Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Roads and Regional Transport) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member. I will take on board the new paradigm referred to in my presentation today. As I said, it was one of the biggest issues in the Gippsland by-election. I made representations to the minister at that time and spoke with the member for Bradfield, who was the opposition leader at the time, and he strongly advocated on behalf of the opposition and in fact proposed a private member’s bill to increase the rate of the single pension, which was, I believe, voted down by the government, and I think that was a mistake. But I do acknowledge that, since that time has passed, the former Rudd government, in one of its better decisions, decided to increase the rate of pension, so I do take the member’s question in the spirit in which it was intended.

One of the key issues for pensioners to understand this situation is that many older Australians have not had the benefit of compulsory superannuation, so their retirement incomes are very limited. They do not have access to large amounts of retirement income, and there is going to be an increased need for government support for those people who have not necessarily had the capacity to plan for their own retirement for a whole range of reasons. I acknowledge the importance of the package referred to by the member for Lyons and stress again that it is something I argued for in my by-election campaign and since that time.

In all this, we must not forget the self-funded retirees, who have been hit very badly by the global economic circumstances and are now facing a situation where their retirement income has been restricted as well. They are often left out of this debate when it comes to discussions of housing affordability. It would be a mistake to think that, just because they happen to own their own homes and have a modest amount of retirement income, they are doing it comfortably in these very difficult times.

Also, reflecting on the cost-of-living pressures which the previous member spoke about, there are some policy positions being adopted by the current government which I believe will add further pressure to retirement incomes—in particular, the government’s proposed new carbon tax and the impact that is going to have on electricity prices. I believe that pensioners in particular will feel the pain the most. I am already hearing anecdotes in my electorate of older members of my community who are staying in bed longer in the mornings because they cannot afford to heat their own homes. If those stories are true, it is a real worry for us as a society when we have older people becoming more isolated in their communities, particularly in regional communities, because of cost-of-living pressures. Increases in water bills and other obviously essential services which have been a direct product of poor state government decisions are also having a severe impact on our pensioners and their cost-of-living pressures, not to mention the food prices which the previous speaker referred to.

I do, however, take exception to the member for Lyons’s assertion that there were 11 years of coalition inaction in relation to pensioners. I think the words he used were that the previous government failed to do anything. That simply lacks credibility on several fronts. Most notably, it lacks credibility on the electoral maths. Why did older Australians embrace Prime Minister John Howard and continue to re-elect the government he led if he treated pensioners as poorly as the member claims?

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