House debates

Monday, 26 September 2022

Bills

Treasury Laws Amendment (2022 Measures No. 2) Bill 2022; Second Reading

12:18 pm

Photo of Adam BandtAdam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | | Hansard source

I rise to speak on this bill, the Treasury Laws Amendment (2022 Measures No. 2) Bill 2022, and in particular the very important amendment moved by the member for Griffith. We are in a cost-of-living crisis. Wages are going backwards in real terms for millions of people in this country. We've seen energy bills—because of the reliance on expensive and outdated fossil fuels, and their unregulated nature around many parts of this country—going through the roof. We've seen rents rise by seven times as much as wages, putting people in a massive, massive housing crisis to the point where we now have, in this wealthy country of ours, people sleeping with their kids in cars because they can't get a place to rent—let alone buy a house, which is now out of reach, potentially, for a whole generation. The massive cost-of-living crisis that is hitting people right now is something that governments can do something about. The government can't keep saying, 'It's up to the so-called independent Reserve Bank. They set the interest rates; there's nothing we can do about it.' It can't keep saying, 'It's up to the Fair Work Commission because they set the rate of minimum wages.' It can't keep saying, 'Housing is all in the private market and that's up to the landlords.' There are things the government can do about it and can do about it right now to deal with the crisis that we are facing. We know that because during the pandemic, when we were faced with another crisis, we saw governments in places like Victoria step in and say, 'We are going to freeze rent.' We saw governments step in and say, 'We are going to do things to make sure that no-one in this wealthy country of ours lives in poverty in the crisis.' The crisis we are facing now is making a massive difference to many people's lives and making many people's lives unliveable. We can and we should do something about it right now.

The government could step in and put dental care into Medicare. The average Australian household spends about $900 a year on dental bills. Medicare makes it affordable for many people to go and get health care in a way that they otherwise wouldn't. One of the great things about this country is that we have the system of Medicare, which means people can go to the doctor—if you can get an appointment, and in many places that is difficult. But we have a country where, unlike in the US, if you get sick they don't check your credit card. If you have a Medicare card you can get the health care you deserve. But dental care is not in Medicare, and that means many people are putting off the treatment they need. When the average cost to a household is about $900 a year and we are dealing with wages going backwards and the rising cost of energy and the rising cost of housing, one thing the government could do now that would make a difference to people's lives and help them deal with the cost-of-living crisis is put dental into Medicare.

The government could also make child care free. We could make child care free in this country and start thinking about child care the way that we think about primary school or secondary school. You should be able to send your child there and know that they are going to be able to be there as long as they need to be and that you can do it without it hitting your hip pocket. The Greens have long campaigned against those so-called voluntary fees in public schools, and we need to do more to stop the rising out-of-pocket costs in public schools. But child care is massively expensive. The government says, to its credit, that it's an area that needs reform. So why not go the whole hog and start thinking about child care and early childhood education the way that we think about primary and secondary schools and make it free.

If we did those things—made child care free, brought dental into Medicare plus built affordable housing—it would make a huge difference to everyday people during the cost-of-living crisis we are facing at the moment. Why isn't the government doing that? It's because they are taking $244 billion dollars out of the budget to spend on tax cuts for politicians and billionaires, instead of doing things that would make everyday people's lives easier, like making child care free, getting dental into Medicare and building affordable housing. It's going to cost the public $244 billion to give tax cuts to politicians and billionaires, who frankly don't need it and don't deserve it. Nine thousand dollars a year is how much politicians and billionaires are going to be better off as a result of Labor's stage 3 tax cuts—$9,000 a year! While everyday people in this country are struggling to put a roof over their head or afford health care or child care, Labor's priority is to give a $9,000-a-year tax cut to politicians and billionaires. It has to stop.

This bill before us today is about amending a number of tax measures and about dealing with some financial matters. The most important thing that this government could do is deal with the financial crisis that is facing so many people around this country and ditch the unfair stage 3 tax cuts. With these stage 3 tax cuts, the top one per cent of income earners in this country will get as much as the bottom 65 per cent combined. It is going to turbocharge inequality. Australia is already at risk of going down the road of becoming a US style society, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots grows. The stage III tax cuts will turbocharge that. It will make gender inequality in this country worse, because men will get twice as much of the benefit as women. Men will get twice as much of this $244 billion as women, and the average tax cut for men will be twice as much as that for women. So, on the one hand, the government is saying that it wants to bring in legislation to this place to close the gender pay gap—which is an ambition that needs to be supported—but, on the other hand, is saying, 'We can rip $244 billion out of the budget to make the gender pay gap worse by giving twice as much to men as we will to women.'

There is no excuse for not making child care free and getting dental into Medicare because, when the government says, 'Where are you going to get the money to pay for it,' the answer is simple: don't give tax cuts to politicians and billionaires. Don't spend $244 billion when that amount of money would fund free child care, get dental into Medicare and build affordable homes in this country. The money is there, if we have the courage to stand up to the powerful, to the billionaires, and say, 'You don't need more money, but the average person in this country needs better services.

