Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great pleasure to speak on the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Fair and Sustainable Pensions) Bill 2015, which provides such a stark contrast between the various parties. On one hand, we have Labor, which has an excellent record on pensions when in government. When we came to government in 2007, I remember how many pensioners in my electorate were desperate for the government to address the issue of poverty for those on fixed incomes and pensions. We had known that they had been fobbed off for a decade by the Howard government with one budget trick or another. Every budget pensioners were waiting in anticipation to see what support they would get. No increases were built into the ordinary pension rate. They had to rely on bonuses and on whatever Treasurer Costello and Prime Minister Howard had squirrelled away for that year or had decided to hand out for that year. Every year they waited with some trepidation to find what their annual incomes would be.

When Labor came to government, we commissioned the Harmer review, a very important review. That came back with three things: a $30 per week increase for the single pension and new a indexation measured to look at not just the CPI or average male weekly earnings but also, critically, to look at what a pensioner would buy every week and what costs they would expect to have in their household budget. That is critical because the CPI includes many things pensioners simply did not consume week upon week. As you get older, of course budgets change and perhaps your discretionary income changes. So what you spend week to week changes as well. So that new indexation measure of what a pensioner would buy or consume every week was in the report. There was also a suggestion to lift indexing from 25 per cent of male average weekly earnings to 27 per cent. All of this amounted to the biggest increase in the pension in its history. That is a very important achievement which should be acknowledged by those opposite and by the community. It was not achieved without some difficulty, it was not achieved easily and it was an important such social justice measure to alleviate poverty.

We know that poverty among pensioners went down from 27 per cent to 12 per cent and that was a significant change. It did not eliminate it, something we would all aspire to, but it made a significant dent in what was a very big problem. Obviously prior to those changes, when you did a shopping centre stall or a street stall, you had to talk to a lot of pensioners about the very real and significant pressures on their household budgets and some of it was quite confronting. When you see people who have worked all the life facing poverty, it is a terrible thing.

I spoke in my maiden speech about how confronting poverty is among the elderly because it is too late to get a better job, as the Treasurer would tell some people. It is too late to save a bit more when the bulk of your working life is behind you and you look to the government to do the fair and responsible thing, to make sure the pension is maintained in a manner which can prevent poverty among the elderly.

We know that Australia, alone in the world, did make changes to make sure the pension was fiscally sustainable. That was part of some of the very important economic and social justice measures Labor made while in government, a record we can be proud of and those opposite can look at in some awe.

Against that, we have the Liberal Party. We know what the Liberal Party have been up to. Before the election, the Prime Minister promised not to touch pensions. He said that nine times, including during that fateful interview on SBS. He, and with him all of his backbench, gave a solemn commitment to Australians not to touch pensions. Given the elevated trust among politicians to a sacrosanct matter, you would think he would be very careful with his pre-election commitments and that he would do everything to hold them. Instead, what we have found is disingenuous, gutless, irresponsible, wild and reckless promise-making before the election and decision-making after the election. What did we find? In their first budget, what was the first thing they did? They set out to cut pensions and not by a small amount—by $23 billion. That is what they were going to hack out of the incomes of pensioners, $80 per week. And every time, he stood up in this House and said oh well, they will still go up every September, every March; they will still be going up twice a year. Every pensioner in the country knew he was perpetrating a fiction, a spin, a lie, a scam. They knew they were being scammed and that is why—

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