Mr BAYLEY (Clark) – Madam Deputy Speaker, I thank Ms Beswick for bringing this motion forward. We will certainly be supporting it.
I will take a different approach than the member for Lyons in relation to this. As part of my contribution, I will call on government to take some actions. I make no judgement on the wisdom or otherwise of the motion. I welcome the fact that it is put on the table here and gives us an opportunity to talk about these important issues. It is lamentable that we are in a situation where inflation is going through the roof and wages are stagnant or falling in real terms. This is putting incredible pressure on everyday people. Let us face it, not everybody is feeling it. Some people are doing very well out of this cost‑of‑living crisis. However, most people are not.
The key reasons for this are global, some completely out of our hands, some not. Some we desperately need to act on. The war in Ukraine obviously increased pressure on a range of different products, fuel in particular. That had flow‑on effects when it came to cost of living not only in Europe but across the entire world.
Climate change is having a profound impact on economies globally. This is the price of a lack of action. The price of a lack of action is increased and more serious flooding events; increased and more serious fire events, droughts impacting on our farmers; marine heat waves bleaching our tourist destinations, and other things. This is having a profound economic impact on many players around the economy.
There is also pure and simple profiteering. Profiteering, particularly in the wake of COVID, has had a massive impact on the cost of living. We have caught many businesses in the corporate sector rort the public assistance given to business. Harvey Norman, for one, was a beneficiary of millions of dollars of taxpayer support; it increased profits during the COVID period and never gave it back.
The other issue is price gouging. We are having a national conversation, thanks to our colleagues in the federal parliament, with Senator Nick McKim leading the supermarket inquiry. That is exposing the fact that Coles and Woolworths, amongst others, but predominantly Coles and Woollies, are gouging us on the groceries we buy. Every day we walk through those doors, they are gouging us for our money, making obscene profits, and paying their executives obscene amounts of money. At the end of the day, it is us, the consumer, who bears the brunt of that. There is no excuse in this world – I do not care how good a CEO is, how talented they are, no CEO is worth tens of millions of dollars every single year plus bonuses. The only people who pay for that is us, the consumer. It is an utterly obscene situation, and it demonstrates the flaws built into the perpetual‑growth economic model that we seem to live and die by in this country.
My colleague, Ms Rosol, the member for Bass, spoke eloquently about the failures of our economic system in her inaugural speech and highlighted how the economic model is failing people. It is particularly failing the poor people in this world.
Traditionally, inflation has been managed at the federal level by the Reserve Bank of Australia. It has largely been managed with an incredibly blunt tool; the sledgehammer that is interest rate rises. That has hit families, mortgage holders and business owners very hard over many years. Interest rates form but one mechanism an economy has in its hands to help manage inflation. However, in the political dynamic we have at the moment with the federal government, the federal treasurer and the system we have in place, it is the only tool it pulls out of the cupboard. It uses that to bash us, the people, over the head to try to beat down inflation. People are absolutely doing it tough.
To go to the motion itself, we know that the financial pressures on a household deliver incredible pressures on families. We know families are sacrificing food, they are not paying for food so that they can pay their energy bills, their school bills or their petrol bills. We know that financial stress causes significant problems in relationships.
There is no excuse for domestic violence, for male-dominated violence perpetrated against women. We know that financial stress can be a trigger and it causes family dysfunction and break-up. We recognise that in this motion. This is why the Greens are here and the Greens continually put people‑focused propositions that will help on the table in this place. Ms Badger has tabled a bill to repeal the crime of begging. How ridiculous is it that in 21st century Tasmania to still have a Great Depression law on the statute books that bans the crime of begging? More and more people are needing to take the steps of asking for help on the streets because they are in this incredible bind where they have lost their home, lost their job, lost just about everything they have. The only thing they have left is the generosity of us as a community to help them out and make things a little easier.
It was positive to hear the minister talk through some of the government’s propositions for helping people. We welcome many of them. Many of those propositions are things the Greens have been talking about for many years. It is great to see the government slowly coming on board, at least some of the way, with some of those initiatives. Half-price public transport for a year is great. That will help a little bit. However, the Greens are advocates for free public transport forever.
The Greens put a range of other initiatives on the table in the election campaign. We need to deal with our rental crisis. Rents are driving a world of pain in our community, in this city, in households across Tasmania and across Australia. We need to control unreasonable rents. We need to make sure that no-cause evictions are banned for good. We need to help tenants with the cost of living in their rental properties by introducing minimum standards. This includes making sure energy‑efficiency measures are built into the residential system to bring down power bills, not by subsidies, not by giving a handout to households, but because they use less energy, or have solar panels on the roof and use their own energy. The sunshine is free. If we can get solar panels on public and affordable housing, we are going to help residents in those houses.
We have put a proposition on the table to halve the cost of car registration for concession card holders. It is a pretty simple thing we can do. Concession card holders who own a car have to register it. It should be halved. It could be halved.
