Dick Adams (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is always good to be here where you are in the chair, Mr Deputy Speaker, knowing what a great influence you have over the Main Committee. First, I must correct the wording of the Notice Paper where it mentions a reform of $1.4 billion. It is in fact $14 billion, a very significant package to assist pensioners. I have been told that it has been changed in the electronic copy.

I raised this motion because I have been inundated with calls to my electorate office about the financial difficulties pensioners are still facing despite the fact that the federal government has given them increases of around $115 per fortnight for singles and $97 per fortnight for couples combined in pension payments as a result of the reforms delivered in September 2009. They also received higher indexation in March and September 2010. These are the most significant increases in the 100-year history of the pension scheme. The federal government is addressing the needs of pensioners after seven-plus years of inaction by the coalition.

Although pension reform has helped ensure that pensions are starting to keep pace with the cost of living, it seems that our state colleagues believe that it should be an excuse to put rent up. This is just unfair. I believe that it is the pensioners who should get the pension rise from last year and not state governments’ public housing authorities. Any rises in the pension benefits should flow through to pensioners. I think we should ask our state counterparts to permanently quarantine last September’s pension rise when calculating pensioners’ public housing rent levels and other costs that are controlled by state and territory governments.

The private sector needs to be responsive too as there is insufficient public housing to cater for all people on pensions and benefits. A pension rise should not mean there is a general rent hike. Organisations such as Shelter Tasmania and various local governments are working together to try and find solutions. The Hobart City Council and Shelter Tasmania point out the difficulties in their research in Tasmania which, like much of the rest of Australia, is experiencing a housing affordability crisis. Monitoring the average rental prices for a two-bedroom home in various suburbs around greater Hobart in the last five years reveals an average price increase of 40 per cent, with the lowest increase being in Glenorchy, 14 per cent, and the highest in my electorate of Bridgwater, 59 per cent. This means that many people on lower incomes are living with housing stress, paying over 30 per cent of their income in rent and many others unable to find or maintain affordable housing, leaving them homeless or at risk of homelessness. In the past rents were capped at 25 per cent of income and the need for that really has not changed. The growing list of people in less-than-adequate housing is being compounded by state governments not increasing the stock of public housing and by taking a component of any rises in pension. It is the famous catch-22 of Joseph Heller fame. People are in public housing because they have a lower-than-average income, yet if the federal government wants to increase their income the states want to charge more rent, leaving them back where they started from or even worse off because of general cost-of-living increases.

The pension increases went across the range of pensions including age pension, adult disability support pension, carer’s pension, veteran’s income support payments, wife pension and widow B and bereavement allowance. The parenting payment and rent assistance also went up in September, so on paper a lot of people should be better off, but the states are preventing this. The federal government also revised the indexation mechanism as part of the 2009 pension reform and now takes into account a basket of goods pensioners buy to better help maintain pensioners’ purchasing power. This basket of goods is weighed to recognise that pensioners spend more of their income on essentials including food, health, clothing, telephone calls and postage. I believe this should have led to reflecting pensioners’ actual expenses, yet we have social inclusion units around the nation expressing the need for more stable housing as part of including people in their communities while on the other hand the opportunity for them to help themselves has been taken away by increasing rents. Somewhere along the line the equation has gone off the road, it has gone haywire.

We have to stabilise people’s incomes to ensure that they have access to reasonable housing. We need to provide adequate public housing and private rentals and then some of the other social inclusion issues can come into play. There has been quite a bit of debate lately on the adequacy of the public housing sector and whether the public housing model is still economic. This is a discussion we should hold, but I believe we are getting further and further away from affordable rent for public housing. Most public housing tenants are on benefits and not working. Any variables in the private sector immediately impact those on the lowest incomes and drive them to try and find cheaper alternatives. Public housing is becoming less and less of an option for many low-income people, so there needs to be another major look at how the rental sector is operating. Funding should be allocated to such groups as Shelter and TasCOSS in Tasmania to undertake this work. We need to get back to where 25 per cent of an income is the rental component—any more than that means that it is dragging you down in terms of affordability.

In the meantime, I believe the federal government should insist on the states quarantining pension rises and seek other ways of supplementing the severe lack of resources to provide affordable housing. It is a major issue for us to deal with in this nation. Our federal Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, Jenny Macklin, has already written to the New South Wales government to delay any rent increases, and I believe that that request was considered. I hope the same process will be applied to all states and territories in Australia.

This government has brought in the most significant changes in pensions in 100 years—after 11 years-plus of neglect by the coalition. The coalition failed to increase the pensions. They failed to do anything for pensioners other than try to take their votes. We addressed it, but trying to improve the life of pensioners has been difficult, because, if their rents are increased, their costs of power and electricity go up—the cost of living is always going up. You talk to pensioners like I do, Member for Gippsland, and they tell you that they go to the supermarket and find that there are increases in different costs. A lot of them are pretty smart at buying specials and knowing where the good markets are so they try to do that.

I have put forward this motion, and I thank those members who are here to speak on it. It is an issue that we need to take up in our communities and we need to make it public here in the parliament. I hope the motion will help to further delay rent increases, and I hope that we can do something about energy increases in the future as well. This is of major significance for many people on the basic pension and therefore their quality of life in our country. I thank members for supporting the motion.

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