Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Australians are doing it tough right now, and today's RBA rate hike won't help those struggling to pay off their mortgage and living with cost-of-living pressures, including higher rental, insurance, health and education costs. House prices continue to rise and enter a historic national housing affordability crisis. It's fair enough that a lot of Aussies are angry and frustrated. This frustration has boiled over after decades of inaction. Rather than reform policy and fix the critical issues hurting everyday Australians, Labor, and the Liberals and Nationals before them, have been tinkering around the edges, too timid and captured to confront what needs to be done. Adding insult to injury, populous politicians and the superwealthy are happy to distract away from real solutions that will benefit Australians.

The Greens are the only party that will tackle corporate greed and make supermarket price gouging illegal by introducing bills to parliament that would smash up the duopoly and make groceries more affordable. For years, we have fought for battlers, for rental caps and for meaningful government investment in public and affordable housing supply. The Greens are the only party prepared to campaign and legislate to remove the rorts in the housing market that lock out young and low-income Australians, benefiting the wealthiest of our nation. For decades now, we've fought to remove capital gains tax concessions and negative gearing deductions for rich property investors. Fifty per cent of the benefit from these schemes has accrued to one per cent of investors—that's right. How obscene—the lucky country, indeed, if you're rich.

What's making this cost-of-living and housing crisis worse is deliberate misinformation, which confuses and cons the public. Of course, population growth and, therefore, immigration plays a role in domestic demand for housing. But, seriously, it's not even close to being the cause of the problem. It's just a convenient distraction. Migrant workers also play a crucial role in the health of our economy. Both big and small businesses depend on migration for labour, and so does our service economy, which underpins our nation's standard of living. Of course, history shows that our nation was built by migration, and we are much richer culturally and economically because of it. How did we drift so far off course?

One Nation's political fortunes, surging on the back of this new, anti-immigration culture war, might suggest that they have tapped into a deep discontent in the electorate, but we need to look deeper than their tired old tropes suddenly finding support amongst disillusioned Australians. Third-party political attack groups like Advance, backed by big money, have helped shift public opinion and enable this. Yesterday's Australian Electoral Commission disclosures show that Gina Rinehart's company, Hancock Prospecting, has been a big donor to this massive misinformation machine.

Billionaires influencing our democracy is not new, but, right now, it has never been more salient to recognise this. Look at the unprecedented influence of billionaire donors on US politics, or look at the latest Epstein disclosures. Rob Harris reported yesterday, in the Sydney Morning Herald, on Steve Bannon, Trump's strategist, boasting he had persuaded another Australian billionaire, Clive Palmer, to spend $60 million on political ads—straight-up misinformation attacking Labor on climate change and Chinese influence in the lead-up to the 2019 election campaign. Apparently, according to Bannon, this was part of a plan to help disrupt global democracy. Mr Palmer has denied this, of course, but I don't believe him. Apart from the fact that a billionaire in Australia—or any billionaire, come to think of it—is spending tens of millions of dollars peddling misinformation on climate change to deliberately undermine policies, an action necessary to prevent climate collapse, makes me sick to the pit of my stomach, the important message is this: the superwealthy, the one per cent, want you to blame migrants, climate policy, Chinese influence or any other manufactured culture war for our economic and social woes so that you don't blame the likes of them.

Do you think their millions spent trying to influence democratic processes is about helping battlers? I don't think so. We don't know exactly what their agendas are, but we can hazard a pretty good guess. It's not about us; it's all about them. Pauline Hanson's One Nation party should take note.