other place, because it's not of a standard that we should be debating. It's from a party that's got a very small vote that wants to get a vote that's a tiny bit bigger, and it's got to appeal to that other half a person that it hasn't quite got in its corner yet. It really is pretty ordinary stuff.

For goodness sake, we know that there's division in the Greens party. Former Senator Rhiannon would have been at one end and other members would have been at the other end of the party room when they debated this sort of stuff. But, honestly, it's pretty low quality. I think it's a pretty ordinary attempt to get a debate going, which is an attempt to get them a couple of extra votes. But let's go to the issues they have raised.

Labor will deliver tax cuts. There's no argument about this. The Labor Party will deliver tax cuts for small and medium businesses with a turnover of up to $50 million a year, delivering certainty in this sector in a fiscally responsible way. Under Labor, small and medium businesses with a turnover of up to $50 million a year will have their tax rate reduced to 25 per cent by 2021-22. Labor have always been a friend of small business; let's not be shy about that. Small business is the engine room of employment. In my previous life, outside this place, I dealt with small business every day. Most of the people in transport are small businesses—thousands and thousands of them. Occasionally, you deal with the multinationals and the larger businesses, who employ lots of small businesses. So our supporting that measure for small business is no great surprise at all, but we'll accommodate the decision in our bottom line by delaying the introduction of the Australian Investment Guarantee by 12 months, building on our record of hard and sensible budget decisions to pay for priorities. There's no bashfulness on the Labor Party side about looking after small business in terms of tax relief.

If we go to the free trade agreements, this is where I do have some level of involvement and perhaps even, dare I say, some level of knowledge, having chaired the Senate inquiries into the Japan-Australia Economic Partnership Agreement, the Korea-Australia Free Trade Agreement, the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement, the TPP-12 and the TPP-11. They have all come through the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee, which I chair. So, over the years, we've had the ability to go through each and every one of those free trade agreements at length, and tax relief has been a very common feature of all of those free trade agreements.

When I had problems with those free trade agreements, I'd approach a minister or a cabinet secretary—say, the Hon. Joe Ludwig—and I'd say, 'Joe, this doesn't seem quite kosher; what's the deal here?' He would say, 'Name a Westminster government anywhere in the world that has its trade agreements approved by parliament.' And you'd go away and you'd have a look at all the Western-type governments anywhere in the world and see that free trade agreements are not approved by parliament; they are an executive prerogative of government.

The Joint Standing Committee on Treaties in this parliament, controlled by the government, has made serious recommendations about improving the way trade agreements are formulated, about transparency, about a national interest test and about—dare I say it—ISDS and labour market testing. There have been comments by the government controlled committee in this area. The Senate committee that I chaired held an inquiry into treaty making. It was called 'blind treaty', because essentially that's what all senators in this place are faced with. The treaties are negotiated by the department, usually in secrecy. They're finalised and signed before the parliament gets a look at national interest or before the joint standing committee looks at human rights implications or any of those things, and they're presented to the parliament as a fait accompli. When you dig into that, if you don't want to pass the customs tariff amendment or the enabling regulations, you're putting a sector of agriculture or business—wine, pork or dairy—at a competitive disadvantage.

The imperative to sign the Japan-Australia Economic Partnership Agreement was that if we didn't sign it we'd be six per cent worse off compared to American beef. The imperative in the Korea-Australia Free Trade Agreement was that we would face a higher quota than we currently had in competing against New Zealand, or against Chile. So these free trade agreements—I agree with Senator Cameron that it is the greatest misnomer in the world; there's nothing 'free' about these free trade agreements—are exceedingly detailed and complex. And usually, in Australia's case, they involve competition with New Zealand, the United States, Chile or anyone else who's got a very good product and has excess capacity and wants to supply into very valuable markets.

So we make no apology for having done what everybody in the last 25 years has done, which is pass the enabling regulation or custom tariff amendments to put into place free trade agreements, because the alternative is quite unpalatable: putting our very efficient export sectors at a commercial disadvantage compared with other nations and other sectors, and that is really not how we build prosperity, employment and opportunity in this country. I will say this: I do not agree with the absence of labour market testing. I do not agree that ISDS is a common feature of these agreements. If you actually look at the evidence that was put to the Senate committee inquiry into the TPP-11, there is only one sector that wanted ISDS. It wasn't agriculture. In fact, when we asked all the people who submitted, the only ones who actually had a view on it were the Minerals Council of Australia. Appropriately, they had a view that they needed ISDS in case they had an operation in Africa or some other jurisdiction with less-visible legal mechanisms than we currently have in our country or that are in most countries that we deal with. So, it's not a common thing for ISDS to be supported by anybody other than the Minerals Council of Australia. But we had a minister, the Hon. Steve Ciobo, who said, 'By hell or high water, I'm getting these things signed.' He didn't get the best deal. The TPP was started in 2010, and he didn't get the best deal. Senator McGrath said that there'd been seven free trade agreements signed. Well, the negotiations basically were: 'Let's get it done, because it's a political trophy. We can wave it around and get some votes out of it. We'll be saying that the Liberal Party's the one that can get things done.'

