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Labor’s Tax Take Is Hitting Home

Minister for Finance, Senator Gallagher – why does your government refuse to support indexation of tax brackets. High inflation under Labor has completely negated past adjustments, leaving Australians no better off than they were in 2022 and paying 17.7% of the average wage in tax. Any upcoming pay rises will only trigger bracket creep and make workers worse off.

Minister Gallagher avoided the issue of bracket creep indexation and instead accused One Nation and I of voting against various government cost-of-living measures, housing investments and tax cuts. The Minister claimed the government is addressing bracket creep over time through various tax cuts and offsets, while pointing to investments in Medicare and cheaper medicines.

Since 2022, real wages have gone backwards by 2.2%. With underlying inflation running at 3.6% (now 3.5%), any national wage increases fail to make up for ground lost under Labor, leaving workers perpetually playing catch-up. I asked if she would accept that the only true way to restore workers’ incomes is to cut taxes.

Labor is now raking in more tax revenue than when they came to power, rising from 29.7% to 30.2% of GDP, fuelled heavily by corporate profits. Tax bracket creep is tightening its grip and increasing the fuel excise is hurting families.

Why is Labor turning their back on workers?

Once again, Minister Gallagher dodged the issue about total tax take and corporate profits, joking about the political relevance of the Liberals instead.

And then claimed the government works tirelessly 24/7 to ease household pressures, which is delusional given all the data showing workers are going backwards under this government.

Transcript

Senator ROBERTS: My question is to the Minister for Finance, Senator Gallagher. Last week, I moved an amendment that would have introduced indexation of tax brackets to protect against bracket creep, which is where inflation-driven pay rises push workers into the higher tax bracket and they wind up paying more tax on their pay packet. While this government adjusted tax brackets several years ago, the high inflation under your government has since negated the benefit. Australians are now no better off than they were in 2022, paying 17.7 per cent of the average wage in tax. The pay rises coming through next week will be the start of bracket creep, making people worse off than in 2022. Minister, why won’t this government support indexation of tax brackets? Are you happy to see workers paying more tax than when you came to power? 

The PRESIDENT: Before I call the minister, I remind the chamber that Senator Roberts has the right to ask his questions in silence. 

Senator GALLAGHER (Minister for Finance, Minister for the Public Service, Minister for Women, Minister for Government Services and Manager of Government Business in the Senate): I thank Senator Roberts for the question. Senator Roberts, you and your party last week voted against tax cuts for working people. I would be more generous if your voting record didn’t show you consistently voted against working people. You voted against penalty rates reform. You voted against energy bill relief. You voted against housing investment, against programs like Help to Buy that are actually helping low-income Australians into housing. The reality of the way the right-wing parties vote and then the concerns they raise—the disconnect between the concerns they raise in question time and the way they vote is astounding. You voted against tax cuts just last week. From memory, you voted against the stage 3 tax cuts as well, where we ensured— 

The PRESIDENT: Minister, please resume your seat. 

Senator Bragg interjecting— 

The PRESIDENT: Senator Bragg, I’ve called order about four times. That does include you. Now either listen in silence or I’ll invite you to leave the chamber. Minister, please continue. 

Senator GALLAGHER: Every time we have sought to provide tax relief in this chamber, One Nation and the conservative right-wing parties in Australia voted against it. 

We are absolutely enthusiastic about cutting bracket creep. I have heard the Treasurer say this a number of times about returning bracket creep: we’ll do it when we can, in a responsible way and we can afford to do so. We’re cutting taxes five times in three different ways. We’ve got the tax cuts starting on Wednesday. We’ve got another tax cut starting 1 July the year after. We’ve got our instant tax deduction. We have the tax cuts that came on in 2024. We have the working Australians tax offset. These are all ways that we are making the tax system work better for working Australians. In addition to that, we’ve got all our investments in Medicare and cheaper medicines that we continue to roll out to help people with cost-of-living pressures. 

The PRESIDENT: Senator Roberts, first supplementary? 

Senator ROBERTS: Since 2022, real wages have gone backwards 2.2 per cent. With underlying inflation running at 3.6 per cent, and rising, next week’s national wage increase will not make up for what workers have lost since Labor came to power. Workers are forever playing catch-up, never getting ahead. Minister, will you accept the only way to properly restore workers incomes is to cut taxes and put more money back in people’s pockets? 

Senator GALLAGHER: That’s exactly what the government are doing. We are cutting taxes to put more money in people’s pockets. We are supporting wage increases, and have done so consistently since coming to government. Real wage outcomes are growing and they have had a three in front of them, for the first time in a decade, since we came to government, because we on this side of the chamber understand how important wage increases every year are to make sure you can balance the household budget. 

