Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Manufacturing) Share this | Hansard source

Once again, it is a pleasure to follow the member for Moreton in a debate in this chamber. In speaking on the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Energy Assistance Payment and Pensioner Concession Card) Bill 2017, can I say to the member for Moreton that I commend him on the speech he has just delivered. I believe he very eloquently outlined the issue in respect of pensioners, the treatment they have received under this government and the very stark difference between the Turnbull government and previous Labor governments.

Indeed, no government in recent times has treated pensioners more disgracefully than has the Turnbull-Abbott coalition government since their election in 2013. At that election they made a very clear promise: no cuts to pensions if they were to be elected. Sadly, immediately upon being elected, they did the opposite. Indeed, they not only set about cutting the pensions for pensioners but they also set about cutting a whole range of other payments and support measures that were in place that directly affected the income pensioners would have received or the support they were receiving.

Pensioners are people who, in many cases, already face considerable hardship. They have no other options in life with respect to raising funds. Many of them are at a stage in their life where they simply cannot do any part-time work if it were able. They simply have no alternative and no choice but to depend on the payments they receive through their pension. These are also people who lived in times that very likely meant they endured hardship and sacrifice to a level current generations simply would never understand—sacrifice and hardship I suspect many cabinet members of this Turnbull coalition government would not understand, because if they did they would not treat them so badly. This is a coalition government that thinks pensioners are easy targets and that perhaps they simply do not understand the impact and the effects of the changes they are making. The reality is that pensioners do understand. They know that they have been gutted and they know exactly when they are losing out as a result of government decisions. I hear it regularly from people I speak to in my electorate, as I am sure every member of this House—including coalition members—must hear as they are out and about speaking to people within their electorates. This legislation is an attempt by the Turnbull government to restore only a fraction of what has been taken from them over the last four years. Doing this will simply not restore the faith of pensioners in the Turnbull government. The Turnbull government is only doing it because it has been pressured into it by the public response, by this side of the parliament and by other MPs on the crossbench that have also been raising the unfairness of this government with respect to pensioners.

The legislation does two things: it restores the pensioner concession card, and it provides a one-off $75 payment to single pensioners with energy costs; for couples the payment is $62.50 each. Again, everyone would agree that this is a very meagre amount of money, and it is a one-off payment only. Simultaneously, this government wants to take $365 of ongoing annual payment that pensioners currently receive in the way of energy supplement. That payment will be taken away from new pensioners in the future and, I understand, for any pensioner that started receiving the pension after September 2016. My understanding is that legislation in respect of that was only brought into the House this morning. So again, I say to pensioners that have come on in the last 12 months, if you started receiving your pension in September 2016 expect that under this legislation you will lose the $365 energy supplement and in place you will get a one-off $75 amount.

Pensioners can do their sums, and they have. If you go through the measures that this government has brought into this place since coming into office, the attacks on pensioners have been relentless. Firstly, they brought in only at the beginning of this year changes to the pension asset test rules. As a result of those changes, 330,000 pensioners became worse off. 236,000 lost an average of $130 per fortnight and 91,000 lost their pension entirely. That was $190 per fortnight for them on average. For pensioners those amounts of money matter a lot. It makes a difference to the kind of life they can live.

The government did this in order to save $2.4 billion over four years. That is $2.4 billion that was taken out of the hands of pensioners in order for the government to try and balance its budget. Whichever way the government wants to spin the issue about the asset test rules, the reality is that that $2.4 billion came directly out of the household budgets of pensioners. The changes at the time also meant that those 91,000, which I now understand is 92,000, that lost their pension altogether in turn lost their pensioner concession card. So for them it was a double hit, because the pensioner concession card also enabled them to access a number of other things they needed in their lives at a reduced rate. So they were hit doubly. The government is now saying that they will restore that—only because, as I said earlier on, of the pressure that has been put on them.

Of course Labor will be supporting this legislation, because it does reinstate the pensioner concession card. Whilst the $75, or the $62.50 for each couple, is only a meagre amount, I have no doubt that it will still be money that the pensioners would rather have than not have.

