Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a real pleasure today to make a contribution to the debate on the Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (Seniors Health Card and Other Measures) Bill 2014. Of all of the pieces of legislation, this is a really significant example of the truly outrageous, twisted priorities of this Abbott government.

I respect the member for Ryan—I really do—but I take significant issue with the tone and tenor of the contribution she has made. People on the other side of the House get up today and say that they are the best friends of senior Australians and talk about how much senior Australians have contributed to this country; yet, at the very same time, they have recently delivered a budget that is an out-and-out attack on the people they are now saying they will defend. How can the member for Ryan sit here in this House and talk about how much she cares about senior Australians when she has been part of a government that is having a conversation about raising the pension age from 67 to 70? How can people on the other side scrap the Commonwealth seniors supplement and then come into the House and say that, because they are putting in place this measure, they are suddenly the great defenders of senior Australians? I can say that senior Australians around this country are not being fooled, and I will talk in some detail about interactions I have had with constituents on this subject.

For the benefit of those in the gallery, we are talking about changes that are being proposed to be Commonwealth seniors health card. The Commonwealth seniors health card is one of the really important ways in which we support senior Australians in our community, who have done so much to grow Australia and to make Australia into the great nation that it is. It is available to senior Australians on the lower income spectrum and it brings a range of concessions that assist with the cost of living. Many of you would have relatives who are eligible for these cards. It usually gets them bulk-billing rates at the doctor, some cheaper out-of-hospital medical expenses and often some transport concessions.

To this important assistance offered to senior Australians, the Abbott government has made some incredibly serious changes in the first budget it has brought down. The first and absolutely most significant of these is one I have referred to already—that is, the axing of the seniors supplement. The $800 a year that was part of the seniors health card is gone just like that because of a decision of the Abbott government. This $800 for a low-income retiree is a supplement that was designed to help with the big expenses that come irregularly during the year. A lot of seniors would use this, for example, to pay for their electricity bills. I have spoken to people at mobile offices around my electorate who are absolutely terrified because they actually do not know how they are going to balance their budget at home without the seniors supplement.

The government has also made some changes to eligibility which will include untaxed super in the eligibility assessment. The final measure which everyone on the other side is so excited about is the change that will extend the eligibility for this much reduced benefit by indexing the income threshold. It means that over time the eligibility for the seniors health card will increase. So, over time, the more you earn the more likely you are to be eligible for a seniors health card. It is a bit complex, but the really practical impact is that eligibility for this scheme will be extended to more Australians on the higher income end.

Labor is opposed to this measure because we are opposed to any such measure which will take support away from the most vulnerable Australians and give it to those who are less vulnerable. It is something we are seeing a lot of in this budget, and I will talk through some other examples. It is the values that sit behind measures like this that are so profoundly out of step with Australians' values, who logically see that the people who have the least should get the most support. We are very proud of the system of government support that we have in Australia because it is very incisively targeted. Despite what we hear from the other side, studies of social support systems around the world consistently show that Australia has one of the most efficient and effective systems of social support in the world. It is because we target the money that we have to those who are the most in need. This measure goes completely in the opposite direction. Combined with the other changes to the seniors health card that I have outlined, it takes away benefits from the people who need them most and extends the eligibility to a wider range of people who are on higher incomes.

The cost of extending the eligibility for these benefits is $100 million over the forward estimates. It is not a huge sum that will change the shape of the budget in the sense, for example, of a paid parental leave scheme that costs $6 billion a year. But it is a lot of money that could be targeted to the people who need it most, rather than using these taxpayers' dollars to extend benefits to people who are on higher incomes.

This is not something that any Australian would now be surprised to see from the government on the other side of the House. It is said that you do not really understand the character of a government until they deliver their first budget, and I have to say this is absolutely the case for the Abbott government. Just nine months after coming into office they have delivered an absolutely cruel budget that has taken away government support from the people least able to afford it. Yet they have also delivered cash splashes like the Paid Parental Leave scheme, which will see a top-up in maternity leave to the wealthiest women in Australia. It is initiatives like this example before us which reduce benefits to the worst off but increase benefits to those on higher incomes. It is very consistent with how this government operates.

The coalition's first budget was full of harsh cuts and, at the same time, very lavish new areas of spending. Let's think about the record we are dealing with here and go through some of the changes. This is a government that is trying to cut the indexation of the disability support pension. Can you believe it? The effect of cutting the indexation of the disability support pension is that, over time, Australians with disabilities will have less money in their pocket than they otherwise would have. They are cutting the carers' payments. Who will this government not go after? Again, over time, Australians who are involved in that important role of caring for people in their family and community will have less money in their pockets.