Now, inflation is higher than we would like—we can see that in the budget papers—and wages haven’t grown as fast as we would like. That’s why we have been so supportive of the annual wage claims and why we’ve consistently done everything we can, including in aged care and early education and care, to give those workers the pay rises that they deserve—something that had been ignored for the decade before we came to government. 

The PRESIDENT: Senator Roberts, second supplementary? 

Senator ROBERTS: This government is raking in more tax than when you came to power, from 29.7 per cent of GDP to 30.2 per cent, with tax on increased corporate profits in the lead. As tax bracket creep cuts in, from 1 July workers will be getting taxed more. Today you’re increasing the fuel excise, which will hurt everyday Australians, particularly families. Minister, why did Labor turn your backs on workers to become the party of big business, and was this a cunning plan to make the Liberals look irrelevant? 

Senator GALLAGHER: They don’t need any help in looking irrelevant right now, Senator Roberts. Even if we were wanting to help them, they’re doing a pretty good job on their own. In relation to fuel excise, we did have a temporary relaxing of or halving of the fuel excise to help when the conflict in the Middle East had such a significant impact on petrol prices. That has come down quite a bit, but we think it is sensible to continue it at a lower level for a shorter period of time to help households adjust. At the same time, we continue to roll out all our cost-of-living help, whether it be tax cuts, whether it be our tripling of the bulk-billing rate or our lowering of the price of medicines. All of these areas are targeted to make sure that people can deal with some of those household pressures that we know they have to manage. What they know is that this government works 24 hours a day, seven days a week to work through all of the ways that we can help households with those cost-of-living pressures, and we will continue to do so. 

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Labor’s Robodebt U-Turn

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The Social Security and Other Legislation Amendment (Technical Changes No. 2) Bill 2025 is an embarrassment and another example of this government’s hypocrisy and deceit. Before the 2025 federal election, Labor condemned the Coalition over the RoboDebt scandal, using it as a key issue to win votes. Many Australians believed Labor would fix the injustice. However, this new bill seeks to retroactively validate the same flawed income calculation method that caused the RoboDebt problem in the first place—something Labor previously opposed.

The bill proposes offering small compensation payments—up to $600—to people who were wrongly charged thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars. Once someone accepts this payment, they lose the right to claim anything further. This is a deceptive tactic to avoid paying full compensation and to silence victims. The scheme is only open for 12 months, and is designed to quietly close the door on proper justice for those affected.

The bill lacks transparency and detail, with much of its implementation left to future decisions by the minister, bypassing parliamentary scrutiny. Advocacy groups like Anglicare Australia and the Australian Council of Social Service have raised concerns, saying the bill doesn’t properly address the harm caused. Instead of correcting past wrongs, the government is validating them.

This is not just a failure to act—it’s a deliberate attempt to avoid responsibility and cheat vulnerable Australians out of what they’re rightfully owed.

Transcript

The Social Security and Other Legislation Amendment (Technical Changes No. 2) Bill 2025 is an embarrassment and example of the Labor government’s hypocrisy and deceit. Before and during the last federal election, Labor used the robodebt scandal—and it was a scandal—as an election weapon to electorally gut the previous coalition government. It worked, and Labor won the election based on the incompetence of the coalition and on what Labor highlighted as the coalition’s cruel betrayal of robodebt victims. 

So what do we have here? Labor wants to pass this bill to retrospectively validate the unlawful income apportionment method that underpinned the robodebt rip-off. You pretended to oppose it, and now you want to invalidate it—the injustice, deceit and betrayal. To make matters worse, persons ripped off to the extent of thousands of dollars are being offered puny payments to a maximum of $600 when actually owed $15,000 or more. That’s not justice; that’s theft. Labor is inducing people to take $600 now so people go away and to ensure they never become able to reasonably claim what the government legally owes them. You’re conning these people. They’re already in misery, and now you’re conning them. 

Applications for the scheme will only be open for 12 months. Accepting a resolution payment will discharge the Commonwealth from any further liability. That ends it. In other words, the compensation scheme is completely inadequate. Worse, it’s deceptive, deliberately dishonest. Many robodebt victims likely voted for Labor to get justice on robodebt. That’s what you promised them. Those same people will now never get close to what they’re owed. The government is blatantly cheating robodebt victims out of thousands of dollars—in some cases, tens of thousands of dollars. 

