Taxing the Rich & Thwarting Oligarchy: An Interview with Senator Waters

As Prime Minister Anthony Albanese approaches the end of a three-year term marked by a failed referendum, a help to buy scheme, and a cost-of-living crisis, a federal election must be called soon. Whether the anticipated polling date, April 12, will remain up in the air courtesy of Cyclone Alfred... we shall just have to wait and see.

It hardly comes as a surprise that major and minor parties in Australia have been ramping up their presence on social media platforms and podcasts this year, as the 2025 federal election will be the first where Gen Z and Millenials will outweigh Boomer voters across every state.

This seismic shift of power towards younger people has been made abundantly clear by politicians pivoting their focus to seem more appealing to the demographic by addressing their needs. A lack of substantial policies centered around climate change, the cost-of-living crisis, housing affordability, and social justice may strip a party of their vote.

Snapshot of voter demographics based on statistics from AEC's December 2024 report on elector count by division, age group, and gender.

Greens Senator for Queensland Larissa Waters remains fairly optimistic in the face of the federal election. As the national spokesperson on women and democracy, Waters is passionate about public participation, accountability in government, environmental justice and gender equality.

This year, her campaign largely focuses on stamping out gendered violence and inequality, banning political donations from big industries (e.g. coal and gas giants, mining companies, banks, property developers etc.), and strengthening accountability and transparency in government.

In November, the Federal Greens announced their Robin Hood Reforms, an election plan that is funded by taxing big corporations and billionaires to deliver on their key policies.

Last month, Waters and I had a good long chat over the phone to unpack these policies, the threat of oligarchy, the future of women's safety in Australia, and how the federal Greens continue to act as an alternative to the current government and the Coalition.

You can read our interview or listen to a shortened audio version of it below.

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We're coming up a federal election where both millennials and Gen Z will outweigh Boomer voters for the first time, and recent voting trends have also started displaying their divergence and detachment from the major two parties. Are you feeling confident that the Greens will win over more seats due to this swing in demographic?

I really hope so, Lauren, because we've got a great plan for young people, and we actually want to fix the problems that people are facing, and not just this generation, but you know, everyone in the nation that's currently really struggling with the cost of living.

As everyone knows, we're still in a climate crisis, even though that's not at the top of anyone's list at the moment, because they're trying to choose between groceries or rent, they can see that the big corporations make big donations to the large political parties, and that the big corporates are doing quite nicely and everyone else is getting screwed, and they're kind of sick of being done over and the Greens agreed.

So we've got a plan to actually make the big corporations pay their fair share of tax, and with the revenue that we could raise from that, we could fund things like actually canceling student debt and making TAFE and uni free, like it used to be a few decades back, making sure that we can freeze and cap rent increases, actually build affordable homes, and taking real action on the climate crisis to try to protect the planet that we all rely on, and, incidentally, bring people's energy bills down.

And I reckon this generation are quite attuned to the fact that the Greens want to do that, and the other big political parties just want to kiss their... proverbials.

Senator Larissa Waters kindly spared time after the first Parliamentary meeting for 2025 to talk about the Federal Greens' election promises. Here is a shortened, audio version of the interview. (Image: Larissa Waters // Instagram)

As you just touched on before, a lot of the concerns of young people, as well as the wider community, lie within the context of the cost of living and housing crisis. To help address this, the Greens have announced their Robin Hood Reform policies. Could you tell us a bit more about them?

What we want to do is tax the super profits of big corporations, because they are making super profits. Meanwhile everyone else is like tightening their belt because food's gone up, rents gone up, interest rates have gone up, like everything costs more, and that suits the big corporations very nicely, and so we reckon their super profits actually need to be taxed at an even higher rate.

And we also want to make the gas corporations pay, because at the moment, they get all sorts of perks, like, you know, royalty holidays, but they they get these... I mean, it gets a bit complicated, but the petroleum resources rent tax is basically a wrought designed to give gas away for free, which we then export, ruining farmland and the climate in the process.

So we want to make those gas companies pay in particular and then, yeah, a mining and general big corporations super profits tax. Now we reckon that will bring in billions. And we've checked that all past the parliamentary Budget Office, they're the ones that kind of make sure that political parties don't just make up stuff when it comes to budget promises.

