Terri Butler (Griffith, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Interesting. Unemployment got up to 6.7 per cent in my state of Queensland under coalition federal and state governments. We might also say that unemployment has reached its highest peak since the current Prime Minister was the employment minister in the early 2000s. What a shock! You would think that they would learn and you would think that they would understand, but what do they do? They come in and they say, 'You know what we should do? We should attack low-income earners and middle-income earners. That's what we should do. We should try to find some sort of basis for austerity and cuts.' What did we see happen to pensions last year? 'I know! Here's a great idea. I'm a coalition MP. What I really want to do is slash pensions by $80'—an indexation change to take away the pensioner and beneficiary living cost index as a basis for indexing the pension, to take away average weekly earnings as a basis for benchmarking the pension and only keeping CPI at a cost to pensioners, relying on excuses.

Of course, we fought that every day since that budget was announced last year and we won that battle. Together with all of the pensioners and all of the people who speak out for pensioners across this country, Labor worked hard every day to defeat that indexation. But we know, Deputy Speaker Vasta, how addicted your side of the House is to seeking to attack the living incomes of pensioners. What have we seen in this year's budget? You finally realised that you were not going to get your indexation changes through—belated, but well done; congratulations. Instead, what have we seen? Somehow you managed to hoodwink the Greens into the idea that they are going to deal with superannuation tax concessions by dealing with you to slash the pensions of middle- and low-income pensioners—a new round of pension cuts that will hurt almost 330,000 existing low-income pensioners in this country, with independent analysis saying that, over the next 10 years, around half of the pensioners will be affected by these cuts.

In total, a million retirees will have their pension cut, including around 700,000 people who are about to retire and are aged 50 to 65 today, including more than 90,000 part-pensioners, who will be thrown off the pension immediately and entirely. Any pensioner couple with more than $451,500 in assets will have their part-pension cut. Any single pensioner with more than $289,500 in assets will have their part pension cut. We are not talking about millionaires, notwithstanding what the coalition government might like to have you believe. We are talking about low- and middle-income earners. There is a price to these cuts. The Greens have sold their soul. What have they sold their soul for? A pig in a poke. We know the government are not going to change their position on superannuation concessions.

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