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

Last week, Billie Eilish asked:

If you're a billionaire, why are you a billionaire?

That's so true, Billie. Here in little old Australia, we are home to over 160 billionaires. Gina Rinehart is worth $38 billion; Clive Palmer, $20 billion; Anthony Pratt, Donald Trump's mate, is worth $25 billion. Add them all up and it's well over half a trillion dollars held by so few people that they could all have a seat in this room. If you're an Australian billionaire, on average, you're making $67,000 every hour—more than many Australians make in an entire year.

Meanwhile, one in seven Australians is living in poverty. Last year, one in five households skipped meals or whole days of eating because they couldn't afford it. Among renters, that number was one in two. All of those billionaires' money didn't just come out of thin air. It came from ordinary people, skyrocketing corporate profits, stolen wages, extortionate rents and shipping off our natural resources overseas without paying tax. Labor and the Liberals are not going to fix this system. They're the ones who built it, and they're on the billionaires' payroll.

Billie, you told the billionaires:

No hate, but yeah, give your money away …

I'll go you one better. We need to tax them. If we took the power back from billionaires, we could raise enough money to build enough public homes that renters could actually afford. We could make it free to see the GP or the dentist. We could take child care and aged care out of the hands of greedy corporations and make those free too. By doing so, we could give hope to everyday people—hope over big money and small ideas. That's what the Greens are fighting for, and, if you believe in that too, join us.