Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a huge privilege to speak this morning on the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Fair and Sustainable Pensions) Bill 2015. I do so on behalf of many thousands of older Australians and pensioners that I represent as the member for Hotham. I take that responsibility very seriously. In many ways, I am very much in awe of some of the older people who I represent in terms of what they have done to build up this incredible country that we get to play a privileged role in.

I do not want the House to forget about the people whose incomes are affected by the legislation that is before us today. They created so much of what we love about Australia. One of the things that is so much at the heart of the Australia they created is a feeling of egalitarianism amongst Australians. We have a social compact in this country that says that when you grow older, when you have worked your whole life, when you have paid your taxes and when you have worked to build this country then the government is going to do its part by helping ensure that you live a reasonable retirement. And it is not a retirement that merely keeps people with enough food on their plate; that is not sort of country that those people worked for and that we represent in this House. We want in Australia, as the country grows more prosperous, for everyone to benefit. That is fair. That is the fair way of doing things. That is why I am proud to stand today to say that Labor will not be supporting the essential measure of cutting pensions for part pensioners that lies at the heart of this legislation. We will not do that to the pensioners who rely on government to live in a reasonable retirement.

The conservatives on the other side of the House have a lot of things to say, a lot of talk about how much they respect older Australians and want to protect them in their retirements. But there is a big difference between the rhetoric that you hear on this side of the House and the rhetoric that we hear on the other side of the House—that is, as well as talking the talk we in Labor walk the walk. Older Australians, as I have said, deserve a retirement does not see them living in poverty. When Labor came to government under the Rudd government one of the first things that the government did was ask the department to come back to the government with a proposal that will see retirement incomes for older Australians lifted up, and the former minister for social services, Jenny Macklin, was in charge of that process. What we found was something very concerning and that is that when the Howard government left office there were literally millions of older Australians in this country—having worked their whole lives, paid taxes their whole lives, raised children, built business—living in poverty. What the Rudd government did was make the increase to the base pension rate that occurred in this country for a hundred years. In a single act, that government brought millions of Australia people out of poverty.

We have something in economics called revealed preferences. That is a way of saying that the only way to really judge what people really value is to watch their behaviour. I would say to you that, if you look at the behaviour and the record of Labor, you will see that every time a Labor person comes into this House and talks about how seriously they take the representation of older people in their electorates we back that up with real policies and real protections for people. That is not what we see today by people on the other side of the House.

Let me get to what we have seen from this government so far. We saw the conversation about retirement incomes very much as one of the 'unity ticket' items of the last election. We saw Tony Abbott walk around the country and say to Australia's pensioners that there would be absolutely no changes to pensions and no cuts to pensions. He said it over and over and over again. Yet what we have seen since this government has been in office is more or less constant attempts to try to change and cut pensions. They have tried it one way and they have tried it other ways. They have done many other things that will affect essentially the retirement incomes of Australians such as the GP tax and raising the cost of meds for older Australians, and we know that all of these will increase the burden and the cost of living on older Australians.

What we have seen Labor do is fight them on really all of the essential measures that would see the incomes and standard of living of older Australians cut. Again, I would say that I am really proud of that. What we have seen the government try to do is cut the indexation rate of pensions. That would have seen, over 10 years, older Australians $80 a week worse off as a consequence of that change. The policy itself was an absolute shock, coming as it did on the back of a sort of parade around the country stating the level of commitment the Abbott government would have in protecting retirement incomes. But what really upset me about this was the falsehoods and the lying that went on about what this change really was. During question time after question time we sat in this chamber and we asked the Prime Minister why he was cutting the indexation rate of pensions, and he would stand up and talk about how pensions were going up. You can probably hear it ringing in your ears as I can.

Older Australians are not silly people. They are not the silly people that the Prime Minister would take them for. They know that when the indexation rate of their pension is being cut, over time that means that they will end up with less money in their pockets than they otherwise would have. I hope that what we see during the course of this debate about retirement incomes is some level of respect shown to older Australians and that when you are cutting their pensions you will be up-front and tell people that is what you are doing. With the changes that we see in the bill before us, we know we are going to see 327,000 current pensioners worse off and over time about half of all pensioners will be worse off as a consequence of the changes.

I was very lucky to host a morning tea in the last few weeks for seniors in Hotham. The shadow minister, the member for Jagajaga, was there with me. You probably will not be surprised to know that we had a flood of people. We had about 150 people there with 90 people on a waiting list because we were not actually able to fit the people that wanted to be there in the room. And I would say that, despite the upbeat nature that we usually see in our older Australians, there is a real feeling of deep anxiety out there amongst our seniors—and they have got pretty good reason to be anxious, because all we have seen on the other side is constant attempts to reduce their incomes.

It is an important moment today for us to pay tribute to the work of the member for Jagajaga and what she has done for older Australians over the time that she has been in this place. Although the people in the room with us at the morning tea did feel a lot of anxiety, everyone who was there—and I think everyone in this House—would acknowledge that the member for Jagajaga has fought with everything she has to protect the incomes and the quality of life of senior Australians. I think the seniors who were at the morning tea are so grateful that there is a politician at a senior level who they know they can trust, who they know is going to go into bat for them. She is doing that again in Labor's stance on this legislation today.

