Sue Lines (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Lambie has submitted a proposal:

Pursuant to standing order 75, I give notice that today I propose to move "That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of public importance:

The Government has failed to implement evidence-based policies to promote wealth equality and affordable housing and education which has exacerbated class struggles across Australia".

Is the proposal supported?

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

With the concurrence of the Senate, the clerks will set the clock in line with informal arrangements made by the whips.

Jacqui Lambie (Tasmania, Jacqui Lambie Network) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am a proud working-class woman. My dad drove trucks and my mum worked in a factory. I went to a public school and lived in public housing. Thanks to the Army, I got some real skills eventually, and thanks to the love and support of family and friends I made it here to the Australian Senate. There are not many like me in this place. In fact, 50 per cent of Australian federal MPs went to private schools.

A Tasmanian woman contacted my office the other day. Her parents were also working-class, and they moved to Tasmania in the 1950s. They got what we used to call a 'bank house', known on the mainland as a council house. Her parents paid a little bit of rent each week, and after 30 years they finally owned it. That meant they had an asset, and because higher education was free, all the kids got degrees. This Tasmanian wanted to ask: what would happen to her family now? They wouldn't have been lifted out of poverty and the kids wouldn't have had careers that they have today. She said, 'What happens to families like mine now?' The top earners in Australia have about six times as much income as the lowest earners.

But it's about more than money and wealth; it's about class. Australia likes to think of itself as a classless society, but if we ever were, we definitely aren't any more. Clive Hamilton and his daughter Myra have written a book called The Privileged Few. For the book, the authors did a lot of research and put in FOIs that show how the wealthiest and most privileged dodge the rules the rest of us have to abide by. For example, in July 2021, when Sydney was suffering through their worst COVID outbreak, the whole city was in lockdown. Workplaces and schools were closed to everyone except essential workers. The most impacted area was Fairfield, one of Sydney's most disadvantaged areas. Kids were being schooled at home, mainly in situations where both parents had jobs and their educational levels were, unfortunately, low. Homeschooling was pushing many of these parents to the point of no return. Meanwhile, just a few kilometres away, it was a completely different story for the children at Sydney's most elite private schools. As experts wrote about kids in Fairfield falling further behind, students at Scots College were allowed by the government to travel to the school's outdoor education campus in Kangaroo Valley for a six-month camp. How lovely! Soon after that, students at another elite private school, where school fees are $42,000 a year, were given a free pass by the New South Wales government to travel to the other campus in Jindabyne.

Wealthy Australians—the elite—know the rules and how to manipulate COVID restrictions and other restrictions. They did not accept COVID restrictions the way Australians had to. They travelled freely to their holiday homes until a decision of the New South Wales crisis cabinet explicitly prohibited travel to holiday homes, except to carry out necessary maintenance. I don't know when millionaires carry out their own maintenance—let's put that on record right now. Reports then began filtering back that wealthy Sydneysiders were travelling to their holiday homes—would you guess, to mow their lawns? I doubt it, I doubt if they know how to pull the choke on it. Everyone knows rich people don't mow their lawns. In one of the authors' focus groups, one of the participants reflecting on the elite schools said, 'Even if you have the capacity to solve the problem, unless you speak to the right person at the right time in the right circles, you know you're never going to go anywhere.'

Expensive private schools like to boast about how well their kids do in exams, but actually they don't do better than the kids from public schools. So why do the wealthiest Australians pay these massive fees? I'll tell you why. The privileged few suggest that private schools are about accessing privileged networks—mummy and daddy's friends. These are networks that get them into career breaks, networks that put them in front of the queue. Even if they don't have the necessary skills, they get the opportunities. These elite networks aren't interested in giving a leg up to the kids from our poorest households, even if they have the qualifications to do so.

So my question is this: what is the government doing about this? What are you doing about this elitism? What are you doing? You haven't done a damn thing to bring down those arts degrees fees. You haven't lifted JobSeeker and you haven't done nearly enough to lift the three million Australians living in poverty out of it. And this is from a party that say they are all about levelling the playing field. Really? How about we see a lot more action and a lot less of this talk and flapping going on? I'm sure that would be great.

Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak to Senator Lambie's matter of public importance on the fact that the government has failed to introduce or implement policies to promote wealth equality in this country. The Labor government has a long, long history of driving wealth inequality in this country. I'll go way back to the 1980s and 1990s to the introduction of superannuation. That effectively drove up the cost of living, and it's still rising. If you wanted to deal with the cost of living, you could put a pause on increasing the amount of superannuation being contributed, being forced, being taken out of people's pockets. Next week you are going to have to take another half a per cent of your salary and give it to someone you have never met, and you may or may not get it back when you are 67. This is a classic example of wealth inequality, because we have $30 billion in fees every year paid to manage superannuation accounts. I think that's a little bit less than what is spent on the military. Imagine how many base-load power stations you could build if you actually set about spending money on more productive means.

