Andrew Leigh (Fraser, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

This morning I received an email from one of my constituents which read in part: 'I am 48 years old and unemployed. The fact that I have not been able to find another job makes life difficult but just manageable because my husband works. He is 52 years old and works for the federal government. He is very good at what he does but unfortunately the program he works with has been cut and he finds out today if his job has been cut.'

My constituent goes on to say that she has two teenage daughters in Catholic schools and has a mortgage on a small, three-bedroom house north of Canberra that has been refinanced a couple of times in the last few years and some credit card debt. All of this is manageable, my constituent writes, if her husband keeps his job. But then she says, 'If he loses his job, we have no option but to sell the house and count on the kindness of relatives and friends, or to live on the streets'. My constituent concludes, 'Cutting 16,000 Public Service jobs will destroy the economy in Canberra and destroy thousands of lives, including those of my family'.

My constituent is a battler, one of millions of battlers across Australia. But recent decades have been a time in which billionaires have made out far better than battlers. Earnings have grown three times as fast for those in the top 10 per cent as for those in the bottom 10 per cent. The income share of the top one per cent of Australians has doubled over the past generation. The income share of the top 0.1 per cent has tripled. It has been a generation that has been good to the cigar-chomping plutocrats and not so good, unfortunately, for low- and middle-income Australians.

And yet what have we seen since this government has come into office? We have seen a government that has ripped away supports for low- and middle-income families: targeted supports such as the schoolkids bonus, the income support bonus, the low incomes superannuation contribution—all taken away by this government. Equity funding from schools ripped away; trades training centres, which aim at keeping low-income students at school, taken away; and the very cleaners who clean the Prime Minister's office are going to likely see a pay cut as a result of decisions made by this government.

In an era in which the earnings of financial dealers and anaesthetists have risen so much more rapidly than the earnings of cleaners and checkout workers, we have a government whose No. 1 business adviser thinks that we have a wages problem—not the wages problem that CEO earnings have risen twice as fast as average earnings while the minimum wage has risen slower, but a wages problem that the minimum wage is too high. And we have a government that is going soft on the top end of town: saying no to modest measures to crack down on profit shifting by multinationals, giving back $700 million of revenue that now has to come out of the pockets of low- and middle-income Australians, giving a mining tax cut that will cost—well, do not take my word on this; let us go to the Treasurer's own budget papers—$1.8 billion in 2016-17. The result of that mining tax cut will see the benefits go to some of the richest people on the planet.

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