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

It's a defining feature of our political system that people are losing hope that a better life is possible, and more and more Australians are losing faith that politics in this country can deliver for them. This budget was a once-in-a-generation opportunity for Labor to address this loss of hope and to restore people's faith that politics can actually do something meaningful to address the great challenges of our time: a spiralling cost of living, a housing crisis where the Australian dream of owning your own home is drifting out of reach for so many young people, the breakdown of the planet's climate systems, the destruction of nature and biodiversity, economic inequality, racial injustice, and young people being ripped off everywhere they turn instead of being given a fair go.

That was the opportunity before Labor when Treasurer Jim Chalmers got up to deliver his budget speech last night, and it's an opportunity that the Treasurer, the Prime Minister and the Labor Party have squibbed. This wasn't a budget that was brave, that was courageous, that met the moment with the kind of bold reform that these great challenges require. Jim Chalmers promised the world, but all he served up to Australians last night was an atlas. For months we were all told that this would be a transformational budget that tackled inequality, that restructured the tax system to look after working people, to look after young people, and that it would respond to the housing crisis and deliver meaningful reform. That's the story we were told, and that is what we were promised.

Instead, it was a budget defined by caution, by timidity and by protection of corporate profits and the superwealthy in this country. At a time when everyday Australians are struggling with rising rents, increasing mortgage repayments, impossible house prices, growing grocery bills and worsening climate disasters, Labor had a choice to make. They could choose to take on corporate profiteering, to invest in the things people desperately need, or they could choose to protect the profits of the top end of town—the big corporations—and look after the existing wealth of the superwealthy. Instead of the 99 per cent, they chose the one per cent.

This budget contains around $4 billion in cuts to the climate transition, including cuts to funding renewable energy. This is the biggest rollback in climate funding since the Morrison government took an axe to Australia's climate response. Labor has cut support for electric vehicles, cut renewable energy programs, cut clean energy manufacturing and cut funding from ARENA while continuing to hand out tens of billions of dollars in fossil fuel subsidies, increased subsidies for native forest logging and increased financial support for new gas projects. I mean, hello? The world is in an energy crisis caused by the illegal war perpetrated by the United States and Israel on Iran, where fuel prices and fuel supply are being respectively going through the roof and highly constrained, and you want to cut funding for a renewable energy and slow down the transition to electric vehicles. I mean, what kind of budget response is that? Yet you can find even more taxpayer subsidies for the mendicant native forest logging industry which costs taxpayers many tens of millions of dollars a year, destroys nature, destroys biodiversity, destroys cultural heritage and emits massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere to turbocharge climate change. (Time expired)