This is not just an uncaring government, and on this issue its approach is not just lazily getting around paying lawful entitlements. No; this government is working hard to rip off innocent, vulnerable taxpayers. These faulty assessments extend back to September 2003—22 years. Instead of paying back exactly what each victim of the unlawful robodebt calculations is owed, the government is trying to introduce retrospective legislation to make what was unlawful then now lawful. And you wonder why we’re upset. This sneaky new bill is making what was illegal legal—the very reverse of your promise before the election. It will try to validate debts which were unlawful when they tried to collect them. I will say that again, in fact. This bill will try to validate debts which were unlawful when they tried to collect them. 

With potentially millions of unlawful debts to deal with, the government is using this bill to welch on its debts to innocent Australians who are victims of government dishonesty. There’s been little consultation with this bill, and it shows. There is little detail about how the scheme should work, and in some areas detail is totally missing. Instead, much of the detail is left to the minister’s use of future legislative instruments to bypass parliament, to bypass scrutiny. Now there’s Labor’s catchcry: ‘bypass scrutiny’—two words that tell us all about Labor in government at the moment. It is the complete opposite of transparency—bypass scrutiny. 

The government has not justified why it considers it necessary to rely on retrospective validation of the previously found unlawful means of calculation. The intention is clear: the government wishes to validate previous decisions that were made on an unlawful basis. You want to validate what you were supposed to fix. The rip-off that you were going to fix you are now validating, quietly cementing in place the Liberals’ violations that before the election Labor screamed about. Anglicare Australia, the Australian Council of Social Service and even the Commonwealth Ombudsman have indicated their concerns that the bill does not address cases where income apportionment wrongly resulted in debts and, in some instances, criminal prosecutions. This bill is an example of the government trying to cover up and weasel out of responsibility for the damage caused to innocent Australians who have been victims of the incompetence of governments, both the coalition and Labor. 

On this issue, the coalition in government was incompetent, negligent and uncaring. People died because of this—suicide. Labor in government, though, is deceitful, deliberately dishonest. Only One Nation has the integrity to restore sound, honest and caring government. Only One Nation cares about the Australian people. Only One Nation puts our country, Australia, first. One Nation will always act to protect the interests of Australians, and we’ll oppose this pathetically woeful bill, this dishonest, deliberately deceitful Labor bill.  

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COVID Royal Commission Now!

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It’s time for a Royal Commission into COVID – as recommended by the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee Inquiry.

Before the last federal election, Anthony Albanese promised to hold a Royal Commission into COVID, yet once elected into government, he changed his attitude and now seeks to cover up government actions during COVID.

One Nation secured a Senate Inquiry to write Terms of Reference for a COVID Royal Commission. I am proud to say the Committee agreed this was the right course of action and recommended a Royal Commission be called. The Committee also set out an appropriate terms of reference – which are excellent – covering all aspects the public would expect to be examined.

It is time for the Prime Minister to stop shielding bureaucrats, the media and multinational pharmaceutical companies. The Prime Minister is making a mockery of the Labor Party’s legacy. PM Gough Whitlam initiated thirteen Royal Commissions during his tenure, and PM Bob Hawke called for eight. This current Labor government has only called for one, despite public opinion polls indicating over 70% support for a Royal Commission.

It’s time for the Labor Party to prioritise people over its donors in the pharmaceutical industry.

It’s time for the Labor Party remembered who they are.

It’s time for a Royal Commission into COVID now!

Transcript

On behalf of One Nation, I thank the committee and the secretariat for their marvellous work during this inquiry into a COVID-19 royal commission, work that resulted from a One Nation motion. Many submissions were received and witness testimonies taken. The report that Senator Scarr has just tabled is a faithful representation of their evidence and reflects some amazing work by the secretariat, him and the committee.  

Australia now has the recommendation that a royal commission into Australia’s response to the COVID pandemic be called, and it has appropriate terms of reference. So what happens now? To this point, the process has been one of which I’m proud. This Senate has held true to its fundamental function as the house of review. The Australian Parliament House website says of the powers of the Senate: 

Democratically elected, and with full legislative power, it is generally considered to be, apart from the Senate of the United States of America, the most powerful legislative upper chamber in the world. 

It’s time to use that power. Indeed, it’s our duty to use that power. It’s time to remind health care, the military and the bureaucracy: they do not run this country; the Australian people do. It’s long overdue to remind the crony communist establishment: they do not run this country, the Australian people do. And it’s time to restore trust in government and confidence in our healthcare practitioners, hospitals and medications. A royal commission is the only way to get to the truth, punish wrongdoing, praise the noble and set a future direction for pandemic preparedness in which the public can have complete confidence.  

