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

I rise to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2021-2022 and Appropriation Bill (No. 2) 2021-2022. The Greens will support the bills because to not do so would be to block the supply of funding to departments and halt the machinery of government. However, the budget handed down by the Treasurer, which prescribes detail of the expenditure facilitated by these bills, is an absolute dog of a budget delivered by a government that is intent on cooking the planet and warping the social fabric of our nation. As I said in my budget-in-reply speech, don't believe the Treasurer's spin.

This budget was anything but a transformative event because the budget for the next financial year, just like the last seven budgets that this government has delivered, is built on the con that is trickle-down economics. The budget makes absolutely no change to the fundamentals of our economy and makes absolutely no change to our tax and transfer system. So the planet will keep cooking, nature will continue to be under siege, young people will continue to be priced out of the housing market and house prices will continue to rise, which means that rents will continue to rise, which means that rent stress will continue to rise, which means that homelessness will continue to rise. All of those negative impacts and many, many more will keep on existing because the government that delivered this budget is a government that exists to serve its donors—the big corporations and the billionaires, who exert so much power and influence in Australia. Under this government they are the ones who are truly in control.

Nothing in this budget challenges the might of the big corporates and nothing in this budget challenges the power of the billionaires. Nothing in this budget challenges the stranglehold that the big corporates and billionaires have over our economy and over our politics. In 1938, the best part of a century ago, the 32nd President of the United States, Franklin D Roosevelt, said:

The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.

He might as well have been talking about Australia in 2021. I wonder what FDR would make of Australia in 2021.

What would FDR say of this government that has given billions of dollars of public money to big corporations in the form of JobKeeper payments to profitable companies, that has allowed billionaires to grow their wealth by 20 per cent, by 50 per cent or even, in some cases, by over 100 per cent in 12 short months in the middle of a global pandemic when so many Australians are out of work and doing it tough? While this country faced its first recession in 30 years, the billionaires made off like bandits, applauded all the way by this government. What would FDR say of a government that's opening up new gas fields with public subsidies—taxpayers paying for these new gas fields—so that multinational companies, many of whom pay absolutely no tax whatsoever and therefore can afford to donate obscenely to the major parties in this place, can reap even bigger profits from publicly owned gas that they're basically being given for free at the same time that the rest of the world is warning that we simply cannot afford to open up a single new fossil fuel project anywhere on the planet if we are to have any hope of stopping runaway climate change? What would FDR say of 2021 Australia? Clearly, he would say that we're living in a fascist state, and he would be right.

There's only one explanation for a government that's so intent on such a destructive and apocalyptic policy agenda. They have ceded control to the big corporations and to the billionaires, and they exist only to serve their masters. The policy agenda of this government is to deliver wealth to the already very wealthy who are driven by greed. That's why this government is overseeing a growing divide between those who already have the most and everyone else. That's why this government is deliberately fuelling a speculative bubble in real estate while the productive capacity of our country continues to wane. That's why this government is turning Australia into an international pariah state, at odds with the rest of the international community who are trying to preserve this planet, the thing we rely on for our very lives and our very existence as a place that our children and grandchildren and their children and grandchildren might be able to survive on. That is the end game of neoliberalism.

All of the pretence of the early days of what was called economic rationalism in Australia has been stripped away. Back in the eighties and nineties, the privatisation and deregulation agenda started, or was at least turbocharged, under Mr Hawke and Mr Keating as Labor prime ministers and continued apace by the LNP. That privatisation and deregulation agenda was spun as modernising the nation by doing such things as delivering efficiency dividends. There's no talk of that now. There's nothing modern or efficient about this government, and there is nothing modern or efficient about this budget. The government doesn't even pretend that there's any more. So, unable to sustain the facade, the government has embraced the pure beating heart of neoliberalism—a corporate state serving the interests of a few and shielded by a culture of avoidance, intimidation and secrecy.

That's why this government gave $443 million to what is effectively an astroturf group to avoid UNESCO saying four years ago what UNESCO has said in the last 24 hours, that the Great Barrier Reef is officially in danger. At the same time, this government publicly subsidises new, climate-destroying, planet-cooking power stations. These are the very power stations that the market refuses to finance because the market understands they'll be stranded assets in the future. Yet this government is going to give away hard-earned taxpayer dollars to get these projects up.

That's why this government knowingly pursued an illegal robodebt campaign. It wasn't because it recovered any great sum of money for the Commonwealth or because it targeted people who'd actually done something wrong; it was because it helped keep the already marginalised in this country squarely in their place. That's why this government pursued Bernard Collaery, who it is still pursuing in a secret trial, and Witness K. It wasn't because they were any threat to national security; it was because they dared to tell the truth—the truthful story of a former Liberal government that used intelligence agencies to illegally bug the cabinet offices of a foreign power, one of the poorest countries on the face of the earth, to secure greater access to oil and gas reserves for multinational corporations at massive strategic cost to our country. Then, of course, the minister who oversaw that, Mr Downer, rolled straight out of the great revolving door in this place and walked into a massively high-paying job as a lobbyist for the corporation that benefited the most, Woodside. What an absolute scandal! What a disgrace of a government! It's a government of mercenaries. If needed, they will make small adjustments to the times, such as what looks like a temporary abandonment of the surplus fetish or their belated adoption of a wage subsidy, but their first instinct—the one they will always go back to—is to serve their corporate masters.

It doesn't have to be like this. Budgets are about choices, and the Greens have made their choice. We choose to take on the big corporations. We choose to take on and stand up to the billionaires, who wield far too much power and influence, and we choose to stand up to and take on their puppets in this government—the puppets of the big corporates and the puppets of the billionaires. The Greens have a clear plan to create a fairer and more equal society. Our plan is for truth and justice for First Nations peoples and, ultimately, a treaty or treaties for First Nations peoples. Our plan is a government led program of action to set us up for a future where the planet is burning. Our plan will establish a national jobs and income guarantee. Our plan is for 700 per cent renewable energy by exporting our clean energy to the world. Our plan is for real climate action, not the climate con perpetrated by the government, which is cooking the books to hide the fact that it is cooking the planet. Our plan would build a million affordable, accessible and high-quality accessible homes. Our plan would revitalise Australian manufacturing, including locally made vaccines. Our plan is for universal, free child care and free tertiary education. Our plan is to care for nature and to restore degraded wild places. Our plan is for the billionaires and big corporations to pay their fair share of tax so we can afford to do those things and fund the quality public services that Australians rightfully expect.

Our plan and our commitment to the Australian people is that we will fight for them every day and we will do that by standing up to the big corporations, by standing up to the billionaires and by standing up to the vested-interest puppet masters that exist in this country and pull the strings of this government and pull the strings of Treasurer Frydenberg. That is our commitment to the Australian people and that is the commitment we make to nature, to our climate, to our wilderness, to our forests and to our coastlines—all of which are under siege at the moment and being smashed up by rampant neoliberalism that cares nothing for those things and cares only about greed and profit.