Stephen Bates (Brisbane, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move the amendment as circulated in my name:

That all words after "House" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

"(1) notes that these revised tax cuts will still make economic inequality in Australia worse by:

(a) giving politicians and CEOs on incomes more than $200,000 three times the value of tax cuts compared to the average worker;

(b) only providing the poorest 20 per cent of society with 0.4 per cent of the share of tax cuts next financial year, compared to the wealthiest 20 per cent of society who will enjoy half the total value of the tax cuts;

(c) exacerbating the gender pay gap, with 42 per cent of the tax cuts going to women and 58 per cent to men; and

(d) starving the budget by a jaw-dropping $318 billion over the decade, removing revenue that could support people who rely on aged care services, disability support, income support and families who depend on the public education and health systems; and

(2) calls on the government to redesign the tax cuts to not give the wealthiest in society $4,529 a year and instead redirect this largesse to expanding public services like mental health and dental into Medicare and financial support for those earning below the tax free threshold in this cost of living crisis".

Scott Morrison's stage 3 tax cuts would have delivered $9,000 to those earning over $200,000 and literally nothing to those earning $45,000 or less. The government's changes to stage 3 are an improvement, but they could go a lot further.

Let's not forget just how much this will cost this country. The projection is $313 billion over a decade. These cuts are due to come into effect in July 2024. They are still the most expensive and most inequitable tax cuts in Australia's history. If they were listed as expenditure, they would be one of the most expensive programs listed in the budget. They're still skewed towards higher income earners: a huge amount of money in this is still going to the people at very top. The wealthiest 20 per cent of society will get 50 per cent of the tax cuts. The poorest 20 per cent of society will get 0.4 per cent of the tax cuts. Even middle-income earners are getting short-changed, with politicians, CEOs and billionaires getting three times more in tax cuts than the average worker.

The Greens are the only ones in parliament to have consistently opposed the stage 3 tax cuts all the way through. I'm sure the Treasurer can attest just how many times I've asked him a question in question time about changing or abolishing the stage 3 tax cuts. We were unequivocal that this was tremendously bad public policy that would turbocharge inequality and widen the gender pay gap.

While the government cheers on these revised tax cuts—and they are an improvement—if we step back and look at them, they are still remarkably unfair and will result in poor public services, by blowing an incredibly huge hole in the budget. People who need aged-care services or disability services and those who rely on the public health system or the public school system are the biggest losers from these cuts.

It's high time we looked at tax reform in this country as a whole. Data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the OECD, shows clearly that we undercollect taxes on wealth and pollution and overly rely on personal income tax. Our so-called tax debates have become so dishonest because they're driven by business leaders and corporate lobbyists—people who brag about the destruction of carbon taxes and fossil fuel taxes to the detriment of Australia's social services. These lobby groups have far too much influence in parliament, writing laws for themselves and having the major parties wave them on through.

Basic economics says we should tax things we want less of and subsidise things we want more of. But, here in Australia, we seem to do it the other way around. We are spending over $11 billion a year on fossil fuel subsidies, and we collect more revenue from HECS than we do from the petroleum resource rent tax. Students pay a fortune to study so the government can prop up the fossil fuel industry. All of us pay a fortune to go to the dentist so that the government can prop up the fossil fuel industry. Bulk-billing rates have collapsed so that the government can prop up the fossil fuel industry. This is about choices. If we want to transition away from coal and gas, we need to stop subsidising them and put that money into making people's lives easier. It's not complicated; it's just inconvenient for BHP and Santos.

Improving the stage 3 tax cuts is a start. We need to reduce inequality—inequality that has been rampantly increasing in Australia. If we're serious about having a fair society, about having a fair economy, about improving the lives of all Australians, about tackling climate change and about fixing the housing and cost-of-living crises, then it is time to admit that we can't have world-class services if we do not have a world-class tax system. It's the dishonest promise of countless politicians: getting Scandinavian social services at American tax rates.