Support for a royal commission came from every witness at the inquiry—a rare and overwhelming display of consensus and unity in what has been until now a highly contentious debate. The inquiry submission from Professor Scott Prasser was most helpful in guiding debate around a royal commission. He said:  

As then Justice Holmes, who chaired the 2011 Queensland Flood Commission of Inquiry observed there is an expectation in Australia for such inquiries following disasters: 

… contemporary society does not countenance a fatalistic approach to such inevitabilities, even if their occurrence is unpredictable. There is an expectation that government will act to protect its citizens from disaster, and that all available science should be applied so that nature and extent of risk is known, and appropriate action taken to ameliorate it— 

to protect people. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Remember these facts on Australia’s COVID response: half a trillion dollars was spent, economy and family livelihoods were smashed, freedom and human rights were stolen, and there were tens of thousands of deaths from injections approved yet not tested in Australia, with approval based only on Pfizer’s trial that was cut short after thousands of deaths and without the TGA seeing the patient-level data. 

The AstraZeneca vaccine was withdrawn last week. How the hell do the injected withdraw it from their bodies? The department of health still approves AstraZeneca now. Overnight, a peer reviewed journal published proof that the Pfizer vaccine was contaminated with mutant DNA at levels that are hundreds of times higher than safe levels. The Pfizer vaccine must be withdrawn on safety grounds immediately. This is all for a virus which the Chief Medical Officer advised me in writing in March 2021 was of low to moderate severity, less than some past flus, and had transmissibility similar to that of flu. That was in writing. Australia will not stand for repeating our COVID mistakes and COVID deceit. 

As I travel through Queensland and listen to everyday Australians, I continue to hear of COVID harms. It’s clear that COVID may be over, yet the harm from our response continues. Businesses weakened during COVID and kept alive with JobKeeper payments are now failing in the recession that inevitably followed the big spend. Victorians have been hit with a COVID tax to pay for the state’s response, a tax making it harder for homeowners to keep their homes in the face of rising interest rates. In turn, rising interest rates are a function of the inflation caused when the Reserve Bank printed $508 billion to fund COVID measures. 

Our COVID response affected every life in this country and every corner of our economy. A quickie cover-up whitewash pseudo-inquiry into bureaucratic performance during COVID will not get to the truth of matters into which it’s not even looking. issues like unexplained deaths, which have started to increase again and are currently sitting at around 13 per cent, or 25,000 deaths a year. These are people who should not be dying—young people. In part, these people are dying of the side effects of the AstraZeneca vaccine that Craig Kelly specifically called out in 2021. Our health authorities claimed it was safe and effective until court cases caused AstraZeneca to withdraw the product worldwide, citing a fatality rate of 3.8 per 100,000 cases. Australia bought 56 million doses. 

The official death figures from COVID injections are a fiction. Evidence of this is the TGA’s refusal to provide independent verification of their case analysis. Reports of deaths and serious injuries from COVID jabs stopped being made in full early in the rollout. Medical practitioners who reported adverse events were inevitably harassed and threatened with punitive action from the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency, who acted as the pharma police. Their actions in suppressing the truth of vaccine harm must be of special interest to the royal commission. 

Pfizer conducted aborted safety testing on a version of the vaccine they never used. The shots they did use were never safety tested, and this was the big lie: that the vaccines were tested and proven safe—a lie. ‘Safe and effective’ was not one lie; it was two. Pfizer are currently settling their lawsuits out of court, but for how much longer, as one successful lawsuit leads to another? Australia offered taxpayer funded immunity on these products. Remember: if criminal behaviour is detected from Pfizer, the immunity can be voided—behaviour like baiting and switching the test vaccines, covering up adverse events in the testing phase and erasing anyone with a serious adverse event from the trials as though they were never a participant. Ghost test sites were used, along with ghost participants who, miraculously, never had an adverse event. Window shifting was employed. Adverse events in person that was single dosed were counted against the unvaccinated, because one is not classified as fully vaccinated until after the second dose. How’s that for deceit? Likewise, even a person who was double dosed had their adverse event counted against the unvaccinated if it occurred within the first seven days for Pfizer and within 14 days for Moderna. 

Behaviour like this is why we have royal commissions with powers to compel witnesses and obtain documents that have been hidden behind redactions. There have been 54 royal commissions since the Menzies era. The Hawke-Keating government called eight and the Whitlam government called 13. The Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government called eight. After so long in opposition, the Albanese Labor government has only found cause to call one. What a compliment to the quality of the last government! In all of that time, only one thing was done badly enough to call a royal commission. You on this side must be so proud! 