But I ask you this: why on earth are you taking money out of people's pockets when, today, we have just seen inflation jump back up to four per cent? There are genuine concerns now we're going to see another rate rise. If the interest rate rises, that's going to impact the 33 per cent of people in this country who have mortgages and it is going to impact the other 30 per cent of people who pay rent. Those people that pay rent, they rent from landlords who often rent out their property or whatever and have it negatively geared or even positively geared. So they are going to stick rents up as well. So we're going to have 60 to 70 per cent of people in this country lying awake tonight—not just tonight but for the next number of years—hoping and praying that the RBA governor doesn't increase interest rates again. While people may have been able to sustain the first few increases in interest rates, it is getting harder and harder. It's like one of those machines you see at the show where you put in your 20c and it slides out, eventually, and then a few coins fall over. Eventually, you are going to have a big bundle of people falling over, because that mortgage rate cliff is getting steeper and steeper, and more and more people are being pushed towards it.

The easiest lever to pull to reduce demand in this country is to lower the rate of immigration, especially in regard to higher education, where they are not necessarily out in the workforce increasing supply. Today's immigration is very different to the days in the earlier history of Australia. After World War I, immigrants came in and built Lake Hume and Lake Eildon. After World War II, they built the Snowy Hydro project. They came into North Queensland and they contributed to increasing the amount of land under agriculture and under irrigation. That is the type of immigration we need in this country—people who are going to come here, go to the regions and increase the supply of goods and services. But we are not seeing that. What we are seeing is a massive rise in the number of students coming here and going to university. Yes, they may get a job as an Uber driver, delivering ice cream to people's homes, but that is not productivity.

The other thing we need to see is money going into base-load power, because there is no substitute for cheap, reliable energy. What we have seen is that $23 billion has been allocated in this year's budget for renewable energy projects. The problem with renewable energy projects is that there is the usual conga line of wealthy rent seekers lining up, many of whom aren't even Australians, to be on the receiving end of that money. That's $23 billion of hard-earned taxpayer money going into renewables that aren't reliable, that aren't efficient and that are only driving up the cost of energy and destroying the environment as well. So we need to see a much better policy by the Albanese government that is going to deal with the wealth distribution in this country so that it is distributed in a much more equitable way.

Helen Polley (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have a great opportunity here to set the record straight in relation to this MPI, because there is nothing further from the truth than the fact that this government, the Albanese Labor government, is not doing everything it can to help Australians deal with the cost-of-living crisis. If we look at what's going to happen next week. On 1 July, every taxpayer in this country is going to get not only a tax cut but a larger tax cut from those that Mr Morrison, when he was Prime Minister, promised the Australian people. The difference is that low-income earners will also get the tax cut, which, under the Liberals and Nationals, they would never have gotten. We also know that, at the top end of town, people like politicians here are going to get a lesser tax cut than what they would have done under the Liberals.

We also know that from 1 July there will be a $300 energy rebate for every household in the country. We have introduced fee-free TAFE. We've reduced the cost of medicine. We've implemented urgent care clinics around the country, and they are helping families. You don't need to have a credit card to go and see a doctor at the urgent care clinic; you just need your Medicare card. So that's taking pressure off our hospitals and helping with the cost of living. We are doing more to incentivise GPs to bulk bill around the country, and that's having an amazing impact in the electorate of Bass where I live.

We have overseen three increases to the minimum wage. We've actually raised wages in this country, unlike the former government. It was their policy, as they come in here and crow about, to keep wages down. So we have done an awful lot already. We have actually improved paid parental leave in this country. We've made it more equitable so that both parents can share paid parental leave. We're bringing manufacturing back to this country. We want to invest in skills, and we want to invest in jobs that are high paying and highly skilled. All these things are helping with the cost of living.

It might be an idea, Senator Lambie, instead of coming in whinging and trying to get a grab for the media, to actually work with the government—

Sue Lines (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Polley, withdraw that comment.

Helen Polley (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I withdraw. What I am trying to emphasise is that, if you look at what we're doing in terms of improving superannuation, closing the gender pay gap and supporting the things we have done to try and assist the Australian community, everyone is going to be better off. But to say that we are not doing everything we can to help deal with the cost of living is disingenuous. It really is. If you want to look at the difference between what we're proposing in terms of an energy rebate as opposed to what we've heard all this week about the future going back to the 1950s with Mr Dutton and bringing nuclear energy here, that's not really going to help with the cost of living because there's not one expert who believes Mr Dutton's suggestions—the thought bubble that he's grabbed—are ever going to deliver cheaper energy in this country. Not only is it not likely to ever be funded by any financial institution or bank to build these nuclear reactors; the Liberals want to become almost like the Soviet Union and come back to controlling energy in this country rather than supporting renewable energy.

