MATTERS OF URGENCY
Senator McKIM (Tasmania—Australian Greens Whip) (16:53): For 40 long, hard years, Labor and the coalition have been running the same neoliberal project in this country. Here is how it goes: they cut taxes for the very wealthy; they cut taxes for corporations; they privatise public assets; they outsource public services; and then they act completely surprised when hospitals are overcrowded, when public schools are underfunded, when housing is unaffordable and when essential services stop working.
Every time government fails to look after people because politicians running a neoliberal agenda have deliberately weakened it, those very same politicians then point at the wreckage and say, 'See, government is the problem.' Then they turn around, double down and keep on selling more of the things that we the people used to own and more of the things that actually support people to lead dignified lives.
What an absolute con this is! The Labor and Liberal Parties have spent decades selling off and defunding the very parts of government that help people make their lives better, and then along comes this motion telling Australians that the great national objective is to get ahead. Well, get ahead of whom?
Who are we supposed to be getting ahead of, and who gets left behind when other people are getting ahead? That is the society that the neoliberal agenda is trying to build, setting one person against another—a feral society where everything has a price and anyone who can't keep up gets left behind; a society based on competition, not kindness. Government should exist to protect us from that.
It should pool our collective resources and build things that none of us could build alone, and government should ensure that everyone is looked after and no-one gets left behind. That requires revenue, it requires public ownership, it requires taking back the things we used to own that the neoliberals have sold to the private sector for profit, and it requires leaders who actually want a government that is here to improve people's lives.
The champions of the neoliberal project, Labor and the coalition, keep trying to prove government can't work by making sure that it doesn't.