And it would raise so many billions, 368 if memory serves me, over about 10 years, which essentially gives us a lot of money that we say if this happened, you could actually allocate to housing, to schools, to hospitals, to making University free, you know, to actually fixing people's lives, to breaking up the Coles and Woolies duopoly, to bring down the price of groceries, like we've actually got the funds to do good things for the world and for people, but at the moment, the political consensus is just, oh, we've got to do what the rich billionaires and big corporations tell us to do, because we take their donations and you know, they're actually the puppet masters.

Another area I wanted to cover was gendered violence, which has become another point of concern and activism in young voters with one woman murdered every four days in this country. One huge part of your campaign this year is the $15 billion package to end it, with $1 billion going towards frontline services. Could you tell the audience what this package includes?

We want to make sure that those services, the women's safety services that really help women avoid being killed and get out of violent situations and start fresh. You know, relocate if they have to. Or ideally, you know, we think the perpetrator should be the one that gets relocated.

But then, you know, seek counseling, you know, maybe they need some retraining, like, basically just we think that every woman who reaches out for help to get free from violence should be able to get it. And unfortunately, the federal government hasn't been tipping in enough money to do that.

And the second part of it is, of course, prevention, because you can just chase your tail by doing the response, and if you're not working on changing cultural notions and beliefs that underpin violence, then, unfortunately, you'll never eliminate the problem.

So we really need to look at programs that can effectively lead to behavioral and culture change, and we reckon that's got to start in schools, because kids need to learn, you know, not from violent porn about sex and relationships, but from actual experts about equality, about respect, about feeling okay about yourself, that you don't need to take it out on other people.

As you mentioned before, the federal government had only provided less than two thirds of the amount that the women's safety sector had called for. How may this have deprived victims of DV and sexual assault the critical care and safety that they had needed?

Yeah, that's such a good question, Lauren. In the last budget that government did kick in a little bit more than the federal government I'm talking about now. And so which, which was very welcome, and so it's up to about three quarters of what's needed now. And the effect of that, of course, is that, you know, about one in four women who will need help to escape violence.

Those services will be underfunded and she won't be able to get that help. And it's often not just her, it might be her and her pets or her and her kids.

So you know, we see rape crisis centers right around the here in Queensland, but right around the country are even more cash strapped than your family and domestic violence response services, and that is just appalling, because the rates of sexual violence and sexual assault and harassment against young people in particular are off the charts.

That problem is definitely getting worse, and the funding hasn't budged. And so yeah, there's a lot to be done, and when you think about the nuclear submarines that this government's decided to continue to spend money on, like if we cancel just one of those submarines, then you could actually have the money to help people and to fully fund family, domestic and sexual violence response services.

I also wanted to circle back on the Greens Robin Hood reforms, which center themselves, as you mentioned, on taxing big corporations to budget for dental and medicare, GP for Free, wiping student debt and making public schools completely free.

Can you run us through the taxation process that will sustain this?

The Robin Hood Tax has got three prongs to it, and it would essentially tax the super profits tax of big companies. From memory, I think we said profits over 100 million. So like, we're talking mega profits.

And you know, that captures things like, you know, the Coles and the Woolies, who, as you know, are making bank off the fact that grocery prices are inflated, and then cracking down on that petroleum resource rent tax loopholes that sees big gas corporations like nominally pay tax and then get, like, a 90% refund on the tax that they pay, which is so bizarre.

And how will taxing these corporations also tie into the federal Greens' policies to enhance democracy and accountability in government?

I'm sorry I'm going on such long rants, but you're asking me about things I'm really passionate about!

At the moment, we've got a donation, a political donation system where there's no limit on what you can donate, there's no limit on who can donate, and there's a really high threshold for when you've got to disclose who you're getting big money from.

And there's a big time lag in in the disclosure. So the data just came out on the third of February, and it showed that over the last decade, there's over $260 million that big corporations have donated to the big political party so Labor, Liberals, and the Nationals, and we reckon that's why we've got such shitty policy on climate, on housing, on grocery prices, on, you know, private health insurance, that kind of stuff.

And it's because those big donors make these donations and expect results. They expect a favor in return. They're not doing it just because they've got nothing better to do with their money. They're giving these donations because they think it buys them outcomes for their profits, and it bloody well does. So we've said for a million years, "look, we want to ban big coal and gas companies from donating."

We don't reckon that the pokies or the alcohol lobby should be able to donate. We don't think weapons manufacturers should be able to donate. We don't think property developers and Big Pharma should be able to donate.

