Josh Dolega (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

The coalition has a storied past of locking in inequality. Their contempt and disregard for the majority of hardworking Australians is nothing short of dishonest and downright disgraceful, to be honest, and I thought I'd take some time to go through some of their greatest hits.

This is a bit of a trigger warning for young people who may be following along at home. I'm going to talk about the Howard government. The Howard government entrenched a system that gradually eroded the dream of homeownership, turning the housing market into a vehicle for building wealth. They created the perfect storm that swept through and lashed the housing market. They also delivered tax cuts and superannuation concessions that overwhelmingly favoured the wealthiest Australians. Combined with negative gearing and the 50 per cent CGT discount, this heavily incentivised investors to flood the housing market. Now, to this day, the fallout from these failed policies is locking ordinary Australians out of homeownership. At the turn of the century, the average house cost about four times the yearly income. Today, that figure has surged to between nine and 14 times the average annual wage.

On the mining boom, instead of using the windfall to strengthen the broader economy and prepare for the future, the Howard government spent billions of dollars on income tax cuts for the wealthy. This was a deliberate distraction from the entrenchment of inequality. You can see this clearly in school funding. Between 1999 and 2005, federal funding for schools increased by $261 per student for public schools, while in private schools it was $1,584 per student.

While shareholders grew richer, Australians today are paying the price. Not only are millions of hard-working Australians doing it tough but we have an alarming concentration of wealth and influence in the hands of a few billionaires. The evidence is clear: trickle-down economics doesn't work. It leads to inequality, it concentrates power and it weakens democracy. And again, for those young ones who may be following at home, respected Australian journalist and comedian Jordan Shanks from friendlyjordies has a piece that he did called John Howard REALLY Sucked. Look it up. It's a really good video to watch.

For nine years, the coalition in their last term delivered just 373 social and affordable homes. As if this circus wasn't grand enough, they didn't even have a housing minister for most of those nine years. Despite repeated warnings of rising housing unaffordability and homelessness, extortionate landlords and the need for tax reform, the coalition simply turned a blind eye. Just to rub salt into the wound, Prime Minister Morrison's genius solution for renters was for them to buy a house, which also highlights just how out of touch the coalition are with working Australians.

To further prove they're not on the side of hard-working Australian wage earners, they presided over a period of deliberate wage suppression. For nine years, Australia's wages stagnated by design. As then finance minister Mathias Cormann said, lower economic wage growth was a deliberate design feature of their economic architecture. In other words, workers wage stagnation was not a problem that needed solving. It was a feature of the system. That's why they've also previously formulated punitive policies such as WorkChoices and unfairly attacked trade unions. Why? Because they know that strong union membership means more democracy and unity in a workplace, meaning workers have a say in the way that things happen at work. Whether it's WorkChoices, whether it's wage suppression or a tax on Medicare, the pattern is always the same: when forced to choose between working Australians and powerful vested interests, the coalition unapologetically sides with the powerful interests, not with working Australians. But where are those powerful interests going? They are even abandoning the coalition and they're going to the orange mob over there. And it doesn't stop there.

The Morrison government's proposed stage 3 tax cuts would have delivered disproportionate gains to the top end of town. To illustrate this, it was estimated that six per cent of the benefit would go to one per cent of the top income earners, and 70 per cent of the benefit would go to the richest 25 per cent. Yet at this time, despite 80 per cent of income earners earning under $90,000, they would only have received 10 per cent of the benefit. Labor fixed that and restored fairness, and that's what we're doing with this budget.

Pauline Hanson (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

Well, I really haven't got time to address the garbage and the lies that just came out of the socialist Labor government. But anyway, I've got more important things to say. You'd be forgiven for thinking I had slaughtered a sacred cow at the National Press Club last week. Monoculturalism is virtually all you've been able to talk about since that day. It's exactly what I intended. We must never be afraid to debate any issue. We must never be afraid to challenge long-held assumptions. I've been doing it for the past 30 years. I'm still here and I'm still doing it. I'm delighted this issue is being publicly examined and debated. It's a debate many Australians have been itching to have, so I make no apology for raising it. Australians are already making their opinion known. A poll of more than 11,000 people in the Daily Telegraph showed 66 per cent of people want Australia to be monocultural, with only 21 per cent wanting Australia to be multicultural. It seems some sacred cows are not so sacred after all.

I'm not the only public figure who has rejected multiculturalism. John Howard said he always had trouble with it. Former UK Prime Minister David Cameron said state multiculturalism had failed. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel said attempts to build a multicultural society in her country had utterly failed. It looks like I was way ahead of the political curve when I spoke about these issues in 1996. More than 40 years ago, prominent Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey criticised multiculturalism for tending to emphasise the rights of ethnic minorities at the expense of the majority of Australians.

In the past week, the far-left have naturally taken my comments into the realm of utter fantasy. I was going to ban foreign food, and the Socceroos wouldn't have beaten Turkiye under my policy. What rubbish—predictable and pathetic. The Socceroos, in fact, represent my vision of a monocultural Australia—people from different backgrounds and cultures and nations all wearing green and gold, and representing one nation under one flag and succeeding under the same set of rules.

Australian monoculture is not exclusive; it is welcoming. It's an umbrella which covers all manner of difference. It's not a dirty word. Oh, now let me remember. Didn't we change our national anthem from 'young and free' to 'one and free'? That's right. Australia doesn't drag people kicking and screaming to its shores; people from other places choose to come here. Actually, they're lining up. They choose to be Australian. That was the case with the parents of Carlos Quaremba MLC, a member of One Nation's parliamentary team in South Australia. When he was a baby, they escaped military junta in Argentina and sought refuge in Australia. They chose to be Australian but they didn't discard their cultural traditions. Carlos, who is quintessentially—well, he's a bloody Aussie but he still loves his Argentinian barbecues and wouldn't give them up for anything. I love them too. Increasingly, however, there are people choosing to come to Australia with no intention of becoming Australian or accepting Australian values, customs, traditions and laws.

Remember what sparked the riots in Cronulla: Muslims attacking Australian women for wearing bikinis at the beach in a hot Australian summer. If we're going to accept you, you must accept us too. That's not too much to ask. It's the bare minimum we should be demanding. It's where we should be drawing the line on things incompatible with our culture, like sharia law, child marriages, roaming armed gangs, female circumcision, sex-selective abortion and the burqa. Burqas are about confining and controlling women, which is un-Australian. Under a One Nation government, they will be banned.

Accepting Australia means accepting our culture and the values, customs and traditions which define it: a fair go, tolerance, secular democracy, freedom of speech, religion and the rule of law. It means accepting our irreverence and larrikinism. Bring back Paul Hogan and Norman Gunston. These are the essential features of Australian monoculture, and there's nothing remotely exclusionary about them. These values are not even especially unique. They are accepted widely in the democratic world because they're values which are blind to race, gender or religion. But they're not accepted by many who are allowed to come here, and that's what must be addressed. Come here with your Greek salad, your Italian pasta, your Chinese stir fry, your Indian curry and your— (Time expired)