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

Australians are facing a cost-of-living crisis which may well have gone unnoticed by those across the chamber. This is a crisis that was not of the Australian people's making, yet they are paying for it—literally—while megacorporations are seeing record profits from their price gouging. When we talk about there being no such thing as a free lunch, the groups in this country that are getting the free lunch are the big corporations and the mining companies, who are getting away with not paying their fair share of tax. When we talk about the question of who pays, we are talking about the Australian people who are not getting the services that they need and deserve.

Inflation is rising significantly faster than wages, and people are not keeping up. We've heard the Treasurer speak often about the pain that Australian households are facing, but so far he has failed to take action to meaningfully address rising prices for people in our community. The Reserve Bank of Australia's response to inflation has been to slug us with increases to the official cash rate, which is raising interest rates, which in turn are being passed on to people with mortgages and to renters—the people who can least afford it. Attempting to curb inflation by reducing the amount of money that first home buyers have for essentials is a particularly unjust policy tool. It's also doing nothing to address the true causes of inflation: shocks to supply and corporate profiteering.

Massive corporations are using inflation as a fig leaf to cover up record levels of price-gouging and this corporate profiteering. The share of national income that is going to profit is at an all-time high. The share of national income that is going to workers is at an all-time low. This is why we need a tax on windfall profits—and we needed it yesterday. A combination of a tax on windfall profits, closing corporate tax loopholes and fixing the structural flaws in the way that the petroleum resource rent tax is calculated could deliver hundreds of billions of dollars in additional revenue over the next decade. This would put a handbrake on corporate profits, which are currently skyrocketing, and could serve to meaningfully reduce inflation.

As has been correctly identified across the chamber, the Greens took a policy of imposing corporate super profit taxes to the last election because we knew that the revenue from corporate tax could be used to make a real difference in people's lives. We knew that the government could use that money to reduce the cost of living for people in things like free child care. We saw during the early stages of the pandemic what a fundamental difference it made to people's household incomes when child care was made free. We've done it already; we need to do it again.

Child care is a huge portion of the household budget for so many families. In my first speech, I talked about the fact that I had to rely on the assistance of my mum to help me afford to go back to work, because of the high cost of child care. There are many women in our community who don't have the luxury and the privilege that I had of having family members or friends who can help them in that task. If we want women in this country to be able to fully participate in the workforce and to continue to engage in careers that they find meaningful and sustaining, and if we want their families to be able to afford for them to do that, we need to have fully universal free child care in this country. We can pay for it by taxing the big corporations and the miners, and making sure that they pay their fair share. It costs around $9 billion per year to provide fully free universal child care. That is much less than tax cuts that are being proposed. In addition to that, funding child care creates 20 times more jobs than tax cuts, dollar for dollar, according to the Australia Institute. That seems like a really sensible thing to do.

What else could we do with the additional revenue that would be created if we taxed big corporations and billionaires and made them pay their fair share to ease the cost of living on families? We could make public education truly free. As I said in my first speech earlier this week, funding to private schools in the last decade has increased at five times the rate of public schools, and public schools are currently sitting at 91 per cent of the Schooling Resource Standard. The Schooling Resource Standard is not an aspirational target; it is the minimum amount of funding that is required—the bare minimum—so that students can meet minimum benchmarks. And at the moment it's parents, carers, families and teachers who are making up the difference in that shortfall of funding.

Parents are having to pay ever-increasing fees in their public school. It is not unusual for a family to get an invoice at the start of the school year for anywhere between $500 and $3,000 for their public school, depending on where they live in the country. That money covers things like excursions, supplies in art classes and supplies in classes like industrial design and technology. And, increasingly, parents and carers are being asked to dig into their pockets to fund their children's public education. That places an increased burden on the cost-of-living pressures on families. By fully funding our public schools, not only do we give every child in this country the opportunity to have the best start in life but we also ease cost-of-living pressures on those families.

I have worked up until very recently in a public school. I have witnessed firsthand what cost-of-living pressures are doing to people in our communities. I have seen families who are struggling to put food on the table because their power costs are going up, the cost of rent is going up, the amount they're having to pay for their public school fees is going up, and they are skipping meals and their kids are going hungry. That should not be happening in a wealthy country like this. As I said the other day, one in eight people in my home state of Queensland are living in poverty.

These are the impacts of the decisions that get made in this place. When governments decide not to tax those who can afford to pay—when governments allow big corporations and billionaires not to pay their fair share—it is the people in our communities who suffer. It is the people in our communities who can't afford to put the petrol in the car to go to the job interview. It is the people in our communities who can't afford to pay their power bill this month. It is the people in our communities who can't afford to pay the rent. I'm pretty sure that the people back in our communities are expecting us to make decisions that will make their lives better. By taxing big corporations and billionaires and making them pay their fair share, we have the capacity to do that.

We could also use the revenue from taxing big corporations and billionaires to put dental and mental health into Medicare. We know that dozens of people in our communities put off going to the dentist because they can't afford it. It is not uncommon to hear of people putting off going to the dentist, then eventually going when they can no longer put it off and being told that they have to pay $6,000 for root canal treatment that they can't afford. Not including dental and mental health in Medicare is a false economy; we end up paying more in the long run when people's health needs are not addressed.

The Greens went to this election with a plan to introduce a corporate super profits tax, to tax billionaires, to tax the mining companies and to get them to pay their fair share. And what we heard, when we spoke to people in the community, was that they want that too. They want to be able to afford health care. They want to be able to afford to keep a roof over their head. They want to be able to afford to send their kids to school with the things that they need.

The Australian people deserve to have what they need to live a good life. People on JobSeeker deserve to have that doubled. If we make big corporations and billionaires pay their fair share, we can do that. We saw what a massive impact that had on so many people's lives during the pandemic. Health appointments that had been put off were made. Children who needed clothes for winter were able to get them. Students who hadn't been on school excursions for months were able to go on them. People were able to live a dignified, good life because they had what they needed. And that is the job of government.

My colleagues and I stand for making sure that the people in this country who can afford it pay their fair share. That means big corporations and billionaires, not the people of this country who deserve so much more.