MOTIONS
Senator WATERS (Queensland—Leader of the Australian Greens) (11:04): I am so proud that the first action the Greens have taken in this parliamentary fortnight before the winter break is to move to get rid of this cruel, inhumane bill that would cut over 240,000 people off life-giving support. I'd like to pay tribute to Senator Steele-John, who is such a staunch advocate for the disability community and who enriches our Greens team with his every contribution.
I also want to thank his team for the work that it has done on this issue. This is an issue that touches Jordon and every single person with a disability in this community and their families. It touches them all.
In fact, it goes to: what is the Australian character? It breaks my heart that this government has chosen in its most recent budget to punish and to cut support from 240,000 Australians because it doesn't have the courage to raise revenue from taxing export gas, from cancelling AUKUS or from properly cracking down on property investor tax perks that have turbocharged housing inequality.
Instead, it has made the active decision to punch down on the most vulnerable in our community as though they are some kind of revenue source. It is disgusting that this government sees disabled people as a means of raising revenue when it's letting the gas export companies, the huge submarine builders and the wealthy property investors off scot-free. Shame on you!
We are moving this morning to get rid of this foul, cruel bill. With everything we've got, we will resist your ramming it through this parliament. I note that the Liberal Party have spoken of their concerns about this bill.
Well, follow through and vote against it. Don't team up with the government to ram these cuts through. Your rhetoric is sounding positive, so please do not vote for this cruel bill.
I call upon the government to withdraw this bill. That's what this motion is about. Stop punching down on Australians who need this life-giving support.
Find other ways of raising revenue; you've got any number of them that you could use if you actually wanted to take on the one per cent and the big corporations who are ripping us all off. Change tack. We saw in the inquiry into this bill, which Senator Steele-John and other colleagues in this place participated in just last week, the true inhumane impact of these cuts.
We heard gut-wrenching testimony of what this bill would do to over 240,000 people, their families and the people that love them. With the removal of supports to leave the house, it would effectively condemn people to permanent lockdown in their homes. Whether or not it's to go to work, whether or not it's to go to the doctor or whether or not it's to have some valuable social connection, these cuts would mean that that support would be removed, condemning disabled people to be stuck in their homes.
No other Australian is condemned to that, now that we're out of COVID lockdown. Why should the disability community be condemned to that because this government doesn't have the guts to tax export gas? Another change this bill proposes is that people with a permanent disability would need to prove that they've got a permanent disability.
Here's a newsflash, folks: permanent disabilities are permanent disabilities. I'm afraid cerebral palsy doesn't just go away. You don't wake up the next morning and find you're not suffering from it.
That is not how it works. The fact that this bill would require people with a permanent disability to again prove that—to use their own time, resources and limited financial means and emotional bandwidth to go through that ridiculous process, to prove they have a permanent disability—is just an insult. It is a ridiculous waste of resources, and it is an insult.
Every single witness in the inquiry on this bill, and particularly those with lived experience, said that you cannot fix this bill, it should not pass in its current form, it is not fixable—get rid of it and stop punching down. The Greens are right alongside every single person saying that. We hear the pleas from the disability community to not raise revenue off the back of them and to not use punishment and cruelty against them to try to shore up some budget issue that you've got because you are buying too many shitty—pardon me—second-hand submarines from Donald Trump, don't want to take on wealthy property investors and definitely don't want to take on the one in three big corporations that pays no tax, including the wealthy gas export companies, who are fleecing us all.
This bill is an absolute dog, and it cannot be fixed. The Greens will use everything that we've got to get rid of it. It needs more inquiry, but really we should fire the whole thing into the sun.
Is this really the sort of nation that this government wants us to be—a nation where the one per cent and the big corporations can continue to not pay their fair share of tax, where we continue to buy, from a madman, weapons of war that will not make us safer and that we probably won't get anyway, and where we bake in housing inequality by letting existing property investors keep all of their perks and instead we choose to raise revenue from the most vulnerable and needy people in our community, who we said we would stand by as Australians when this NDIS framework was first introduced, something that makes Australians proud that we support each other and that we value humanity enough to invest in people in our communities, including disabled people in our communities?
The kind of Australia that the Greens back in is a community where people are looked after and have their needs met and where we raise revenue from the one per cent and the big corporations who aren't paying their fair share, rather than raising it from ordinary people and raising it off the backs of disabled people. For shame! This Labor government is showing with every decision that it doesn't have the guts to take on the wealth inequality in this country and that it's not going to stand up to the billionaires and the big corporations.
Instead, it's going to punch down on disabled people. It's not going to fix the housing crisis. It's not going to properly fund frontline domestic and family violence services.
It is making all of the wrong moral choices, and the message that it's sending to Australians is: 'We don't care about you. We don't work for you. We work for our political donors, for those big corporations that donate to our political parties, and for the same billionaires that are boosting the hatred and racism that we see from other quarters of the Senate chamber.' I'll note that the Labor Party and Pauline Hanson's—or should I say Gina Rinehart's?—One Nation party are the ones that oppose this motion.
They sat together and wanted us to just crack on with other business. They didn't want us to be talking about the real impacts of this NDIS cut bill, because they support these cuts. So here we have the government sitting with Pauline Hanson's/Gina Rinehart's One Nation.
They are both happy to make savings off the back of the disability community. They are both taking money from the same billionaires and the same big corporations, I might add. They are both happy to boost the existing system that sees wealth inequality get worse.
They are now happy to punch down on disabled people, their families and people who love them. Well, let the record show that, when you embolden that kind of rhetoric, you're going to have to live with the consequences of that. The Greens are proud that every single day we will stand up and fight against these cuts and we will always fight for a fairer economy that actually puts people first and that says that billionaires, big corporations, weapons of war and property investor tax perks are where we should be looking to raise revenue, not from ordinary people—not from Australians working hard, just trying to make ends meet, working harder than they ever have and not even getting ahead.
We've got a huge homelessness problem. We've got a huge problem with housing unaffordability. We've got underfunded schools and hospitals.
We've got fossil fuel subsidies going out to coal, gas and oil when we should be having solar on every single roof, attached to batteries, to both tackle the climate crisis and keep people's bills down. We could actually have a system that works for ordinary Australians. That's what a representative democracy is meant to be delivering.
Instead, we see the government wimping out on all of those important decisions and not raising revenue from those who can afford to pay but instead choosing to make almost $40 billion of savings off the backs of people with a disability. The government should be ashamed of themselves, and they should be withdrawing this bill at the earliest opportunity. The Greens will not stop pushing for that outcome.
Every day, we will keep fighting these cuts because we proudly stand, roll and hang alongside people with disabilities, and we think they are worth it. We think all Australians are worth it. We are worth investing in.
Our communities matter. People matter. Billionaires and big corporations, they don't matter to us; people matter to us.
I urge the government to withdraw this foul bill that is so un-Australian, that punches down so cruelly on a community that deserves our love and our support and who want to contribute strongly to their workplaces where they are enabled to do so. This bill will stop disabled people being able to get to work, yet you're probably going to blame them for not working in the same breath.
What an irony. I urge the Liberal Party to follow through on some of the positive rhetoric that you've espoused around this bill, and actually vote against these cuts. We could stop this bill.
We just need you to vote against it. If you won't vote against it, we need the government to withdraw it. But we're not going to stop shining a light on the cruelty of these cuts, and I'm so proud that we are doing so.
Again, I want to commend Senator Steele-John for having the courage and the determination to never back down when it comes to fighting for his community. We share that love for the disability community and we've got your back.