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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Finance (Senator Gallagher) to a question without notice I asked today relating to income tax rates.

At a time when Australians are labouring under a cost-of-living crisis, at a time when food prices, petrol prices, medicine prices, transport prices, rents, mortgages, electricity prices and insurance payments are all sky rocketing, it is a massive injustice that this government is even considering going ahead with quarter of a trillion dollars worth of tax cuts for the super wealthy. Even the International Monetary Fund, one of the absolute architects and cheerleaders of neoliberalism around the planet, has suggested that these tax cuts should be reassessed, yet this government, in its blind pursuit of lining the pockets of the already very wealthy people in this country, is ignoring the cries of working-class people who are struggling to make ends meet.

These stage 3 tax cuts used to be Mr Morrison's tax cuts. He conceived of them when he was Treasurer and he legislated for them when he was Prime Minister. But these are no longer Mr Morrison's tax cuts; these stage 3 tax cuts for the super wealthy are now Labor's tax cuts because Labor brought down a budget after the election that included these tax cuts and Labor have confirmed, as recently as Senator Gallagher's answer to my questions this afternoon, that these tax cuts are still Labor's policy.

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

They love the billionaires.

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

As my colleague Senator Shoebridge says, they love the billionaires.

The important thing to know is that Labor has never been able to run an argument that these tax cuts are good policy, and of course that's because Labor knows they're not good policy. So why does Labor support them? Because in their own self-interest they decided prior to the election that they had to support them. Labor's position boils down to this: they're going to support policy that they know is wrong and they're doing it because they promised to do something that they knew was wrong.

We're in the middle of an inflation spike in this country at the moment, with the RBA basically going rogue, using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut, trying to use old style interest rate rises, which work well when it's a demand side-driven price spiral but don't work when it's a supply-side price spiral, which is what we're in now. The reason the RBA feels it has to do that is because Dr Chalmers, the Treasurer, has abandoned the field. He's run for cover. He won't use the powers that he's got in the Reserve Bank Act to actually override the RBA on interest rates. He won't pull any of the massive taxation levers he's got at his disposal.

When you consider Labor's political cowardice on the stage 3 tax cuts with Dr Chalmers's cowardice in refusing to implement anti-inflationary tax policy and refusing to use the power that he has to override the RBA, we're left with a situation now where we're going to get super inflationary stage 3 tax cuts, a quarter of a trillion dollars of pump priming the economy, in the most inflationary way conceivable at a time when they come into play when, according to the Reserve Bank, inflation will still be above the target band. The Treasurer says Labor's got a plan for inflation. It is inconceivable that that plan includes putting $9,000 a year into the pockets of billionaires. These are Labor's tax cuts. They have to own them, and they should walk away from them.

Question agreed to.