It comes back to the central point of the member for Griffith's amendment, which is that, when the government says to you, 'All of this is in the hands of the market, all of this is in the hands of others; there's nothing we can do about the massive pressures that you are under,' that is simply not true. There are things the government could do right now that would make a difference to people's lives. We know that the Medicare system works. We have already got line items in there for dental care. Let's just put dental in as part of it so you can use your Medicaid card when you go to the dentist. We know that we can have free child care in this country, because we had it during the pandemic. We've got a system in place for funding child care and early childhood education in this country. Let's make child care free on an ongoing basis. How are we going to fund it? Well, don't give Clive Palmer a tax cut and don't give politicians a tax cut. If you ask most people in this country, 'Do you think it is fair that Labor wants to give $9,000 a year to billionaires and politicians but nothing to someone on the minimum wage?' most people will say, 'No, there are better things to spend the money on than that.' We have an opportunity here to address the cost-of-living crisis and make this country more equal, and we can fund that by not giving tax cuts to politicians and billionaires. I support the member for Griffith's amendment.

12:28 pm

Photo of Bob KatterBob Katter (Kennedy, Katter's Australian Party) Share this | | Hansard source

After spending 48 years in parliaments, I find that we have reached a stage in Australia where government bears no relationship to reality. I couldn't agree more with the previous speaker, the Leader of the Greens, in his comments. What sort of a country sells all of its gas for six cents a unit and then buys it back, its own Australian gas, at current prices of around $32—not the six cents we sold it for but $32? Qatar produces the same amount of gas that we do and exports the same amount of gas. It gets $29,000 million for its people from its gas and the moronic governments of Australia get $600 million. So if we want to do the sorts of things that the previous speaker, the Leader of the Greens, spoke about, well, there is one answer straightaway. The only country on earth that has no import charges is Australia. In fact, the first act of significance of this government was to subsidise imports of motor vehicles.

We have discussed moving forward on electric vehicles. Even though a troglodyte like me is going along on this one, they're going to subsidise their introduction to Australia. In sharp contrast, the crossbenchers want them to be built here in Australia. If you're going to put out money then put out money to have them built here in this country. Why wouldn't you do that? Are you so locked into the primitive laissez-faire capitalism of 1800s? Didn't they teach you in school that little children worked for 20 hours a day, believe it or not, at the ages of 8, 10 and 12 in factories. That's what laissez-faire capitalism delivered to you. We may not be as dramatic at this stage, but there are a lot of people, even in North Queensland, now living in the streets. In the wealthiest country on earth, there are people in the streets.

You gave away all of your mining companies. Four of the big five are Australian owned. The price of metals has gone up 300 per cent. What do Australians get out of it? We get nothing because we don't own the mining companies. You let them all be sold to foreigners, so all of our mineral resources are foreign owned. We don't get any benefit from the huge surge in mineral prices. In fact, we have to get much more aggressive. My own trade union—I am a great supporter of the CFMMEU. We must get more aggressive because our wages have actually gone down. We've gone down in the coalmining industry from close to $200,000 to close to $125,000. They've actually pushed our wages down in mining thanks to their FIFOs, their labour-hire companies and their section 457 workers—all initiatives of ALP governments. They provided the levers that have pushed our wages down in mining, and our blokes have got to get much more aggressive. I serve notice to foreign mining companies that we're not going to sit back and watch our wages be driven down through the floor while your incomes go up 300 per cent.

As for the cost of living, I live in a town called Charters Towers, and we were under the Mining Act, as was Mareeba, another big town in my electorate, and as was Mount Isa. Under the Mining Act, if I went out, bought a piece of land and wanted to subdivide it, a bloke called Michael Power signed a document. My wife and I had 20 acres and weren't wealthy enough to complete our demountable house that we bought, so we had to subdivide the 20 acres into two. It took my wife about 15 or 20 minutes to fill out the form. Michael Power stamped it and signed it, and she walked out and sold that block for $3,000 the next day.

Now, Malcolm Turnbull, no less, and an Australian professor who teaches at Oxford, in Britain, did a report on why housing costs are so enormous in Australia. It's because we can't get at the land. Your subdivisional impositions upon the people have skyrocketed the land in Charters Towers, a good example to use. We had no restrictions. It was one person, a local bloke, that made the decisions, and he made good decisions, as most local blokes do. The land went from $7,000 a housing block to $72,000. Government intervention in the marketplace, imposing ridiculous conditions that were impossible to meet, drove the price of land straight up through the roof.

Malcolm Turnbull and the Oxford professor said the average cost of land in Newcastle, Sydney and Wollongong is now $890,000. You can get a good demountable house for about $140,000. So where's the land? In a big, empty land—125 kilometres from Sydney you can buy land for $5,000 an acre. Divide that into quarter-acre blocks and you've got a piece of land for 20 grand with a few add-ons, I suppose. You try to get a block of land to build a house on within an hour's drive of Sydney for that money. The government is also required to build high-speed highways, spoke roads, that will enable us to do 120 kilometres an hour so we can get to work within an hour. They should be designed and in there now. Of course, it's not taken place.