We need to make public schools genuinely free by abolishing public school levies. This is a system with inequity built into the public school system and for a minimal amount of money to the Tasmanian Budget we could make every public-school student get an education for free. That is real cost‑of‑living relief for families.
I have talked about minimum standards. We have proposed to provide funding to assist every public school to deliver a breakfast program. We would like to see TasTAFE free.
Introduce means-based fines: if you get a fine and you do not have the capacity to pay it, what happens? You get another fine. Then you get another fine and you get another fine. It is just a perpetual spiral of increased cost, increased stress, and then all of those effects that flow.
We need to help low-income households bring down their power bills by subsidising rooftop solar, double glazing and insulation. Deliver more emergency food relief for struggling Tasmanians. We could help people get on bikes, on electric bicycles and on pedal bicycles. We could absolutely help people get on those bikes and get out of their cars. The double-whammy benefit of that is that they would save money and they would stop contributing to the climate crisis.
I know the question is, ‘How do you pay for this? How do you pay for this kind of support?’ We would make big corporations pay both at the state and the federal level. We have woefully inadequate royalty and other measures when it comes to big corporations. To think that HECS students are paying more and owe more to the federal government than fossil fuel companies pay in tax is an absolute indictment on our system. We would end the subsidies to some of the most destructive industries of all. One of the issues that has been a topic of discussion over the last week is the 15 per cent increase in the surcharge by TasNetworks. That is going to hit Tasmanians’ hip pockets and that is a real problem.
There are a range of challenges built into that but let us remember that it is not that long ago, less than 10 years ago, that we made TasNetworks transfer $30 million from their books to Forestry Tasmania to prop up and subsidise native forest logging. There are choices. Let us remember, poverty, pain and some of the sacrifices that are mentioned in this motion are political choices. They are made by governments. They are endorsed by parliaments, and they are things that we absolutely need to get on with the job of dealing with.
We acknowledge the renewable energy dividend, Mr Barnett, we acknowledge that $250 going to every household, but not every household needs it. You could do more with less with that initiative. There are households – probably most of our households, given the wage that we get in this place – that can actually afford their power bill. Why don’t we give it to the people who need it most? We will be able to make a bigger contribution to those people by giving it to fewer people because the reality is some of us simply do not need it.
In terms of a call on government, it is welcome, and I echo the minister’s support of volunteers. Volunteers are truly stalwarts of our community. I completely agree with that. Let us face it, volunteerism gives people something as well. It gives people meaning, social interaction and engagement, and people derive a positive sense from their volunteerism. We should not allow government to use volunteerism, the generosity, and the gift that people give in their communities as an excuse for not acting, an excuse for not properly funding community organisations, an excuse for not properly paying people who do work on behalf of the government.
To that end, I really do call on government to listen to the community services sector. They have been crying out for an increase in funding. They have been crying out for indexation that means that their income from the government is indexed more than inflation. This motion is aimed at families and at individuals and there is nothing wrong with that. I get that and that is completely acceptable. However, community service organisations are suffering the same cost of operation pressures, the same staffing and waiting pressures, the same petrol price increases, and yet the help that this government gives to that sector is utterly stagnant.
There is another issue that has been raised with me, the Treasurer, if he is listening, should take heed. There are organisations funded to deliver incredibly important services within our community. Engagement with school students, supporting programs against violence and the like, who, because the budget is delayed by six months or so, have no comfort for the period until September. They do not know whether they are going to get funded until September and they are left in limbo. They still do not have a letter of comfort from this government or any assurance that they are going to get paid, going to get funded to continue to deliver the services that they have been delivering, in some cases over many years.
There are actions the government can take here and now to give comfort to those parts of our community, those organisations within our community actively working on relieving the cost-of-living impacts, trying to address the social dysfunction, the family dysfunction, the domestic violence, the mental health issues and the like. I call on the government to heed that message and to do what it can to make sure those organisations get both the indexation they have been pleading for over many years and also get some comfort in this period when we are between budgets. We had a supply bill last week that extended some money for parts of government, but there are bits of the community service sector that are still hanging out there waiting to hear whether they have operational funds for the next few months. I do implore the Treasurer to get onto that.
To conclude, we support this motion. This has been a valuable debate. The economic drivers over the past four years and COVID have been a massive influence there, but I do not think anyone expects them to go away soon. Looking back, we can see the effects. We can see the drivers of those effects, and so forth. Unless we have a profound shift in the way we as a global economy do our business, how we deal with climate and take it seriously, how we introduce compassion and some level of comfort. When I say comfort, I mean corporations. Why is it that corporations need to get bigger and bigger? I am reminded of The Lorax, that fantastic kids’ book, where the business just had to keep ‘biggering and biggering’ until every single tree was cut down and they had to move out.
I thank the member for bringing this forward and we will certainly be supporting it.
