Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

During the 2007 election, the Prime Minister and Labor promised to ease the cost-of-living pressures for senior Australians. What a joke! The PM promised he would govern for all Australians—an even bigger joke. Now it is time for the Prime Minister and Labor to guarantee that no senior Australian will be worse off under his government. Clearly many will be.

The bill before us today, the Social Security and Veterans’ Entitlements Amendment (Commonwealth Seniors Health Card) Bill 2009, will effectively cut 22,000 senior Australians off from their seniors health cards. It will do this by adjusting the taxable income test for the Commonwealth seniors health card. That test is currently at $50,000 for singles and $80,000 for couples. By including income from taxed superannuation funds, the income will be bulked up, in conjunction with their pension, to create a new income level. While the threshold limits will remain the same, at $50,000 and $80,000 respectively, the superannuation drawings from a taxed fund will remain untaxed for ATO purposes. But these drawings will be added, as I said before, to adjusted taxable income for the purpose of assessing eligibility, effectively pushing many seniors over the income test level and stripping them of their card.

There are some very serious implications of this. Australians who have their cards taken from them will suffer in many ways. Under the PBS, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, Commonwealth seniors health card holders pay $5.30 per prescription. Once the card is stripped away from them, they will be paying $32.90. Under the PBS safety net, a cardholder pays a total of about $318, I think, as a maximum in any 12 months for their scripts. Without the card, they will pay $1,264.90 before the $5.30 fee applies. If a husband and wife have, between them, five prescriptions a month, the cost to them will be $1,350.

I did a little exercise which none of the speakers on either side of the House have done. I asked: what will this really cost the people who will have their card stripped away? Let me take you through the expenses of a typical husband and wife. With regard to the healthcare card and the pharmaceutical benefits, as I said, five prescriptions a month between husband and wife will cost them $1,356. Then there is the utilities allowance, which is indexed and is now at $514. The bonus plan, presuming Labor continue it—there are no guarantees of that on the basis of their last performance—will be $1,000 between the two of them. For the phone, which has now gone up to $34.60 a quarter, it will be $138. For the doctor—and a lot of doctors use the card to decide whether to give you bulk-billing—it will be another $215. If they go to the movies together once a fortnight, say, over a year that would be another $150 in concessions. Then I got onto a provincial bus company and asked about two to three trips a week of a medium-sized run—in fact, I used my own hometown of Bundaberg as an example. A couple would save $725 in travel a year. If you put those together you would have nearly $4,100. That means an average couple in this usual situation are going to have $80 a week ripped off them. Just think about that. Already pensioners are in dire straits. The previous speaker spoke about some of the things we did to improve the pension: brought in the MTAWE factor, brought in the utilities allowance—all those sorts of things. But, even then, it is way below an acceptable level.

The very core of our philosophy should be that aged people are looked after and looked after properly. How can we improve the lot of older Australians? Labor is content just to strip away benefits and entitlements and to bring everyone back to one standard. The thing that troubles me more than many other things is the suggestion that has come from a number of forums in which Labor members have participated—and I have not yet seen an unequivocal denial of it—that there may be some form of a means test on the family home. The idea that troubles me is that, if someone through some fortuitous means lives in a particular suburb and that particular suburb becomes the fashion of the day—although it may not have been the fashion of the day when the couple built their home—they may be penalised because their home has gone up in value and is worth $1 million or $1½ million. At the end of the day, it is just a house for them. It is the house of their memories, the house in which they brought up their kids. What are you going to do, rip it off them? Are you going to bring in a means test that is so severe that people have to sell those sorts of homes and go into some lower form of accommodation? I think that anyone seeing what is being done with these 22,000 Australians would have cause to be quite concerned. We paid $96 billion of Labor’s debt. That gave us the capacity to do things: to introduce the MTAWE factor, to give bonuses, to arrange superannuation schemes, to bring in the co-contribution scheme—all those things to enhance the income of the modern income earner. All this new government is doing is winding it back the other way. If the family home becomes part of the assets test, it really will be a bad day for pensioners.

Let me speak briefly for those Australians who are on what we might call a modest income. Let me talk about people who are on a below average income whose superannuation scheme is not enough and, indeed, is much less now. A lot of my constituents tell me that the value of their super has dropped 20 per cent, 30 per cent, 40 per cent or even, as I have heard, 50 per cent. That has really denuded their income, and they have become more reliant on the pension. In a Pension Review submission, the AIR challenged the following statement made in the Bills Digest for the Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs and Other Legislation Amendment (2008 Budget and Other Measures) Bill 2008:

With the income test limits being set at $50 000 single and $80 000 partnered, the CSHC is now no longer a low-income health card.

I think the AIR were right to take offence at this statement because, on the one hand, the government say that a retired couple living on $80,000 a year should not qualify for the card yet, on the other hand, they say a working couple on the same income should receive a $900 bonus.

So this is quite unfair. I would like—but the short time we have been given does not allow me to do so—to talk about the general position of self-funded retirees. This is a very bad move. This cuts at the core of people who have been self-sufficient all their lives. This will lower their standard of income and sends a signal to the retiree community to be very fearful of this government.

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