Mehreen Faruqi (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

If 2025 has proven anything, it is this: our political system is designed to fail ordinary people. Instead of fixing that broken system, the Albanese Labor government has spent the past year defending it, propping it up and polishing it. They have all this power in majority government and nothing good to show for it. This Labor government was first elected in 2022, following the climate election, with a promise to take real action on the climate crisis. What we have seen is anything but.

The climate crisis is not an accident. It is a direct result of big business seeking profit at any cost and of governments too cowardly, too compromised and too entangled with big money to stop them. This year, Labor approved Woodside's North West Shelf expansion, a disaster for the climate and for the priceless Murujuga rock art. Why did Labor approve it? It's because Woodside wanted them to, because the fossil fuel industry continues to run the show, because rampant capitalism rewards destruction and because Labor refuse to bite the hand of the carbon cartel that feeds them.

Then came the climate risk assessment, a document Labor tried to hide for months because it outlines the devastating consequences we are facing by utterly failing to tackle the climate crisis. Yet the government refuses to even acknowledge what is causing this crisis—the coal and gas projects that they continue to approve left, right and centre. Then there are the environmental reforms that Labor has proposed, which, in their current form, are a gift to environmental vandals. In its current form, it is a framework built around faster and cheaper approvals for fossil fuel corporations to bulldoze First Nations country and destroy the planet. This is corporate lobbying turned into legislation, and the planet and the climate are paying the price.

Nowhere is the sickness of our system clearer than in the Labor government's response to Israel's genocide in Palestine. Thousands and thousands of Palestinians have been killed. Gaza has been destroyed. Children have been starved, bombed and buried under the rubble, and the Albanese government has not just looked away but actively participated. The government endorsed Trump's sham peace plan, which entrenches apartheid and denies the Palestinian people self-determination and justice. Australia continues to supply parts of weapons that will murder children. Why? It's because the United States demands loyalty, because the weapons industry demands customers and because supporting genocide is, apparently, less politically risky than standing up to colonial violence. This is what happens when foreign policy is dictated by weapons manufacturers, imperialists and warmongers, not by morality.

We see the same pattern in Sudan and in the Congo, where mass slaughter, famine and displacement continue with little more than a murmur from the international community. The crisis in Sudan is not an unstoppable tragedy. It is a consequence of deliberate choices made by governments who arm dictators, who sign trade deals with tyrants and who put profit before human life. This humanitarian catastrophe demands that Australia speak up and act, and it demands that Australia commit to significantly more aid and humanitarian access. The global war machine has an endless, insatiable appetite for death, genocide and destruction, and the international system meant to restrain it has become too weak and too compromised to even try.

This year, racism has dug its claws even deeper into the world we live in. State Labor governments ramped up racist policing and passed antiprotest laws that criminalise democratic dissent. Federally, they've leaned into dog whistling, blaming migrants and international students for their own failures to address the housing crisis. It has kept communities of colour living in fear. This is not passive; this is deliberate. A system built on inequity and white supremacy relies on racism to survive. It ensures demonisation of the marginalised by hate and fear while people can't make ends meet and the billionaires feast.

This year, the big banks pocketed almost $30 billion in profit. Coles and Woolworths jacked up prices while working families skipped meals. Energy giants raked in tens of billions selling our resources back to us at inflated prices. Mining corporations made super profits off climate destruction and paid pennies in tax. If anyone still doubts that the system is not working, look no further than the obscene explosion of wealth among Australia's richest ultrawealthy people. While ordinary families line up at food banks, while renters are pushed into homelessness and while workers juggle two or three jobs to stay afloat, the wealth of the ultrarich in this country is growing at sickening, obscene rates.

Gina Rinehart's personal fortune grew by billions in a single year. The wealth of the Murdoch dynasty, of Andrew Forrest and of the tech and property barons skyrocketed, even as the living standards of everyday Australians fell. The combined wealth of Australia's richest 200 people now sits at $668 billion. It grows faster than wages and faster than GDP. This is not a quirk of the market. This is the inevitable outcome of a system that rewards hoarding, rewards endless greed and rewards exploitation. It is a system where the rich get richer because ordinary people are squeezed harder every year.

Let me be crystal clear: these billionaires are not some geniuses lifting this country up. They extract, and they exploit. Their wealth increases when someone else's hardship increases. Their gain is our loss, yet they get away scot-free. There is no super profits tax or wealth tax. There are no meaningful constraints on supermarket price gouging. The governments cut deals, offer subsidies and roll out the red carpet, because, in this system, political success is tied to appeasing the very people responsible for the suffering of millions.

Responding to this is not a matter of tweaking around the edges. The entire system is failing because it was built to fail—to fail us. We do not have the luxury of pretending that this can be fixed with mild reforms or incrementalism. We must build something different. A different future is not idealistic; it is necessary. It means public ownership of essential services operated for people, not profit. It means housing as a human right. It means a public higher education system that is debt free and independent from corporate control. It has workers at the centre with strong unions, secure jobs and fair wages. It has antiracist, anticolonial governance. It confronts white supremacy instead of feeding it. It is just and caring. This is not impossible to achieve, but we do need a bit of courage to do it.

We stand on the shoulders of movements that reshaped the world. The union movement won the eight-hour day, the health and safety of workers and even the weekend. The civil rights movement dismantled segregation. The women's liberation movement won reproductive rights and economic freedoms. The anti-apartheid movement toppled a system once considered unbreakable. But these victories were not delivered by compliant politicians. They were delivered by ordinary people who refused to accept the status quo of their time and who loudly and proudly protested for a better future.

In Australia as well, governments once dared to build big. We created Medicare, public housing, income support and free education. We have done this before. We can do this again, but only if we confront the system standing in our way, a system that feeds off exploitation and suffering. The billionaires will not save us. The banks will not save us. The corporations will not save us. The politicians who pander to them will not save us either. We will have to save ourselves through people power movements, through solidarity and through collective power. We are running out of time, but we're not running out of hope. Hope turned into action has always been the most powerful force in history. (Time expired)