The Greens are proposing to raise $11 billion over four years through a one off "Bernie tax" or pandemic levy applied only to Australia's richest people to attack what it calls "obscene" profiteering during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Greens leader Adam Bandt announced the proposition, similar to two multitrillion-dollar wealth taxes proposed by US Democratic senator Bernie Sanders to fund housing and free education, in the Greens budget reply speech on Wednesday night.
"The billionaires won't like it, but I don't care," Mr Bandt said on Wednesday.
"They won't like it. They love not paying their fair share."
Under the plan, unlikely to get government support, a 50 per cent tax would be imposed on any increase in wealth made by 122 of Australia's richest people over the past 12 months of the pandemic.
It would apply to Australian residents regardless of where assets are held and non-residents who hold more than $1 billion worth of Australian assets. The Greens say the money raised should go to education, public housing and clean energy.
The Greens say Australia's richest people have "made out like bandits" during the pandemic, including by receiving government JobKeeper subsidies, while the rest of Australia made sacrifices.
"This massive increase in wealth by Australia's class of billionaires is obscene," Mr Bandt said.
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The Greens pandemic levy has been costed by the Parliamentary Budget Office as possibly raising $29 billion, but the PBO assumes the levy would be hit by uncertainties such as legal action and other delays, making $11 billion over four years a more likely revenue figure.
The Greens say Tuesday's federal budget failed to make billionaires and corporations pay for budget repair.
"It's tax cuts for billionaires and handouts for big corporations, but wage cuts for workers and poverty for the unemployed," Mr Bandt said.
The Treasurer Josh Frydenberg hopes to create 250,000 jobs over the next two years in a stimulus plan to secure long-term recovery from the pandemic before starting the effort to pay down $1 trillion in debt and attack the $161 billion budget deficit for 2021-22.
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