STATEMENTS BY SENATORS
Senator DOLEGA (Tasmania) (13:10): 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.