Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

This Finance Bill underlines yet again that we have a Government of millionaires looking after the billionaires. Not only are we in the middle of a health crisis, but let us not forget the housing crisis. Yet in this Finance Bill the Government proposes to extend a tax break for major developers which actually encourages them to hoard land for even longer.

The Government stamp duty refund scheme proposals will not only hand over more money to some of the richest developers in this country, it also allows them to continue to drag their feet on actually building homes on the land they own. This scheme refunds developers almost three quarters of their stamp duty costs. The Government now proposes to extend the scheme even further making completion dates as late as June 2025 eligible for this refund. This extension means developers can sit on their land even longer watching its price rise and even get a handout from the Government for doing so while the homeless figures rise and the housing crisis deepens.

We have seen again and again how this is a Government of the golden circle from schmoozing with lobbyists over golf at Clifden to Ministers becoming banking and corporate lobbyists and to the Tánaiste pulling strings for his friends. This proposal is a continuation of that approach. It is a law written for the property speculators and is being proposed here today by Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party. The proposal has been largely missed by many Deputies and the media and, in fact, there has been remarkably little discussion at all about the residential development stamp duty refund scheme.

Even by the Government's logic, the idea of extending the deadline out to cover properties completed by mid-2025 makes no sense. We know developers are hoarding land and watching land prices rise. Extending this scheme gives them an extra year of hoarding. If the goal is to encourage developers to actually build, this extension will only do the opposite.

The same is the case with the so-called help-to-buy scheme which is also being extended. The Government is once again handing money to super-rich property developers and trying to tell us it is really about helping home buyers. The so-called help-to-buy scheme is really a help-to-profit for developers scam. It lets developers hike up property prices an extra €30,000 for first-time buyers. Government spin doctors like to present it as a stimulus to encourage developers or to help buyers, a sort of trickle-down economics idea where if one throws money at developers, hopefully, they will build houses. While I am sure it will make the Government popular among its friends in the Construction Industry Federation, CIF, it will only make the housing crisis even worse by making homes more unaffordable.

There should not be a penny more in handouts to those profiteering from the housing crisis. Instead, we need a left Government with socialist policies to take on the speculators, developers and big corporate landlords. The reliance on the market to deliver housing has succeeded only in making a tiny few wealthy but it has failed ordinary people abysmally and deepened the crisis. A left Government with socialist policies would build public homes on public land. It would nationalise land that is being hoarded and bring the properties of the corporate landlords into democratic public ownership.

I also want to talk about the changes to the carbon tax included in this Finance Bill. This proposed carbon tax increase has nothing to do with protecting the environment. It is an austerity tax with a thin coat of the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan's, green paint. Now the Government is proposing to lock in a decade of carbon tax hikes right up to €250 on a tank of heating oil by 2030. That might be small change for Government Ministers but it is a major bill for ordinary workers. Hiking up these taxes does nothing to help someone reduce his or her carbon footprint. It does nothing to tackle the big business polluters who are responsible for this crisis. All it does is let the Government pretend it is doing something while undermining support for the real climate action we need.

Instead of a decade of rising carbon tax, we need a decade of a green new deal with socialist policies to achieve zero carbon emissions by 2030. We need investment in free, green and frequent public transport. We need investment in green jobs such as those in healthcare and education. We need to move to a four-day or 30-hour week without loss of pay. We need a just transition to a sustainable model of agriculture without small farmers being hit. Rather than hammering ordinary people, we need a Government that will stand up to big business polluters and bring the key polluting industries into democratic public ownership and in that way enable us to plan for the rapid and just transition we need.

Finally, I want to talk a little bit about a group of people almost ignored in this Finance Bill and in this budget, that is, the postgraduate students who are working in universities across the country. The Government is turning largely a blind eye to the fact they are being exploited under its nose. The Government gave them a fairly meagre €1,500 extra in terms of grants but that is it. It is completely inadequate while the Government benefits from their exploitation and refuses to allocate the extra funding needed for third level to raise these students and workers to a decent standard of living.

Many people have no idea thousands of unpaid workers in our universities are forced to work for free. People spend thousands of euros on some of the highest college fees in Europe and they do not even realise many of the people teaching their children in college are completely unpaid. The treatment of postgraduate workers in this country is a disgrace. Last month, the Minister with responsibility for higher education admitted in an answer to a question from me that it was common practice for PhD students to be required to do five hours per week teaching without payment. He seems to think it is perfectly okay for people to be expected to work for free. Right now, we are seeing how crucial these postgraduate students are to the running of our universities. Much of the tutorials, laboratories and other teaching takes place due to them. If, in the morning, they all withheld their free labour and refused to work, every college in the country would collapse and be unable to deliver their courses and yet the Government seems to think they do not deserve payment for their work. It is time to treat workers fairly. No one should work for free. They should be paid a decent wage.

A particularly shocking part of this is many of these postgraduate students are required to sign a declaration that there is no element of service between themselves and the university despite the fact they are being told they must work five hours per week without pay. Worse than that, National University of Ireland, NUI, Galway, reportedly one of the worst offenders in all this, even demands that students who receive Irish Research Council funding do unpaid hours despite the fact the guidelines for that scholarship clearly state that any teaching duties should be appropriately remunerated. It seems the colleges think they are a law unto themselves and think it is okay to exploit postgraduate students by making them work for free like this. It seems, unfortunately, that the Government is perfectly okay with that. I support those postgraduate students who are getting organised to fight for their rights and for their right to be paid for the work they do rather than being exploited and made to work for free.

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