This government cut the schoolkids bonus, a very important government support provided to families around Australia—$410 a year for primary school students and $810 a year for secondary school students. This was a sum paid at the beginning and in the middle of the school year to help families manage big one-off costs such as school books, school shoes and computer equipment. It might be hard for people on the other side of the House to understand this, but there were people in my electorate who really depended on that money and were not able to scrounge together hundreds of dollars at the beginning of the school year if a young person in their household was asked to provide a laptop or something else. The government cut the low-income support supplement. That was $300 to people earning less than $30,000 a year. They cut the low-income superannuation contribution, which was a government contribution to help Australians on the very lowest incomes save for their retirement.

We need to look at the area of health, because that is where some of the most perverse and awful cuts were made in this budget. It now costs another $7 to go to the doctor. Before, families were at least able to know they were not going to have to budget to take their children to the doctor if they fell ill. I recently met with a GP in my electorate who is not particularly a Labor person. We talked through some of the impacts that she saw as a result of the co-payment. She operates in a very low-income area of my electorate. She talked about the issues she thinks she will see for families with a significant number of children—say three or four—who all get sick at once. While $7 might not sound like a lot, when you consider multiple people in the family falling ill at once, potentially having to get pathology reports and other things and then having to fill prescriptions, now that the cost of prescriptions has gone up too we are starting to talk about really serious dollars for people who are on low incomes. We do not want to live in a country where people have to worry about how they are going to budget to take their family to the doctor. That is just not the type of country that we live in.

Something else I will mention in brief is the changes to university fees. These are cuts that are going to have the biggest impact on the people in our community who can least afford to look down the barrel of starting their working life with a $100,000 debt. The young people in my electorate are just not going to go down that path. Yet, at the same time, in the context of all these absolutely egregious cuts, we have the big cash splashes. We have the Paid Parental Leave scheme that will see $2,000 a week given to mothers around Australia who are otherwise earning good money. We have the $20 billion fund for medical research. We support medical research for sure, but should the sickest people in our country—chronically ill people and the older Australians who are more likely to access medical services—be the ones to foot the bill for this?

And do not get me started on climate policy. This week we have seen the government very excited for itself because it has scrapped a tax that brought in significant revenue and instead plans to put in place a type of climate policy that pays big polluters taxpayers' dollars. It is absolutely crazy.

We have seen a lot of this kind of perversity, especially in relation to senior Australians. The legislation that is before us is part of the context of that. Senior Australians are in line with the gun with some of the changes in this budget. Raising the pension age to 70 will give Australia the highest retirement age in the entire world. For people who work behind a desk, that will mean something quite different from people who work in manual labour. From talking to a lot of people who live in my electorate who work in those more blue collar jobs, I know they are seriously worried about the idea of having to work until they are 70 and how they are going to preserve their health in those final years of their working life.

The other important initiative to mention is the changes to the indexation of the pension. The Abbott government is wanting to change the indexation of the pension—the rate at which the pension rises—from being attached to the average earnings of Australians down to the CPI, a much lower rate. This is a very good example which really shows us what this government's values are. What they are really saying here is that pensioners who do it very tough—because it is hard to live on a pension—should continue to do it tough while the living standards of the rest of the Australian community grow. So, despite the fact that our country is growing and our economy is growing, the government are saying that pensioners do not deserve to share in that wealth while they are not earning an income any more. That is something that Labor is not willing to abide.

I have mentioned the Commonwealth Seniors Supplement, but it is another important example of the attack on senior Australians that is part of this budget. I have been talking a lot to seniors recently because I have just run a number of morning teas in my electorate. I have spoken with a very large group of seniors in East Bentleigh, and the Leader of the Opposition was able to join me at that. I can say absolutely for those on the other side, in case they are not out there talking to people in their communities—I can understand why they might not want to be out there just at the moment—that senior Australians are incredibly angry about this. We talked about some of the perversities that we see in this budget, specifically the cutting of supports being used by senior Australians while at the same time the government is putting in place a very lavish Paid Parental Leave scheme. These seniors were seething with anger, and I had many great conversations about how Labor will continue to stand up for those seniors and continue to fight to have clarity and fairness in the support that we offer people around the country. I had another terrific seniors morning tea in Dingley Village. They are not always Labor people down that side of my electorate, but they are very upset about what the government is trying to do to them. I had similar conversations at a morning tea in Hughesdale.

The people at these morning teas are not just talking about things that this government is doing to senior Australians. They are not just talking about the change to the pension age and cutting the Seniors Supplement. They are not just talking about changes to the Commonwealth Seniors Health Card. They are talking about things that do not affect them personally but affect the people around them—their neighbours, their family, their grandchildren. They do not want to live in a country where the limited social support that we provide is being taken away from the people in our community who are most vulnerable and given to the people who have a little bit more. It is not how we do things in Australia. That is why we see the legislation before us as anathema to the Australian way, and it is legislation that we will not be supporting.

See this speech in context