Prime Minister Albanese has turned his back on Labor Party history and seeks now to cover up for bureaucrats, multinational pharmaceutical companies and crony capitalist companies like Woolies and Coles. These companies implemented onerous staff vaccine mandates, required customers to behave like they were diseased and blasted out pro-vaccine anti-human propaganda over their PA non-stop for three years. It’s no surprise that their share register includes names like BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street. These same names appear in the share register of the pharmaceutical companies that profited from killing people in this country. 

These foreign predatory wealth funds appear on the share register of Australian media that contributed unending fear to drive the pharmaceutical response to COVID. The media also policed public opinion, destroying the careers of presenters, medical professionals and politicians, despite those opinions now being proven correct. Even worse, their opinions were known to be correct at the time these brave people were speaking out against the official narrative during COVID. Was COVID an evil exercise in crony capitalism, in racketeering for the benefit of foreign predatory wealth funds, or crony communism? Yes, it was. Those funds have ripped $5 trillion—trillion—from the pockets of everyday citizens around the world in the name of keeping us safe. What an eye-watering transfer of wealth, unprecedented even in wartime. Thanks to COVID, the rich are richer, while everyday citizens struggle with reduced wealth, unprofitable businesses and poor health. 

And yet the Labor government refuses to call a royal commission. You don’t care! Is this who the Labor Party has become—protectors of racketeering wealth funds and their parasitic, predatory billionaire owners? Is that it? One benefit of misinformation laws is that they may stop you calling yourselves the party of the worker when you are clearly the party of predatory billionaires—parasites. 

Prime Minister Whitlam called 13 royal commissions, Prime Minister Hawke called eight and this Labor government has called one. Talk about not being able to handle the truth. Your position defies history, it defies the will of the Senate and it defies the will of the people. Talk to anyone in the street; they’ll tell you they want this. Your position defies history. I urge the Senate to send a clear instruction to the Prime Minister that his quickie cover-up inquiry has fooled nobody—nobody. It’s time to begin the royal commission; it’s time to care about people, not corporate profits; and it’s time for this Labor Party to remember who they should be. I seek leave to continue my remarks. 

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Prime Minister Back Flips on Election Promise!

Here’s Anthony Albanese only a couple of weeks ago repeating a promise he took to the election. How can we trust anything he says?

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Laboring Under the Delusion of Albanese’s Election Promises

Since 2020, real wages have gone backwards to the same level as 2009. It’s the worse decline in household income anywhere in the developed world, not a title we want.

Labor traditionally sold itself as the party of the worker, but today’s Labor is selling out Australian workers.

According to data from the OECD, the Albanese Labor government has presided over a 5.1% reduction in per capita household income. Before Labor tells you its because of the global problems caused by the Ukraine, or because of supply chain issues, not only did this Labor government reduce household incomes 5.1 percent, two thirds of developed nations actually grew their per capita income during the same period.

The government’s Net Zero climate scam is driving power bills up and driving employment opportunities down. Labor, far from championing the workforce, is selling out workers by allowing 2.3 million visa holders into the country and driving down real wages.

The real party for the workers is One Nation.

Transcript

Data from the OECD shows that Australia has suffered the largest reduction of real household income amongst all developed nations. The Albanese Labor government has presided over a 5.1 per cent reduction in per capita household income. Not only did this Labor government reduce household incomes by 5.1 per cent; two-thirds of developed nations actually grew their per capita income in the same period. Spain wins the gold medal for economic management, with a six per cent increase in income. Meanwhile, in Labor’s ‘socialist republic of Australia’, the real wages of everyday Australians have gone backwards to the same level as they were in 2009.

Labor governments somehow sell themselves to the electorate as being the party of the worker. Not anymore. Labor is selling out Australian workers with your net zero climate change scam, driving power bills up and driving employment opportunities down. Labor is selling out workers by allowing 2.3 million visa holders into the country, many of whom will cost Australia more than they will ever contribute, while driving down real wages. Labor is selling out the workers with your digital-prison legislation which is currently before the Senate. This will ensure that workers who want to keep a bank account—how novel—won’t be able to complain about having no job, no home and no future. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister is jetting around the world, enjoying the largesse of nations to which we’ve surrendered economic advantage. It’s the Anthony Albanese world tour of shame, complete with an appropriate and highly patronising canine reference from China that I will not repeat.

Everyday Australians are going backwards while corporate profits are at a record high. This is not the government of the workers. The Prime Minister’s billionaire mates are running a government of wealth and advantage for parasitic billionaires who feed off taxpayer subsidies. The workers party is now One Nation. We have one flag; we are one country; we are One Nation.

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