Corporate superprofits are going completely unchecked, all while they dodge taxes and leave it to Australian workers to pick up the tab. Here are some examples: Qantas, $9.3 billion of income, no tax paid; casino giants Crown and the Star Entertainment Group, $2.25 billion and $1.5 billion in income respectively, no tax paid; Singapore Telecommunications, parent company of Optus, $8 billion of income, no tax paid. Meanwhile, just one nurse or teacher is paying more than all of these companies combined. Make it make sense.

As we face the impacts of climate change, it is only going to get harder to hold the economy and our society on a steady course. One of the major variables in how we shape our economy is how we choose to collect and spend tax revenue. It is something the people should have control over. Legislation should not be written of, by and for giant corporations.

A simple, efficient solution would be to collect more tax from the petroleum resource rent tax. The PRRT was introduced in 1987 and is supposed to operate as a means of collecting a fair share of petroleum profits on behalf of the Australian people. The PRRT is a tax on superprofits, sometimes called resource rents, made by multinational oil and gas companies operating in Australia. That's what it's designed to do, but, in reality, the PRRT has such extensive loopholes that oil and gas producers are able to minimise the tax or avoid paying it entirely. Australians are missing out on a fair share of revenue, while fossil fuel companies are making record profits and worsening the climate crisis. Proposed changes to the PRRT, which are supposedly designed to limit the extent to which gas and oil companies can reduce their liabilities, are so incremental that they were actually welcomed with open arms by the fossil fuel industry. The government seems hell-bent on tinkering around the edges of genuine problems rather than dealing with them in a meaningful way, for fear of antagonising donors.

Australia is the world's third-largest fuel exporter. We are behind only Saudi Arabia and Russia. We export less gas than the likes of Qatar, and they receive over 20 times the amount of tax revenue that we do. Or take Norway, which like us is a relatively small but developed economy with substantial natural resource extraction. In recent years, Australia's and Norway's oil and gas industries have generated similar amounts of revenue, but Norway's citizens have gotten significantly more out of it than we have. Norway's Ministry of Finance projected that tax revenue from oil and gas was to be a staggering A$127 billion in 2023 alone, or around A$23,500 per Norwegian citizen. Research from the Australia Institute shows that increasing the PRRT would raise billions of dollars in revenue that could be spent on essential public services and dealing with the cost of living and the impacts of climate crisis, which in itself is driven by Australia's massive fossil fuel export industry. Increasing the PRRT is necessary to ensure that Australian people get a real share of the windfall profits from our own natural resources.

Scrapping fossil fuel subsidies, actually taxing the fossil fuel industry fairly and closing loopholes that let so many wealthy individuals and companies avoid tax will strengthen our economy and our society. This is about making the right decision for everyone. Rather than having to imagine what we could achieve, we could just do it. Investing in our essential services will improve both our quality of life and our productivity. We could invest in public housing and public transport, driving down the cost of living. We could invest in fully free child care, driving far more people into the workforce than any tax cut could ever hope to. We could lift the pension and JobSeeker payments. The list goes on with what could be funded by fixing the PRRT, even with the $318 billion price tag of these stage 3 tax cuts.

Dental into Medicare, wiping student debt, making uni and TAFE free, and creating a universal childcare system—these are all possible if we start having a realistic conversation about our tax system. We live in a country where a nurse or teacher pays more in taxes than a billion-dollar multinational company. This is beyond a joke, and it's an insult. Everyday people are struggling to make ends meet, and more people than ever are living pay to pay. This is about choices. On one hand, the choice is to cut our people's health and education, their futures and a sustainable planet for the sole purpose of propping up billion-dollar companies and ensuring that one in three corporations in this country never have to pay a cent in taxes. On the other, we could look at the alternatives that already exist: making these giant corporations and the fossil fuel industry pay their fair share so that we can afford to have these nice things again. There is nothing impossible about that choice. Politicians just have to decide if they want to put people or corporations first.

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