Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

What is incredible about this debate and the way the government have gone on today is this: they are trying to turn the well-known into the exceptional, the extraordinary. All of a sudden we have discovered that Australia is ageing. Apparently this was not known. Up until today we did not know that people were living longer. In recent times, every single generation has lived longer than the last. In fact, it was commented on in the first Intergenerational report. Everyone knew it. Everyone knew, for example, that the number of taxpayers that would support those that had retired was decreasing, that there would be fewer of them.

We then say, 'If they have just discovered this, let us look at what they did in the months preceding the Intergenerational report .' Given how long it has taken, I was thinking that we would have to wait another generation to get this report. But we finally got it, five years late. It should have been delivered much earlier. It should have been delivered earlier in the year. In fact, they promised they would deliver it last year and they did not. When they bring it down, they say, 'We need to think about the future of the country and what people are doing.' What decision did they make, for example, on pensions? They realised people are going to be living longer, they realised that there will be more of them, and what did they do? In their first budget they cut pensions. They cut the income that people will be relying upon. If you say, 'In actual fact, we do not want people relying on pensions,' what is the next policy lever that you pull?

See this speech in context