Bill Shorten (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

Australian pensioners be warned: Mr Abbott and the Liberal government are after your part pension and decreasing your pension. Nine times in the last election campaign—not once, not twice, but nine times—Mr Abbott, in his pursuit of the votes of Australians, said: 'There will be no cuts, no changes, to pensions.' He made that perfectly clear—no cuts and no changes to pensions. Mr Abbott looked the pensioners of Australia in the face and he lied to them. He said that he will not change pensions and he absolutely has. The trickiness of the Prime Minister knows no bounds. What he says, to rationalise getting out of his broken promise, is that the changes to pensions will occur on 1 January 2017. Using logic which only the government can be famous for, they say that a lie legislated now is not a lie if the pensioners start losing on 1 January 2017.

Australians know when they have been misled. The government is failing the present and future retirees of Australia, and I can say without any fear of contradiction that Labor will vote against Tony Abbott's new round of cuts to the pension. We will vote against these cuts because 330,000 low- and modest-income pensioner households will lose out. Ninety thousand people will be thrown off their pensions entirely, and what these legislative bullies on the other side say to justify it is: 'Sure, we are flogging 330,000 people. But we are going to make a modest increase to some.' He is effectively daring Labor by taking people on modest incomes hostage and saying his government will not increase their pensions at all unless Labor agrees to support his electoral dishonesty and his broken promises. We will not do that.

We then hear what this government is now world-famous for: when you disagree with this government or when this government wants to justify breaking its promise, it starts attacking you. We heard this fellow, the Prime Minister, get up in question time and say, 'We don't want millionaires to be getting the pension.' He knows as well as I do, and every one of those people sitting opposite should know—although it would not surprise me if some do not know, but we all know not to believe Tony Abbott at least—that he is looking at someone's asset base. But what he does not look at is the income stream from that asset base. He is saying that a person's asset base should be looked at and then he denigrates them. Today, in that shameless, bullying style of this government, he has said that 330,000 people deserve to be taken off the part or full pension and deserve to have their money lost because they are millionaires. The implication is somehow that they are all millionaires.

I will tell you who these people are that they are taking the money from. Let me go through the actual case studies. Facts will always trump the propaganda opposite. These are not millionaires. A single pensioner who owns her own home and is earning less than $25,000 from interest and earnings on superannuation would lose $8,200. This woman will lose almost a quarter of her entire household income. Labor cannot vote for a measure when we understand the misery and the consequences of the measure. She has $25,000 in income. She will lose $8,200. No wonder the government members look surprised. They do not know what they are doing. If they do know what they are doing, that is even worse.

Let me give another real-world cameo. It is not one of Tony's millionaires, who he is so quick to denigrate. These are 330,000 pensioners. A couple who own their own home draw down $45,000 together on their superannuation. They have worked hard to build that. They will lose their entire part pension of $11,400 per year. This government is going to take one dollar in every five. These are the real-world examples. I have more. There is Graham Ratcliffe, who gave us the details for a question. He says: 'Surely, you must agree there is something wrong with a system when a couple with $400,000 in assets invested at an average of three per cent per annum plus almost the full age pension will have an income of $43,766 but a couple with up to $800,000 in assets invested at the same three per cent plus a very small pension will only have an income of $24,566.'

It might be that each can live on that certain amount of money. But why is it that under this government they have created a binary situation? If you believe these fiscal bandits opposite—the enemies of the pensioner—what they say is that there are only two types of Australians. There are people who have very little money who get the age pension and people who have a bit more money and have a modest income stream and get the pension. In the Prime Minister's false binary that he loves to create of the goodies and the baddies, there are the really poor and then there are the modestly poor. But what he does not talk about is another group of Australians: Tony's multimillionaires. On superannuation they can—listen to this, Assistant Treasurer—use a cameo and distort and just lie about what I said. But that is what it is; we have little expectation of this person.

What we are proposing on superannuation is as straightforward as this—listen carefully, Josh; listen carefully, son—if you earn more than $75,000 a year, instead of getting a 45 per cent tax concession you only get a 30 per cent tax concession. What we are proposing is helping the budget bottom line over the next 10 years by $14 billion. I will give you another cameo in terms of who gets affected. There are 475 Australians with superannuation balances in excess of $10 million. That is a lot of money. Courtesy of this government, if they wanted to have a five per cent return, which is an average return on a superannuation fund, they get half a million dollars tax free. But they want to take the part pension from some of these other people and push them under or near $20,000 in total income per year.

This is a government who says there are only two sets of people: really poor pensioners and modestly poor pensioners. The government is inviting Australia and this parliament to choose between the two of them. We reject this false choice. Instead, we speak to the 700,000 people who are planning retirement in the next few years. There are people at work between the ages of 50 and 65 who will be 700,000 potential retirees who stand to lose the pension altogether. When this government casually says that we will have a war between the really poor pensioners and the modestly poor pensioners, it is not just 330,000 victims they are proposing. This government is coming after the pensions of people who have not yet retired. This is the consequence of the change.

We now have a generation of baby boomers who have been working hard and who are approaching retirement. They are doing the best they can to save superannuation, doing the best they can to try and prepare to have some asset in retirement. In the next 10 years this government is going to slug literally millions of Australians and affect their access to the pension. This government is vandalising the pension. The pension and the people who currently receive it are not on high annual incomes, they are not rich people and they deserve security in their old age. Yet the government will not go after the Costello-Howard loopholes whereby basically they said that any amount of money in superannuation can be tax-free. But they are going after pensioners on much more modest sets of incomes.

A person who has $½ million listed as their assets puts something aside for everyday emergencies. They have their car, they have their furniture. They might have $400,000 in term deposits. It sounds a lot to this mob opposite. Well, actually they know it is not a lot. But when you look at the annual income the person gets in the intersection with what they are doing with the pension changes, those opposite are wreaking great havoc on hundreds of thousands of people who were told at the last election that this would not happen. And as much as the government members may bow their heads and find something terribly interesting in the latest government press release, the latest contribution from George Brandis to anything—whatever they are reading—I would say this: we will fight for the pensioners.

Last year we stopped you with your pension cuts. Remember last year? For a year, this government bullied Labor. They harassed us. They said that the opposition was not telling the truth on the pension index. But we won. We stopped you cutting the pension, and we will fight you again. We will warn every part-pensioner in Australia: you cannot trust the Liberal government with your retirement.

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