Jenny Macklin (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Families and Payments) Share this | Hansard source

I am glad to hear the member for Flynn is still defending them! Keep going! Go out there and tell that to your pensioners, because one thing is for sure: pensioners are not fooled. They are not fooled by the member for Flynn and they are not fooled by the Prime Minister. They know how important it is to have a fair indexation rate. The pension is benchmarked to wages for a reason. It is so that pensioners' standard of living actually keeps pace with the standard of living of the working population more broadly, and governments of both political persuasions have understood this in the past. John Howard understood it; the former, Labor government understood it—but not this Liberal government. It was $23 billion that you wanted to take out of the pockets of pensioners, and none of you can deny it. That is what last year's budget would have done. We know that this fight is not over and we will continue to remind pensioners that this is what you really want to do.

The government wants to increase the age pension age to 70 and still wants to stand by its $1.3 billion in cuts to concessions for pensioners and seniors. And so the list goes on. There are more cuts to pensions in this year's budget which we will need to consider very, very carefully to make sure that whatever this government comes up with meets the fairness test.

I want to finish on what this government wants to do to the young employed, because there was nothing crueller than that in last year's budget, when each Liberal and National party member wanted to leave young unemployed people with absolutely nothing to live on for six months. They have changed that now; they just want to leave young unemployed people with nothing to live on for one month! For one month, you want to leave them with nothing to live on. I can tell you that we will not be supporting this punitive measure, which is patently unfair. We need to help young Australians into work, not leave them homeless and with absolutely nothing to eat.

This government cannot be trusted. Families know they cannot trust this government, pensioners know they cannot trust this government and young Australians know that they cannot trust this government. Australians know that, every time this government looks for a change in its budget, it will be unfair.

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