There is no national interest evaluation or assessment on these treaties. And, surprisingly, even though we've done about 230 treaties over 90 years, there's no historical assessment of them either. If you want to go back and work out what the net economic benefits of these treaties were, that's almost impossible to find.

If you press the government on what the economic benefit of these treaties is, they point to some think tank over there. My view is that we, the Senate and the House of Representatives, should be doing this under the national interest assessment. You should have quantified figures done by the Productivity Commission or some similar organisation. You should have transparency when you're negotiating all the clauses, and you shouldn't have anything that's against the national interest. But that's not the way that these treaty agreements are done in the Westminster system. Essentially, it boils down to this, and the department will tell you so if you press them: whatever the minister wants, the minister gets. Those are their instructions at the end of the day. If the minister wants it signed, it'll be signed, whether it's a good deal or a bad deal.

Pauline Hanson (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In the same way as Little Red Riding Hood failed to recognise the big, bad wolf, the coalition and Labor have failed to recognise foreign-owned multinationals for the danger they represent to the economy and to Australian workers. Too many multinational companies and their subsidiaries pay little or no tax in Australia. To put that in perspective, taxpayers in the working-class electorate of Longman in Queensland paid more in personal income tax in 2015-16 than all the foreign-owned multinational subsidiaries operating in Australia paid in company income tax.

The pitiful collection of company income tax from multinationals and their subsidiaries represents the strongest argument for reform of the tax system for multinationals. The same pitiful collection of company income tax from multinationals and their subsidiaries removes any economic argument that free trade agreements are good for Australians or the national economy. Additionally, free trade agreements often put Australian workers in direct competition with low-wage workers in countries where child workers are tolerated and where there are few protections for workers or the environment. We are told free trade agreements open up new markets, but the next thing we know jobs have moved abroad to low-wage nations, and that is one of the reasons Trump pulled the US out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership, like every other free trade agreement, was entered into by the government of the day without ever coming before the parliament. It is only later that the government of the day comes to the parliament to seek the passage of enabling legislation like customs tariff schedules. These agreements are about more than trade, because they include the movement of people from other countries to take jobs and they give multinationals the right to sue our government and get the matter arbitrated outside the Australian court system. Who would have imagined that Philip Morris, the cigarette company, would sue the Australian government for losses associated with the plain packaging of cigarettes? It is ridiculous that we are expected to pay multinationals for changes in government policy, but our government keeps agreeing to these investor-state dispute settlement provisions, known as ISDS. New Zealand has managed to void these ISDS provisions with side letters, and I wonder what has stopped Australia from doing the same.

One Nation cannot support trade agreements which put the interests of foreigners and foreign corporations ahead of the interests of Australian workers and the national economy. The government must reform the tax system which applies to foreign-owned multinationals and their subsidiaries in Australia and fill the revenue black hole left by them. The government must have noticed that the interest rate on 10-year US Treasury notes has risen sharply in the past few months. It is over three per cent and expected to rise again. This means the cost of servicing our external debt of $600 billion will rise and make more urgent the need to fill the multinational black hole caused by these companies not paying tax.

One Nation will always put the interests of citizens first, which is why we support tax cuts for businesses with a turnover under $50 million. We do so because we want to see small and medium Australian businesses thrive in Australia and employ Australians in Australia. One Nation supported the corporate tax cuts for turnover of up to $50 million, but the only way to move forward with this and create employment in Australia is to work with the states to reduce payroll tax. That will create employment in the states.

Why are companies and businesses paying payroll tax when the average median price in Western Australia or anywhere in Australia can be up to $80,000 a year? A lot of Australians don't get that amount of money, but it only takes 11 people to put them above the threshold. Then you've got businesses who are not putting on more employment, and, with wage increases and superannuation, they are over the threshold and they are not employing more people. In terms of the Greens' policies, their idea of saving this country is to: stop mining resources—billions of dollars gone; shut down farming more—billions of dollars gone; pay all Australians $30,000 each—as if we can afford this; and open the floodgates to immigration and refugees. That is what the Greens' policies are, and Australia would soon become a Third World country.

Dean Smith (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The time for the discussion has expired.