We know, Senator Lambie—because we come from the great state of Tasmania—that renewable energy is the way of the future. We know that hydroelectricity, for over 100 years, has stood the test of time for Tasmania. It's clean, it's cheaper, and we should be doing more—

Sue Lines (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Polley, I'm sorry: please resume your seat. Senator Lambie, it is incredibly disrespectful not only to call out, but you're not even sitting in your seat.

Senator Lambie, you're not in a debate with me. Either be silent or leave the chamber. Please continue, Senator Polley.

Helen Polley (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, President. The reality is that we've got the rungs on the board, we know there's more to be done, and you should be working with us. (Time expired)

Penny Allman-Payne (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

From a tax system that rewards property hoarding by a privileged few at the expense of affordable homes for the many, to a social security system that forces millions into poverty and then punishes them for being poor, to the systematic underfunding of public services, Australia's ruling class has rigged the economy in their favour while pitting everyone else against each other in a battle over artificial scarcity. Nowhere is this war on the working class more evident than in our school system. Under Labor and the coalition, Australia's public schools have been neglected, underresourced and undermined for decades. While elite fee-charging private schools bank millions a year in public subsidies so they can build performing arts centres and hire fashion designers, public schools are forced to scrape by on less than the bare minimum.

Our school funding model is catastrophically broken. Recent data from the Productivity Commission shows that real per-student government spending on private schools grew by 3.7 per cent a year in the decade to 2022. That's 60 per cent greater than for public schools, which saw only a 2.3 per cent annual increase. The same report showed that a third of public school students were from low socio-educational advantage backgrounds, compared with only 13.2 per cent of students in private schools. In other words, public funding to the richest schools is increasing at a faster rate than funding to the poorest. Even more perversely, state and territory governments are incentivised to withhold resources from public schools because their budget bottom line improves for every young person who is forced out of the public system.

School is meant to be a great driver of equity and upward mobility, providing every young person with the same opportunity to thrive, regardless of where they live or how rich their parents are. But under Labor and the coalition, Australia's education system has become yet another way that wealthy elites extract public money to entrench their privilege. It is time we said, 'No more.'

David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'd like to thank Senator Lambie for highlighting the desperate need for more evidence based policies to promote wealth equality and affordable housing and education. Senator Lambie points to the growing social inequality in our country, and to this I would add the growing intergenerational inequality that we are seeing in this country. Too many people in this place are turning their backs on current and future generations and their needs—turning their backs on the evidence before us about what needs to change to shift the trajectory of this growing divide.

Let's start with housing. We're fast becoming a country where, as a young person, the only hope you have of owning a home one day is if you have wealthy parents, and we're becoming a country where more and more Australians—over 1.2 million households—are now living in rental stress. Over 116,000 people are homeless. More than 150,000 others are waiting for public housing, in most cases for years. We're becoming a country where here in the nation's capital, a jurisdiction that's constantly pointed to by others in this place as a wealthy, out-of-touch place, social workers from Canberra Hospital, just down the road from this place, are discharging women who are fleeing domestic violence onto the street because there is nowhere for them to go. At the same time, there are workers in that hospital who have to live at the caravan park because they can't afford rents.

Unfortunately, we have become a country where the major parties won't even have a conversation about tax reform when it comes to property. They won't even debate the merits of limiting negative gearing to, say, someone's first or second investment property or winding back capital gains tax discounts to 25 per cent instead of 50 per cent or even legislating a requirement for current and future governments to have a plan. Let's legislate a plan to deal with this housing crisis that is hurting so many Australians. As a parliament, we could agree on some common objectives, like making housing affordable or ending homelessness. This surely isn't something that's too big to ask, and I thank Senator Lambie for seconding the private senator's bill I introduced this week, which would do exactly that.

The government, as we've heard, is doing some good things. They are taking some steps, but they aren't going far enough. The Housing Australia Future Fund will deliver 30,000 new social and affordable homes over five years. It may sound like a lot of houses, but, if you hold it up against the current shortfall which is measured to be some 640,000, then 30,000 isn't even going to touch the sides. That's an indication of how much more ambitious we need to be.

The same is true of climate action, in relation to which I've also tabled a bill seeking to legislate a requirement to consider young people and future generations when we're making decisions. We have to be lifting our gaze beyond the next election. I see this constant focus on the next election, rather than on what is good for the country over the long term and on what's good for our kids and their kids.