We basically just think that when you've demonstrated that you are, you know, a powerful group of big corporates and trying to flex their influence, you just shouldn't be allowed to donate to buy that influence.

We've pushed for that and unfortunately, we're getting nowhere fast, but we will keep trying, because I think most ordinary people would agree with us that you shouldn't be able to buy a democracy meant to be there to represent the people and the planet. It's not meant to be for sale.

We want to see caps on donations so that big money stops playing such a role in decision making, and we want to make that disclosure a lot faster, as close to real time as humanly possible, rather than just massive lag of only once a year finding out who's donating. Which is not at all transparent. And at the moment, the transparency disclosure threshold is gone up to $16,900.

On the 9th of Feb, both labor and the LNP voted against the greens and the cross bench to block an inquiry on what you described as on your social media as "the most consequential changes to our document democracy in decades".

Could you explain what the federal government's electoral reform bill entails and why you described it as such?

We're finally seeing some action in this space, after years and years of pressure from the greens, from, you know, from new independents elected, and from the public who, as we just talked about, might want a system that actually works for them, rather than just donors.

And so the government's come back with a really chunky bill which has got heaps of changes in it, some of which are really good, and some of which we have been calling for for such a long time, like the lowering of that disclosure threshold, they want to put down to 1000 which we think is much, much better than 16,900.

But interestingly, they've come up with this new concept called nominated entities that political parties are allowed to set up, and that then if you take money from that nominated entity, it's not considered a donation, and so you can just take as much as you want.

Now we know that the two big political parties, and so the coalition and labor have got, like, millions in the bank, and so what they're going to be able to do, like 10s of millions, is put all of that war chest into this new body that gets exempt from all of the donations laws, and essentially just spend that money.

But they're going to say nobody else can do that, you're all going to be subject to donations and spending caps, and so we're like, well, on the face of it, that looks good, but when you think of the actual impact of it, you're going to lock in the Labor and Liberal party's ability to spend big with all of their dough, and you're going to hamper anyone who is a smaller party, or, you know, who doesn't already have a massive amount of wealth, or who isn't already elected.

And so, like many of those teal independents, the Greens have said, we don't actually think this is a good reform.

We think this is a reform that is simply designed to shore up the labor and liberal parties and to help them keep their seats, and that that's not democracy, that's a stitch up.

So what we did is say, Look, we want to have a Senate inquiry into this bill. We want to hear from the experts, to interrogate, you know, with our interpretation the right one, and if so, well, how could we fix this so that we do actually get some good reforms that are more even and fair.

And the two big parties said, "nah, we don't want anybody looking closely at this bill. We want to just have the ability to ram it through without any scrutiny," which is highly unusual.

Mostly, legislation does get sent to a Senate inquiry for experts and academics and ordinary people to share their views on it, and then, you know, you can propose amendments, or you decide what you whether you're not, you're going to vote to support the bill or not.

And so we're really sus that they're going to try and just do a deal and ram it through with basically zero scrutiny.

Before we wrap up, I wanted to address the concerns amongst Australian youth that American-style politics will make its way across the shores. Do you think there is a threat that oligarchy might surface in Australia?

Yeah, I really do. Oligarchy is when democracy is controlled by a handful of people, and in America, you saw at Trump's inauguration, you had all of these rich and powerful dudes sitting in the front row.

So you know, Zuckerberg for Meta, which is the new name for "Facie" and Elon Musk, and some other old rich guy who's in charge of something else.

It was just littered with these incredibly wealthy, powerful, mostly white men, and many of those are now calling the shots on Trump's policies.

What we don't want to see is this real culture war nonsense that Trump's going on about that will have real world consequences for people.

And that's what I'm worried about if there's a change of government in that you'll see this kind of, you know, war on queer people, cutting of gender equality targets in workplaces and government in particular, just denial of climate science and propping up of coal and gas at the expense of renewables.

Lauren Bartholomew is a final-year journalism student at QUT who loves nothing more than reading a penguin classic with a mocha in hand. Now the president of QUTJN, Lauren previously worked at 4ZZZ Radio as a journalist & host for nearly two years, and has interned at ABC News Queensland. With a keen ear for local stories, Lauren's works have covered state politics, environmental & LGBTQIA+ issues, and Brisbane's live music scene. She is very excited to be working amongst the talented journalists at Queensland Lens.