Mr BANDT (Melbourne—Leader of the Australian Greens) (12:38): I rise to make a few brief remarks about these bills, which have in their title 'cost-of-living support' but do not go to the fundamental issues that would make people's lives easier. People are feeling very real cost-of-living pressures after almost a decade of this government. But those hits are coming from low wages, high costs for health care and a housing crisis. As we find ourselves in a climate crisis, a housing crisis and an affordability crisis, this budget was the opportunity to fix it. Instead, what we've got is a budget that will make these crises worse. This budget makes housing more expensive. It locks in tax cuts for the super wealthy, and it funds more coal and gas. There's about $37 billion—and rising—for coal and gas corporations. But climate change gets its funding cut by about a third, and there's only $1 billion and a bit for renewable energy. There's $13 billion to push up the price of housing, and zero dollars for new, affordable housing. Meanwhile, there's a $420 one-off payment for low-to-middle-income earners, but billionaires get $9,000 a year every year, forever. If you're a low-income earner, you get $420, once. If you're a billionaire, you get $9,000 per year forever. This budget will make the climate crisis, the inequality crisis and the housing crisis worse, and that's why, fortunately, this is going to be the government's last budget. If we want to tackle cost-of-living pressures, as this bill suggests, there are a number of things that we could do. We could not proceed with the unfair stage 3 tax cuts, which Liberal and Labor back, that see $184 billion ripped out of the budget and funnelled to those at the top—where the top 10 per cent get the overwhelming share of that $184 billion. What could we do instead? If we really want to tackle cost-of-living pressures, we should wipe student debt instead of giving tax cuts to billionaires. Wiping student debt would make a real difference to the 2.9 million people who've got HECS or HELP debts of an average of $24,000. And we could do that for about a third of the cost of the Liberal-Labor tax cuts for billionaires package that funnels the majority of savings to the 10 per cent. It's $184 billion to give tax cuts to the very wealthy or $60 billion to wipe student debt and make a massive difference to people's lives. If we really want to tackle the cost-of-living pressures that people are facing and being hit by, we'd wipe student debt and make housing more affordable. The Greens have got a plan to build a million homes over the next 15 to 20 years that people can buy for $300,000 or rent for 25 per cent of their income. You could do that. You could build a million homes, wipe student debt and still have change left over from the unfair tax cuts package that this budget enshrines through Labor and Liberal. It's time to understand what a grave threat to social democracy we're facing in this country. This budget enshrines a flat tax system, a trickle-down nightmare, where someone on a minimum wage pays the same tax rate as a CEO, and Labor's going to wave it through. This will make Australia more unfair, and it will rip $184 billion out of the budget, money that could be used to wipe student debt, build a million affordable homes and get dental and mental health into Medicare. To conclude, if we really want to tackle cost-of-living pressures, we've got to deal with the structural problems that people and this country are facing. If we want to deal with cost-of-living pressures, we need to make people's lives easier not just with a one-off payment but permanently. By getting dental and mental health into Medicare, by building affordable housing and by wiping student debt, you would make people's lives better not just for one budget, not just for one election, but for year after year after year. This budget tells us one thing, and it's that we need to kick this rotten government out. But the next government is also committed to a flat tax, trickle-down-nightmare system. We've got to fix that. We've got to make sure that the next budget that gets passed after we've said goodbye to this government makes this country a fairer place by getting dental and mental health into Medicare, by wiping student debt and by building affordable homes so that everyone has a secure and affordable roof over their head.