Finally, on higher education, despite railing against the former government's job-ready graduates system, which jacked up the prices of some degrees by 90 per cent for some students, two years into the term of this government, we've seen nothing. We've seen no movement on job-ready graduates. At the time it was, rightly, called out by Labor in opposition for what it is: a totally unfair system that is saddling some students with a lifetime of debt. We also haven't seen them change the date of indexation for HECS, so we're still, effectively, charging people with a HECS debt interest on repayments that they've already made to the ATO. These are simple changes that you would have expected the Labor government to make because they're evidence based and because they deal with rising inequality, but we've seen nothing yet. So, while they've done some good stuff, there is so much more to do.

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

I wish to thank Senator Lambie for raising this important issue, yet I submit that Senator Lambie may have become a little confused as to what's really going on in Australia. There are two classes in a class war now: the political class, from the uniparty, versus the rest of us—everyday Australians. There are plenty of things going wrong in this Labor government's attempts at governing this country.

Labor believes in promoting wealth equality. So did Karl Marx, but the way the government go about it is as if they have been watching some old videos of the Marx brothers. It's ludicrous. They're destroying wealth. Labor's version of promoting wealth equality is to ensure that, in the end, most Australians will be poor. The exceptions will be Labor Party bosses, union bosses and the political elite, including those making a living from the black and white Aboriginal industry and those who profited from the COVID-19 industry fraud.

Labor are the big achievers in driving up inflation. It's back to four per cent now; it's got a four in front of it. As of today they are pushing policies that make even the cost of living out of reach for many Australians and ensuring that energy costs keep rising by trying to force us to rely on unreliable renewables, like wind and solar, that are sending the cost of electricity sky-rocketing. Several years ago, when we were all locked up by governments, pandering to drug companies during the COVID response, the Labor state governments combined with the federal government to print huge amounts of money, with no basis, in a feeble attempt to buy us out of strife that was completely government created. Now we've got the inflation. Look at the thousands who lost their jobs and became vaccine injured, and the billions of dollars that were lost to the Australian economy.

In the meantime, the political elites have given themselves pay rises ahead of inflation rises, and now want to pay a new governor-general a pay rise of 43 per cent. How much of a pay rise do everyday Australians get? Stuff all, as our disposable incomes go backwards by five per cent under this government. Every major problem that Australians face today has stemmed from the decisions made in this building. Labor and the coalition—the uniparty—still refuse to make decisions that are evidenced based. Instead, they govern by knee-jerk reaction or brain-snap, instant decision-making to look good, not to do good.

How nice it would be if the government decided to actually govern for Australians based on data and facts, not spin and looking after mates. As I said, instead of trying to look good, let's do good. As for affordable housing, how many houses have been built using the much-touted Housing Australia Future Fund? Wait for it: zero, zilch, nada, zip—much the same as the value of Labor promises. We are yet to see workable policy from either side of the uniparty to solve the housing crisis that plagues Australians, including those Australians earning what, historically, would have been considered reasonable incomes. They are housing problems caused by excess immigration, foreign ownership, inflation, COVID restrictions, government restrictions eroding the supply of houses and energy prices.

The problems in education in Australia stem from the warped curriculums of schools, starting from teaching primary school students about the ins and outs of transexual practices, to slanted views of Australian history that try to rewrite the facts as recorded at the time of writing by explorers and truth-telling observers of the time. Many in our society now want to castrate children and warp children's minds. Our high schools and universities perpetuate the mistruths and promote political views that our European immigrants immediately recognise as communist, totalitarian extremist views reminiscent of the histories of Nazi Germany and the dark days of Stalin.

The class struggle that I see in Australia relates to the thuggish actions of some extremist union bosses such as the CFMEU and MEU in the Hunter Valley in Central Queensland, who refuse to actually represent their worker members and steal their wages in secret, dirty deals.

As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I agree this government is failing on multiple levels of policy creation and implementation because it does not make decisions based on data and facts. The losers are Australians, young and old, and our future generations. Today's class struggle, as I started this speech saying, is between the political class—the uniparty, pushing globalist agendas—and everyday Australians, who are the real Australians.

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

The Greens will be supporting Senator Lambie's matter of public importance because we agree that wealth inequality is spiralling in Australia and that housing unaffordability has worsened. The share of the Australian economy going to profits has never been higher than it is today, and the share of the Australian economy going to wages—that is, to ordinary Australian people—has never been lower than it is today. The social contract is in tatters.

It used to be possible to believe in this country that, if you studied hard and if you worked hard, you could have a decent life, but today that promise—that social contract—is a cruel joke for millions of Australians. If you can't hear that social contract creaking under your feet, colleagues, you are simply not paying attention. This is particularly true for young people. The great Australian dream of owning a home is receding faster and faster from more and more young people. Young people's futures are tied far more closely to the wealth of their parents than they have ever been in Australia's history. The new class divide in this country is between property owners on the one hand and people who don't own property because they can't afford to get into a spiralling property market on the other hand.

Helen Polley (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Senator McKim. The time for the discussion has expired.