Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

A different set of implementation of the rules, perhaps, Madam Speaker.

An honourable member interjecting—

Yes. I will continue on. This, of course, is a fig leaf of a policy which pretends that the burden is shared between those on $180,000 and those in the vulnerable and less well-off section of the community. Again, it is interesting to compare the treatment of pensioners to the treatment of people who earn an income of over $180,000. Pensioners, for example, will have their indexation reduced permanently, according to the government, from male average weekly earnings or CPI to just CPI—not temporarily for three years with giant loopholes but permanently, according to this government—which over time will reduce their spending capacity relative to the cost of living.

We have seen what that looks like. We saw what it looks like under the Howard years, the last time that pensions were indexed to the CPI that way, and we saw at the end of the Howard years pensioners in desperate straits. When we came to government, we had to take some really quite emergency measures. A single pensioner was on $250 a week at the end of the Howard years, absolutely not enough, so we had to take emergency measures. To pretend to the Australian people that you can put pensioners back on that old indexation method and not see the same cost-of-living pressures on pensioners within five, seven or 10 years is just fraud. There is no way, given the way that prices rise relative to wages, that you can index pensioners on a lesser rate indefinitely and not put unbearable cost-of-living pressures on them and have to adjust at some point. There will have to be a catch-up. This is not a change that will last, as the government says, through to 2050. It simply cannot.

There is also the other side of it. If you actually want to reduce pension payments, one of the ways to do that is to reduce the number of people who need the pensions. But, rather than trying to encourage increasing superannuation contributions, the government have actually delayed the increase in superannuation contributions, so they have made it more likely that people will need the pension, and then they have cut it. That sort of contradiction is through everything.

Again, look at the burden that young people will pay—a temporary levy for people on over $180,000 but, for people under the age of 30, a six-month wait for unemployment benefits, Newstart as it is called these days. If they lose their jobs—six month's wait. But rather than introduce programs that help young people get into work, they have actually cut the programs that help young people get into work—cut the programs that help them get into work and then refuse them assistance if they lose their job. The contradictions and the nastiness of it are quite extraordinary.

It is the same with health. Cut funding to preventative health, cut the Health Prevention Agency, cut funding from my community of $700,000 to fight obesity and then, when they go to the doctor, charge them more.

A government member interjecting—

For the member who is interjecting, there was money for CCTV cameras: the government cut it and now they are giving it back, apparently. So get the facts right before you interject. Speak the truth. Please check your facts; you are not.

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