We were able to talk to a lot of seniors who will be affected by the bill that is before the House today. A lot of part-pensioners were there. Again, there was a lot of anxiety about what this legislation is going to do to their incomes. I want to make it really clear that the people who were there with us at the morning tea are not millionaires—absolutely not. They are people who have worked in ordinary jobs for their whole lives, people who have been prudent, people who have put aside a bit of something extra where they can and people who, over time, have been able to put themselves in a position where they are accessing a part-pension and not a full pension. The implication that the people affected by this bill are millionaires is brutally offensive, and I think, again, just getting the politics of this so wrong. I will give a bit of free advice to those on the other side. The people who will be affected by this legislation know who they are. They know they are not millionaires. You going out there and telling them how well-off they are and how little they need government support is neither going to get the legislation across the line nor win you any votes at the next election.

The Leader of the Opposition and the shadow minister have done a lot of detailed policy work together that has helped us reach the conclusion that we will not be supporting the central change in here about the part-pension. As the detail of the legislation has become clearer and as we have seen some modelling that has been done, we have seen a lot of reasons that this is a really regressive proposal. There are people in Australia, single pensioners, who will be $8,000 worse off as a consequence of the measures in the legislation here. Couple pensioners will be up to $14,000 worse off. Two hundred and thirty-six thousand pensioners will be $130 a fortnight worse off. That is almost $3½ thousand a year. A further 91,000 Australians will lose their pension altogether. Modelling by Industry Super Australia has shown that, as a consequence of this legislation, in 10 years time half of all future retirees will end up with less money in their pockets than they would have had otherwise.

There are a lot of confusing things about our retirement income system. I would say to people who are listening at home, trying to make their own view about these proposals: what you really need to know here is that this is a cut to the pension of $2.4 billion. Whatever is going on here, whatever machinations there are, whatever different proposals come forward over the coming months, just remember that this government is trying to cut your pensions, and that is what it has been trying to do since it was elected to office.

I referred before to some of the equity issues here. The government has been saying again and again in question time that this is a policy that is about millionaires who are accessing a pension. NATSEM, which is one of the most robust and authoritative modelling organisations in Australia, has looked at the impact of this legislation on older Australians, and it has found that $8 in $10 of the savings in this measure will be paid for by the lowest fifth of income earners. So I just want to absolutely put this to bed. This is not about millionaires; this is about middle Australians who are going to see significantly lower incomes and cuts to the pension as a consequence of what is in the legislation.

We do need to have a conversation about retirement incomes in this country, and Labor is trying to be a constructive voice in those discussions. We know that over the next four years we are actually going to see the tax concessions that apply to superannuation outstrip the amount of federal budget that is going towards the pensions. Most commentators in Australia agree this is becoming unsustainable. A tax system which was trying to do something very sensible, which is encourage Australians to put money into their super, will see tax concessions actually outstrip our expenditure on the pensions. We do need to look at this, and Labor wants to have a serious debate and a serious policy conversation about whether this can continue.

A third of superannuation tax concessions go to the top 10th of income earners, and 70 per cent of capital gains tax concessions and one-third of negative-gearing concessions also go to this group. So I think we do have an issue to address here. Labor wants to have a real conversation about it, but the narrative and the rhetoric that are coming from the other side are not actually going to any of these important strategic fiscal issues that we face as a nation. What we have heard from the other side since they were elected to government is a lot of noise about how unsustainable the budget is, but then the first thing they did was get rid of a tax that applied to some of the biggest-polluting companies in Australia and change our carbon-trading system into something that means that we now have taxpayers paying big polluters to try to reduce their pollution. They ditched the mining tax and they spent the next two years crying poor and saying that pensioners are the ones who have to pay—when effectively the two first things they did as a government cut taxes to some of the biggest companies in the country.

When we have the discussion about retirement incomes which I hope will follow in the coming months, I want to make it clear that Labor is not going to be buying into this bogus dichotomy between superannuation tax concessions and the pension. If we were to take the government's argument that this distinction exists to its logical conclusion, we would not really have a tax system in Australia. A lot of Australians with high incomes actually acknowledge that a lot of their wealth comes from the fact that government provides lots of infrastructure and other things that have allowed them to run successful businesses and so on. Many Australians have planned for their retirement on the basis of a fair pension, and, as Labor people, that is what we will be fighting for.

From what we hear in question time and in these debates, there is a bit of an undercurrent that people do not do need or deserve certainty, because they are relying on the government for a pension. That is absolute tosh, and I will be fighting against that rhetoric. If anyone needs certainty about their incomes in this country, it is pensioners, because at their stage of life they cannot do anything to change their incomes. That is why government needs to be clear about what it wants to do and be consistent in the policy that it puts in place.

I am very pleased and proud to continue a Labor tradition in this House, which is standing up for Australia's pensioners, standing up for fair retirement incomes and standing up for the seniors that I represent in my community of Hotham. I am very pleased to say today that yet again we will not be supporting cuts to pensions, and yet again we are standing up for senior Australians.

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