Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today, I'm going to read out an email that I received last week from a constituent, a self-described burnt-out mum from Blackwater in Central Queensland. She says:

I am writing this with a level of rage and exhaustion I never thought I'd feel in Australia. I am a mother in regional Queensland, part of a two-income household, and I am currently skipping meals so my children can eat.

I am walking everywhere to save fuel money while our government sends resources and troops overseas for a war we never asked for.

I live in a mining town. I watch the wealth of the country being dug up and shipped out every day, yet those mining corporations pay basically zero tax while they sell our own resources back to us at prices we can't afford.

It's an absolute betrayal.

We are a community of workers and families struggling to support each other because the government has let us down a path of greed and destruction.

We do not align with the values of the US government, and we certainly do not align with the 'annoying orange' presiding over them.

Why are we tying our future to a foreign power while our towns die? That money—and the taxes the mining giants should be paying—could house every person and feed every child in this country.

Instead, it's bankrolling a war machine you don't want.

We want change and we want it now.

This is not the first email that I have received along those lines, nor will it be the last, but I think it really encapsulates the feeling out there in the community. Ordinary people are paying the price for this war that this government backed in. It was the first out of the blocks to do so, and it should not have. Moreover, it is time for those greedy gas corporations, who are making bank out of this war, to pay their fair share so we can give cost-of-living relief to ordinary people.