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

I move:

That the Senate take note of answers given by the Minister representing the Prime Minister (Senator Wong) to questions without notice asked by Senator Waters today relating to taxation of the gas industry.

Labor's budget is a missed opportunity to make big corporations and the ultrawealthy pay their fair share. Instead of taxing gas exports and using that revenue to fund essential services and give people real cost-of-living help, Labor has chosen to preserve corporate handouts, to keep unfair tax breaks for wealthy property investors and to shift the burden back onto everyone else. By the Greens' calculations, this budget keeps in place 95 per cent of property investor tax perks. The Working Australians Tax Offset works out to $4.81 a week that people aren't even going to get until 2028.

Meanwhile, people in the community are going to be set back by Labor's budget—160,000 people chucked off the NDIS, losing critical disability supports. There is no new money to build housing, except for the $110 million for US and UK defence personnel. There is $4 billion in deep cuts to climate transition, the biggest rollback since the Morrison government, in a time of a climate crisis and when we desperately need to be transitioning to renewables for our energy security. There is $1.7 billion for electric vehicles, $2.2 billion in cuts to climate and the environment, a $255 million cut from ARENA, and cuts to the domestic manufacturing of solar and hydrogen.

Egregiously, there is no increase at all to income support payments, no increase for JobSeeker, no increase for youth allowance, and no increase to the age pension or any other income support payment—after your own advisory body told you, for the fourth time, that raising income support is critical. And there is not one new homecare package.

I note the minister's response to the question from Senator Pocock. But on our view of the budget papers, on the Parliamentary Library's view of the budget papers and on the department's view of the budget papers, there is no additional allocation for any more homecare packages. There are no new packages in a system where the waiting list is now well over 200,000 and where the average waiting time is now a year. How do we know that? We know that because, under the cover of the budget lock-up, instead of releasing the figures on the day they were required by law, the government held them back and snuck them out in the hope that no-one would see them. Well, we noticed. Old people will have to wait for a year for critical supports. That's a year to wait for help with showering, a year to wait for help with getting meals, a year to wait for help to get out and do shopping, a year to wait to get essential transport for medical appointments.

What is wrong with this government? I don't understand how you can tell the community that you want to help them when you're giving billions of dollars to Defence because we're supporting wars that are illegal, when you're still giving away billions of dollars in fossil fuel subsidies, and when you're refusing to tax gas exports, which would bring in $17 billion a year, and the people whom you are telling that you can't help—or you won't help—are people on income support, older people desperately waiting for home-care packages and people who need the support of the National Disability Insurance Scheme. That is shameful.

You're not a government for the people. You are a government for the big corporate backers who help you write the legislation for things like gas reservation policies that will not raise a cent because you're too cowardly to stand up to them. The people of Australia are paying the price for that, and the Greens are going to keep fighting for them.

Question agreed to.