Fatima Payman (WA, Australia's Voice) Share this | Hansard source

I don't know about you, but it feels a bit 'Let them eat cake' to attend a lavish party hosted by a billionaire while parts of the world literally burn and while regular Australians are facing a cost-of-living shitstorm.

There are Western Australians living out of cars, showering in their workplaces, and soon those people will not be able to drive their car to work because fuel, if you can get it, will likely exceed $3 a litre. That is the reality on the ground for so many Australians, and it lays bare a deep growing inequality between those accumulating wealth and those barely keeping their heads above water. In the meantime, we have the people in this chamber, and in the other place, entertaining, meeting and jetsetting with literal billionaires. Those same people are conveniently, and unfortunately with great success, pointing at migrants and saying, 'They're to blame for your woes,' while cynically sucking on the teat of Rinehart, Pratt and others.

In a vacuum of leadership, it has become incumbent on the crossbench to prosecute the ideas that sit gathering dust in Labor Party platform documents across the country. Sensible policy ideas like 25 per cent tax on gas exports, capital gains tax reforms and making sure billionaires and foreign based multinationals are paying their fair share in tax are a good start. Then we could explore the reinvigoration of manufacturing and the diversification of our economy, away from the 'dig up and ship off' we've become so accustomed to. And none of this is revolutionary. These are all things that the Labor Party have proposed in one way or another, but, when they are handed the baton, they put it in the too-hard basket.