There is no country on earth that has anything like the centralisation of market power in food as Australia. There are only two people to sell food to and only two people to buy food from in Australia. So is it any surprise that when they deregulated the sugar industry the price of sugar on the shelf went up 300 or 400 per cent? When they deregulated the price of milk, the price of milk on the shelf went up 200 per cent—and the price to the farmer went down 30 per cent. Potato farmers were getting paid about 52 cents the last time I looked for a kilogram of potatoes. In Cairns I saw them for $3.90. That's less than they were down here, in Canberra, at $4.20. How about that for a mark-up! What's the most staple element of your diet? Potatoes. As far as milk goes, Coles said, 'We sell two litres and it's so cheap.' Check out how many two-litre volumes of milk are on the shelf. It's one-fifteenth. Yes, they brought the price down for one-fifteenth of the milk sales—and doubled the price for the rest.

In the meantime, the farmers are out there shooting themselves. That's literally true. I had the most centralised dairy area in Australia, and the highest suicide rates in Australia were in that area: the Atherton Tableland. We had 248 dairy farmers, the biggest dairy farmers in Australia, on average, about 400 or 500 milkers. I said the other day that we're now down to 54. A state member of parliament corrected me and said it was 48. Then a lady there corrected him and said it was 32. Thirty-two is all that's left. And 6,000 went in Victoria. What? To make Woolworths and Coles rich?

As the honourable member said, what are the heads of these corporations paying themselves? The head of Qantas pays himself $25 million a year; therefore, Woolworths and Coles think they should pay themselves $25 million a year. Instead of coming to grips with the monopoly powers of foreign mining corporations and giant supermarket corporations and giving Australians a fair go, and taking away your stupid restrictions on land to subdivisions in an empty country, what are you doing? You're giving a tax break to the super rich, to the boys on $10 million a year. They get a tax break. That's your initiative. This new government's two major initiatives are to give a tax break and to subsidise imports.

Every pub in Australia—not that we've got many left. I always reflect upon the first thing the revolutionaries did in France. Their revolutions were made in the coffee houses, and the minute they took power the first thing they did was close down the coffee houses. Every revolution in Australia has been made in the pub, and they're desperately trying to close the pubs down! There are a few of them left. If you go into them, you'll realise that every single one of you in this place is a laughing stock. They have nothing but contempt for you. You've gone down to the second lowest ranking of respectable people in this country, and you deserve it.

We can't afford to buy food. We can't afford to buy a house. We can't afford to buy a car. We subsidise the import of cars. But I hope that we on the crossbench are a little bit more reactive in listening to the people. We'll be bringing forward legislation that will reduce, at least, the cost of fuel in this country and will also do something for lowering CO2 emissions, which is more than I can say the government and the last government have done for Australia or the planet.

12:40 pm

Photo of Stephen JonesStephen Jones (Whitlam, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Treasurer) Share this | | Hansard source

I'd like to thank all of the honourable members who have contributed to this debate, particularly the last. Schedule 1 to the Treasury Laws Amendment (2022 Measures No. 2) Bill 2022 makes it easier for businesses struggling with their record-keeping obligations. If a business does not comply with their record-keeping obligations, the Commissioner of Taxation will be allowed to offer them a choice to undertake a record-keeping course rather than pay financial penalties. Something that may have been lost in some of the debate is that this choice will not be available to businesses who are disengaged from the tax system or who are deliberately avoiding their obligations.

I'll turn quickly to schedule 2, which didn't get as much focus during the parliamentary debate, but it is important. Schedule 2 extends the existing third-party reporting requirements to operators of electronic platforms, market platforms in particular. Platform operators will be required to report to the Australian Taxation Office information regarding certain transactions that occur on their platforms to ensure they are meeting tax obligations and to ensure that there is not an unfair advantage over the majority of other businesses in the economy that are already complying with their reporting obligations.

Schedule 3 of the bill before the House reduces compliance costs for individuals claiming self-education deductions by removing the exclusion of the first $250 of deductions for prescribed education courses. This will be of particular benefit to small businesses and their staff.

Schedule 4 of the bill allows small businesses to seek orders from the Administrative Appeals Tribunal that stay or otherwise affect the ATO's debt recovery actions while the small business is in the process of disputing the underlying tax assessment in the Small Business Taxation Division of the AAT. Applying to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal rather than having to go through a court is going to save small business both time—as much as 60 days of waiting for a decision to be made—and, just as importantly, money in court and legal fees. These orders will be subject to integrity checks intended to prevent aggressive taxpayers without genuine disputes from receiving stay orders with the intention of merely frustrating the inevitable tax recovery of debts.

Schedule 5 to the bill expands eligibility for those aged 55 years and over to make downsizer contributions to their superannuation. This will allow more Australians to consider downsizing to a home that better suits their needs, thereby increasing the availability of suitable housing for Australian families quite simply by adding to the supply of housing. Older Australians moving into more suitable, smaller housing will free up larger houses to be purchased by another family, adding to the supply and, by its very nature, putting downward pressure on housing prices. With those comments, in summing up, I'd like to commend the bill to the House.

Photo of Milton DickMilton Dick (Speaker) Share this | | Hansard source

The question is that the amendment be disagreed to.