I want to talk about the record of this government on pensioners. As I said from the outset, this government has treated the pensioners more disgracefully than any other government in recent times. The measures that this government has brought in, or tried to do, are beyond what I would have thought any fair-minded government would ever have wanted to do. Firstly, they tried to reset the deeming rate threshold, which would have affected the part pension of half a million pensioners across the country. Secondly, they wanted to change the indexation rate. These are matters that the member for Moreton covered in his speech a few minutes ago but I want to reiterate, because when you look at the list it really brings home how harsh this government has been when it comes to pensioners. Then there was the $1.3 billion of cuts to the pensioner concession payments that were being made to the states. The Turnbull and Abbott governments claimed that these were payments that were made by the states, and therefore, it was not a responsibility of the federal government. The reality is that that $1.3 billion had been paid by the Commonwealth government for years and years, and it went directly into the households of pensioners. The states might have picked up the tab, but this was a direct cut to pensioner payments by this government. We then had the asset test and taper rate, which I referred to earlier on, that took $2.4 billion from pensioners. We had the education supplement, where around 41,000 recipients would have been worse off as a result of what this government proposed to do. There is the issue of pensioners going overseas—if they were there for more than six weeks they would have had their pension also cut. If they were a migrant pensioner who did not spend their entire life in this country, the cuts would have been even deeper.

But those are not the only things that were going to hit pensioners. We also had the proposal, reaffirmed last week by the finance minister, that the pension age is going to rise to 70. This is not about cutting the pension or cutting the assistance and support payments to the pension—this is about cutting the whole thing. You do not get anything until you reach the age of 70—the highest age in the world for people to receive a pension, and this was the work of the coalition government.

It goes further than that, because when we look at other out-of-pocket costs that pensioners have to face on a daily basis, we then come to the issue of health funding in this country. We know that out-of-pocket health and medical costs have risen in recent years since this government came to office, particularly because the government has extended the Medicare rebate freeze. As a result of that, we know that more doctors are charging a co-payment or have increased their co-payment when they see a patient. That has a direct effect on pensioners because, as we also all know, pensioners, because of the stage in their life, are more likely to have to go and see their doctor and, therefore, incur medical costs. So the cuts to health payments by this government have also had a very direct impact on pensioners—more so than on any other sector in the community—and the government would have known that. Again, it just shows the callous disregard that this government has had for pensioners.

I now turn to aged-care funding—a sector of funding that, as we all know, pensioners are more likely to be in need of. Whether it is home and community care funding or whether it is the assistance and aged-care packages, it is more likely than not that the person applying for those packages or the home and community care assistance is going to be pensioner. Quite often it is a single pensioner; sometimes it is a pensioner where the spouse is in need of that support. Again, we see billions of dollars cut from those programs. As a result of those cuts, we also know that just getting an aged-care package at the moment is an absolute nightmare. Not only are the packages simply not available, particularly if you need a level 3 or level 4 package—even just getting the assessment has become very difficult. All of this is in order to stall the provision of the support that those packages would otherwise provide. This goes to the heart of the needs of pensioners. I can assure the House that I have had many people talk to me about that issue alone, and they are all pensioners. When they get to a point where they do not get the funding, what do they do? They have to find it one way or another, because it is funding that they absolutely need. They are in a desperate situation, and we have this government cutting their funding and simultaneously cutting the support to them in every other service that they might, in the past, have been receiving support from.

Whichever way pensioners turn, the Turnbull government's policies and budget cuts have made their lives more difficult. Pensioners know that, and that is why they have lost faith in the Turnbull government. Not only were they lied to by the coalition in the 2013 election, when they were promised no cuts to pensions; they feel even more cheated when they see $65 billion of tax cuts given to business whilst, simultaneously, they are asked to receive cuts to their weekly income.

I particularly focus on the cuts that go to those businesses which turnover more than $50 million per year, and which the government wants to proceed with in respect of the tax cuts that it wants to make for those businesses. Those cuts will amount to some $45 billion over the next decade. Most of that money will probably go to businesses that are based overseas or which have their headquarters overseas and, in fact, to many shareholders who are overseas, so it will not even be circulating in the Australian economy.

Contrast that with the money that is being cut to pensioners, which in my view is a false saving by the government. Pensioners, because of their meagre income every week, spend every last dollar in their local community. They keep people employed in the local community and they keep small businesses going in their local community. So most of the money that the government outlays to support pensioners inevitably would be coming back to local communities, supporting them, and through that much of the money would actually be coming back to government because it would save the government other expenditure down the track, whether that is increased unemployment payments that it would have to make or something similar.

I started off by talking about the very cruel cuts that are being made to pensioners by this government. These two measures, yes, will be supported by this side of the House. But both fall far short of restoring all of the cuts made by this government. I say to members opposite: pensioners do understand the way they are being treated by this government. They understand it well. I have spoken to them at forums, I have met with them in my office and I have met with them as I am out and around in the community. There is no sector in the community that feels more aggrieved and feels that they have been more harshly treated than do the pensioners I speak to. It is time that this government showed a little respect for them and treated them with the dignity they deserve.

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