28 January 2025

The Greens are calling on the NSW Labor Government to seize revenue-raising opportunities to ensure all public sector workers are paid a fair wage. While claiming not to have enough money in the budget to pay the people keeping our hospitals and trains running, Labor is leaving billions of dollars of lost revenue in the hands of big business.

The Greens have been calling for years for the NSW Government to implement the following key revenue raising measures to ensure the future financial health of our State:

• Increase payroll tax for large businesses as a special levy towards fixing our public health system (as is the case in Queensland and Victoria)
• Increase mining royalties and rebalance polluter pay schemes to more accurately reflect the cost of pollution, particularly from participants in the fossil fuel industry
• Introduce a supplementary banking levy to levy the big banks based on NSW assets
• Reintroduce vendor duty and introduce vacant property taxes and extreme wealth property taxes
• Increase gambling taxes and impose licence fees on online gambling
• Increase duties on luxury vehicles in line with other states such as Victoria
• Removal of tax exemptions for certain non-government schools

Most of these revenue-raising measures would simply bring NSW into line with other States, while some (such as the supplementary banking levy) would take ideas already well socialised within Labor parties in other states and territories and make NSW a leader when it comes to creating a fairer revenue base. Billions of dollars of extra revenue could be raised with these simple measures every year, before even getting to recouping the billions of wasted expenditure going to corporations and the wealthy in subsidies every year. 

Quotes attributable to Abigail Boyd, Greens NSW MP and spokesperson for Treasury:

“This Minns Labor government came to power on the promise to reform the public sector after a lost decade of wage suppression and austerity. They campaigned on the argument that the public sector had been starved by the previous Liberal-National government, but are now seeking to claim there is in fact plenty of fat on the bones of these under-resourced departments, and that it is the responsibility of the workers to identify so-called productivity gains in order to see fair wage rises.

“The Minns Labor government is asking the overstretched public sector to do more with less, while the government gives a free pass to the big end of town. Rather than asking public health and transport professionals to scrounge around and try to find some money tucked down the side of the couch, the Minns government should be raising revenue by demanding the big end of town finally pay their fair share. 

“For this Minns Labor government to be asking workers to either accept an unfair wage or to find the savings themselves is both fiscally irresponsible and deeply insulting to the State’s workers. 

“The fact is that the NSW Labor government can afford to pay all of its workers fairly, and ensure the long-term health of our vital public services, if they just took action to end the handouts to big business and asked those businesses to pay their fair share to the State’s revenue.

“Labor could ends its standoff with our nurses and midwives, with our rail workers, with the psychiatrists who are resigning en masse from our faltering public health system - we could put an end to all of it today if Labor adopted just a few of these obvious revenue-raising measures and started putting workers ahead of big business. 

“The Greens are willing to work with Labor to rebalance the budget and get our State back on track. There are no excuses for not paying everyone who works for our State a fair wage.”