with an election on the horizon, labor continues to let us down

By Adam Bandt, Leader of the Australian Greens 

 

You can feel that there’s an election on the horizon. It's not clear whether it will be toward the end of this year or it might be next year, but it’s coming. We have to be ready. 

According to the polling, Labor’s in the low 30s. The most likely outcome of the election at this stage is Labor losing a few seats, and its parliamentary majority.

If we keep working hard we can re-elect all our Senators, but it’s in the Lower House that we have the chance not just to re-elect our existing MPs, but to grow.

There’s a lot of pain in the community. Rents have gone up, food prices have gone up, mortgages are up, power prices are up and the cost of healthcare is up. 

Labor’s approach to the cost of living crisis has failed. There’s no relief on the horizon. The cost of rents, food, mortgages and healthcare isn’t going down. Wages aren’t going up enough. 

Labor says they’ve given people a few handouts here and there, but people know these handouts won’t touch the sides. People know Labor is failing to address the real causes of the problem.

Big corporations are driving this crisis, price gouging and profiteering of people’s pain. Supermarkets are still making massive profits, while people are having to skip meals because it's getting more and more expensive to buy food. 

The Greens led a Senate Inquiry into the supermarkets, which delivered recommendations to make price gouging illegal and break up the big supermarkets to bring down the cost of groceries. Yet Labor has refused to act. 

Likewise, with rents soaring and big mortgages starting to break people, Labor refuses our calls for governments to intervene and hit the pause button so wages and incomes have a chance to catch up.

Labor has let people down on multiple fronts, whether it is housing, military exports, submarines or climate. 

While it’s been a cold winter here, across the world we’re still seeing deadly heat waves and record temperatures. The world just recorded its hottest day in history. Yet Labor’s still backing new coal and gas projects. 13 of them since coming to power. 

Just this week, Labor approved more gas exploration in our oceans. Everywhere you look Labor is refusing to take climate action and is making the problem worse.

And while Labor’s approving new coal and gas mines, Peter Dutton’s pushing for dangerous nuclear reactors to be built around the country. 

As if that’s not bad enough, now Labor and the Liberals are pushing ahead with nuclear waste dumps for their billion dollar submarines, waste from here, the US and the UK.

The next election is going to be extremely important and it’s going to be on us sooner than you might think. 

The battle lines are clear. Liberals are for nuclear. Labor is for more coal and gas. And the Greens are for clean renewables. 

While Liberal and Labor have a fake debate about building nuclear power stations in 30 years, they both want to keep opening coal and gas mines in the meantime, and the climate crisis will get worse and people will suffer. 

We’re fighting two parties who people say it is getting harder and harder to tell apart. We’re fighting to make the big corporations pay tax to improve the lives of everyday people. We’re fighting for real change and for the future of our planet.

And it’s never been more important.