Thank you Deputy Speaker. I'm currently running a survey on housing in my electorate the responses
have been astonishing and heartbreaking. I've heard from renters struggling with
exorbitant rent increases, and mortgage holders being pushed to their absolute
limit by interest rate hikes. Cutting back on groceries to only the bare essentials,
no longer able to pay for preventative health care or exercise. One person shared with me
only recently that even with a full-time job they've had to rely on family support and food
banks just to get by. There are families living in cars and tents! In Ryan! In Australia! Shame!
Is this the Australia we want? Well, it's not the Australia I or the overwhelming majority
of Australians want, but it's the Australia that the Treasurer seems to be more than happy with.
Budgets, more than words, reveal whose side a government is on. With this budget
Labor have shown clear as day that they are on the side of billionaires,
of big coal and gas corporations, of property moguls. They are not on the side of everyday
Australians struggling with the cost of living. The Treasurer talks of $14.6 billion dollars
in cost of living relief. Sounds big, right? But that's actually over the next four years,
so in fact it's only about 3-and-a-half billion dollars. Sounds a bit less now, doesn't it?
If you divided that evenly across the population, that's a $137 dollars each a year. Sounds quite
small now, right? Well it gets worse that $3.5 billion is 1/8th the government is spending each
year on tax cuts for the very wealthy. It is 1/4 of what the government is shelling out each year
on those nuclear subs that we don't need. It's 1/5th of the government subsidies to property
investors every year, and far less than this government pays to fossil fuel corporations.
The federal government is also spending twice that amount - about $7 billion dollars - on the
Brisbane Olympics. Make absolutely no mistake, cost of living relief is not a priority in this
budget. So spare us the "difficult decisions" rhetoric, Treasurer. You didn't make difficult
decisions in this budget. Difficult decisions are the ones millions of Australians are making
every day and your budget will not make any difference for those having to make those
decisions. Your budget will change nothing for families having to choose between paying
for groceries or filling up their car. None of the frankly tokenistic cost of living relief is
going to help my constituent who told me they are under such severe mortgage stress that they can
no longer afford meat for their family. An extra $1.15 in rent assistance a day is not going to
help renters facing eviction after a $150 a week increase. But wow congratulations on the surplus,
Treasurer. Gold star. I'm sure that a surplus is really comforting to people out there on the
brink of homelessness, people who are unable to afford anything more than the barest essentials
at the supermarket or people struggling to pay to heat their homes this winter.
There is an alternative. If we got rid of the stage three tax cuts and the nuclear subs,
if we made multinational companies pay their fair share, we would have well over half a
trillion dollars to provide real cost of living relief -and here's what we could do with that,
here's what we could do with it, we could invest $5 billion dollars in public and
affordable housing each year and build enough homes, enough homes to ensure everyone,
everyone has a secure place to live. Surely that's what we want, isn't it?
We could wipe out all student debt, we could freeze power bills at their pre-crisis levels,
and substantially invest in cheap and reliable renewable energy to bring down power prices
long term. We could raise the age pension and Jobseeker , as my colleague mentioned,
over the poverty line. We could make public transport free for everyone. This is the money
we could have! We could fully fund our health care system by putting dental and mental health into
Medicare. We could fully fund our public schools and eliminate out-of-pocket costs for parents.
The government wants you believe to believe that genuine help for struggling Australians
is impossible but ask yourself this: why can they find the $368 billion dollars for subs,
$254 billion in tax cuts for the wealthy but only $3.5 billion for cost of living relief?
why? Thank you. Thank you.