David Feeney (Batman, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Justice) Share this | Hansard source

Obviously, I am speaking to the Military Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill 2014. This is a bill that Labor is very pleased to support. We are very pleased to support it because this is yet another example of the government bringing into this place legislation that essentially has its foundation stones in Labor policy and Labor's work in government.

In particular, in 2009 the Labor government initiated and in due course completed a review into our military compensation and rehabilitation arrangements found under the Military Rehabilitation and Compensation Act 2004. That review was very thorough and very comprehensive. It gave rise to some 108 recommendations. Ninety-six of those recommendations were taken up by the former government and have found their way into this place in legislation. What we have today is a bill that also is based on the recommendations found in that review.

In particular, the purpose of this bill is to make some technical corrections to the Military Rehabilitation and Compensation Act regarding the making of transitional impairment calculations. This bill is of a technical nature. It is making those technical corrections to the act and it will only have a neutral or, indeed, positive impact on recipients.

Insofar as this government covers up its lack of policy and its absence of a policy agenda by coming into this place and moving Labor legislation, we welcome that and we thank them for it. Of course, it will not surprise anyone that we will vote for it. I guess the real tragedy here is the various things this bill does not do. This bill does absolutely nothing when it comes to alleviating the plight of our veterans—our veterans who were, astonishingly, such outstanding victims of this government's budget and this government's actions since it came into office.

We will all, of course, remember the overblown rhetoric of the coalition in previous years and most particularly on the eve of the last federal election. At that time, the coalition were very determined to persuade Australia as a whole, and the veterans community in particular, that they were their friends. Never before have we seen a friendship come to such a vicious and nasty conclusion as it did on the night that Joe Hockey came into this place with his budget. What we now know is, notwithstanding the commitments and promises made by the coalition, that our ex-service men and women—war veterans and their families—have been particular targets for coalition budget measures, and that there have been some spectacular broken promises in the 2014-15 budget.

In particular, the cutting of veterans pensions by reducing the rate of indexation so that the measure is only CPI is going to have a slow but corrosive effect on the living standards and purchasing power of our veterans. What makes that broken promise all the more spectacular is that the coalition, for a very long period of time, pointed out that the indexation measures that applied to the DFRDB—the defence pensions—were inadequate because they were only a CPI measure. And so our newspapers, our radio interviews, our television screens were constantly bombarded with the coalition painfully explaining how the CPI-only measure was inadequate.

Having worked hard to educate themselves, ourselves, the parliament and the people of Australia about the inadequacy of that CPI indexation measure, the coalition then went on to use it themselves in the future calculations for veterans pensions. So we now have a veterans community that has, to its own astonishment, found that their pensions have been cut, their living standards have been cut and at the same time the coalition has increased the indexation for the DFRDB.

So while some 59,000 ex-service men and women who are part of a scheme that closed in 1992 are enjoying triple indexation, some 280,000 veterans—recipients of some 310,000 payments—have now had their indexation cut and their living standards cut and, as every quarter goes by, their situation will become ever more acute.

But not content with that outrageous blow against the veterans community, the 2014-15 budget also axed the provisions that enabled three months backdating of veterans disability pensions for new recipients. This is going to cost new recipients something in the order of $8,405—a significant blow. Further, there was the scrapping of the $870 seniors supplement for some veterans and, of course—outstandingly and very controversially—there was the cutting of the $217 annual payment for the children of war veterans. Worse still, the Prime Minister has vowed to cut payments to the children of war veterans, including war orphans.

What this bill does not do is go any way at all towards remedying the fact that this government has lied, and lied spectacularly, to our veterans' community. And having built up expectations, having made promises and proclamations at RSL conferences and the like, we have seen all of that turn to dust in record time.

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