ADJOURNMENT

Senator ALLMAN-PAYNE (Queensland) (20:14): Do you know who benefits from people believing that immigrants are to blame for an unaffordability crisis that almost all of us are experiencing? It's the massive private corporations who are raking in billions of dollars—and their profits come at our expense. It's been a hard year for so many people, but it hasn't been a hard year for the big four banks.

They made over $30 billion in net profit last financial year. The big banks love it that houses cost over a million dollars, and they love it that people can't afford big deposits, because, the bigger the mortgage that you take out, the more money they can squeeze out of you, your neighbour and your neighbours to be. It also wasn't a hard year for the Coles and Woolies duopoly.

They both raked in over a billion dollars in net profits, and everyone is experiencing grocery price gouging, whether they're migrants or not. Big corporations want us to turn on each other so that we don't turn on them. They donate to political parties like Labor, the LNP and One Nation so that they don't need to worry about their own PR.

Every time Labor, the LNP and One Nation punch down on immigrants, they're providing cover for big corporations. They want you to believe that the only option is for us to attack each other, but there is an alternative. We could make big corporations pay their fair share of tax.

A majority of Australians want a tax on gas exports. Pressure is mounting, and more and more of us are coming together to demand that we all share the wealth from our natural resources, not just multinational gas exporters. With that money we could have the well funded public services that we all need to live good lives.

Unless you are a First Nations person, we are all immigrants in this country. Being Australian is about helping your mates, and mates don't turn on each other. The major parties and One Nation will always put privatised corporate profits ahead of renters, homeowners and the hundreds of thousands of people being shuffled around on the growing public housing waitlist.

Public homes are poorly maintained. Many Queenslanders have contacted me and my team to share horror stories of black mould and unliveable conditions. They're not given a choice.

Even if a house is unsafe and unliveable for them and their families, if they refuse a home, Queensland's department of housing will boot them off the public housing waitlist. We had a gentleman come into my office last week. He told us that he'd requested maintenance on the range hood above his stove.

The fan wasn't properly installed and it was causing mould to grow rampant in his roof. What did they do? Instead of fixing it, the department had it removed and patched up the hole where the fan should have been.

As a result, when this gentleman cooks inside, it constantly sets off his five interconnected smoke alarms—so he just avoids cooking on the stove. This man is 67 years old. He has mobility impairments and he lives alone.

The housing department knew all about this because he'd given them the medical certificate for his mobility and his chronic pain conditions. On top of all that, he was breached by the housing department for not maintaining his nature strip. The department thinks that he should be grateful for having a home, even if he can't cook for himself there.

The Greens think that governments should stop choosing private property developers, only in the game for quick profits, over you. The coalition and One Nation want to scrap construction codes and standards so their billionaire property developer mates can churn out unsafe housing. They call these standards 'woke palaces' because they'll never know what it's like to choose between a house riddled with pests and mould or another night in an underfunded and overcrowded shelter.

The Greens believe that everyone deserves access to affordable, high-quality housing, and we are going to keep fighting for that for you. Labor has broken its promise to introduce packaging standards to cut plastic waste. This is a travesty because Australia's voluntary model has failed.

The voluntary targets were supposed to deliver 100 per cent reusable, recyclable or compostable packaging and 70 per cent plastic packaging recycling by 2025. Instead, we've reached just 86 per cent and 20 per cent respectively. Anyone who has watched the documentary The Plastic Country will know plastic waste is clogging our environment and our landfills, and it's now even turning up in our bodies.

Plastic is in the air that we breathe. It is in the water that we drink. It is in the clothes that we are wearing.

It is in the food that we eat. Australia has a plastic problem. We are one of the biggest per capita users and generators of plastic waste in the world, and yet companies and governments would like you to believe that, in order to tackle this plastic problem, we all need to take individual responsibility and make sure that we put all our plastic in the recycling bin.

But plastic is a systemic problem and the fossil fuel industry, whose profits are starting to decline as we phase out coal and oil and gas, are looking for their next big market—and where is that market? It's plastics. Plastic production, on the current trajectory, will triple by 2060.

No individual person in this country can tackle the plastic pollution problem if governments don't act. Labor can't keep pretending that this is a problem to be fixed with a patchwork of separate regulations. The inquiry of the Senate Community Affairs References Committee into microplastics and other toxics heard evidence from experts that we are now seeing plastic pollution affecting our health and our bodies.

There is growing evidence that plastic pollution is reducing people's fertility. I, along with my Senate colleagues on that committee, went to Adelaide University and looked down microscopes in the lab that showed plastic in sperm and eggs. We now have plastic in our children before they are even born.

This should be a problem that this government is taking seriously. Successive governments keep putting the burden on households and councils, while the companies who are producing and profiting from packaging get to just walk away from their mess. The government needs to act.

The Greens are calling for a mandatory federal extended producer responsibility scheme ahead of the meeting of federal, state and territory environment ministers this Friday. If you want a template for what that needs to look like, take a look at the bill that Senator Peter Whish-Wilson introduced into this place before he left the Senate. The template is there.

The legislation is drafted. The evidence is in. Plastic pollution is harming our environment, our wildlife, our water and our health.

On Friday, environment ministers need to act.