Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

As previous speakers on this side of the House have said, we agreed to support this bill, the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Energy Assistance Payment and Pensioner Concession Card) Bill 2017, because it is some evidence that the government is trying to help those on fixed incomes and those on the smallest incomes in our electorates. But we need to make sure that the government is held to account for what is happening and remind people about the con the government is trying to put forward in the budget.

First off, the one-off energy assistance payment of $75 a week for singles to help with their energy bills is welcome. Any good MP who, when they are not in this place, is out there talking to their constituents and holding their listening posts and their street stalls would know that the cost of energy is a major concern. We are about to hit winter. In regional Victorian areas like Bendigo, winter is particularly cold. The energy policy crisis that we are in because we are exporting too much of our own gas is putting pressure on the energy market and therefore driving up power bills. So $75 per single and $62.50 for each member of a couple is welcome because it will give some people and some households relief with their energy bills this year.

I should say, however, that this is not a silver bullet solution. This is not a long-term solution to the energy policy crisis we have in our country. It is a one-off payment. They are saying, 'Here's a little bit of cash to distract you from the fact that we have no long-term plan to address skyrocketing energy bills.' At the same time as giving a small relief to households, they are taking from those who are about to come onto these sorts of payments. What the government have also put forward in their budget is to scrap the energy supplement for new pensioners and people on new payments. So whilst this one-off payment is good news for our aged pensioners, our disability support pensioners, our parenting payment single recipients and our veterans' payments recipients, it is a one-off. People are not fools. They say: 'Great, that helps me this year, but that doesn't help me next year. It doesn't help me in the long term.'

My electorate, the Bendigo electorate, is like many regional electorates. We have a significant number of people on fixed incomes or on some form of government payments. We have a large proportion of people on the aged pension. We have single parents and a number of people on the disability pension. One pensioner said to me on the weekend: 'The cost for me turning on my power is the same as for my next-door neighbour. Whilst my pensioner discount does help, there is a point where it doesn't help because our bills have gone up so much.' Bills are skyrocketing and $75 will help, but it will not really get on top of the massive increases they are paying.

The other part of this bill that I need to draw people's attention to is where the government is trying to clean up a mistake they made back when the former Treasurer in this place made a bit of a mistake on budget night. Now we are seeing the reinstatement of the pensioner concession card. This is for people who lost their pensioner concession card because of the new pensioner asset test that began on 1 January 2017.

I think what is really frustrating about the fact that the government has only brought this forward now is that since that budget night when the former Treasurer promised this and up until people lost their pensioner concession card—a few years now—people on this side of the House have been saying: 'What are you doing about this? Because of the pension asset test changes people will lose this concession card,' and the government did nothing. The government did nothing when pensioner groups got active about this to say: 'We will lose it. There is a significant proportion of people in our community who will lose this pension concession card.' Still, the government did nothing about this. It was not until people lost it that they went, 'Oh, this has created a problem.' It is the growing mantra of this government: pretend it is not an issue, say it is not an issue, stick your head in the sand about the issue, and only when people start to complain go, 'Okay, maybe we need to look at this.'

The government estimates that approximately 92,000 pensioners lost the concessions card in this period alone. However, as people's retirement income starts to grow because we have had superannuation and as fewer people will qualify for the pension, in the future there would have been more pensioners not eligible for this card. It actually challenges the government to rethink their entire approach towards retirement income. I am proud, as all Labor members are, that it was a Labor government that first introduced compulsory superannuation. The vision was that throughout somebody's working life they would save enough through their super contributions to have a decent retirement through their own retirement savings. That was first introduced in 1992 by former Prime Minister Paul Keating, and it was a great reform. It was something that working people, that the unions and that Labor had long championed.

For Australian workers to get to a place where they have enough to retire on, they need to have had a working life of superannuation savings. We are talking about my generation. I started working in 1994. We hope that when people now in their 30s retire—as is the government's wish, when they are 70, but at the moment if they retire at 67—they will have earned enough in their working life to have enough in superannuation to retire. If we acknowledge that it will take a generation of workers to get to that point, for those who between now and then, unless they are full age pensioners, there will be a sliding scale of people who will have a mix of super and pension.

The problem in the approach of this government is that they want to knock out people who may have a mix—they want to force a group of pensioners back to the poverty line. It has been well established by a number of groups, by research, that the level of single pension that people are trying to survive on is well below the poverty line. We have older Australians currently living in poverty. Our pension rate is too low. People may have been trying to supplement their pension with their super to get themselves above that point, but this government has taken the axe to them and cut back the assets test to say, 'No, we think you are millionaires and you all must live below the poverty line.' It was purely a budget save, and I am very disappointed, like many people in my electorate, that the Greens got on board with this idea from the government, that they backed the government in. The Greens, the Liberals and the Nats all said at the time that millionaires should not get pensions. What they did not talk about were the teachers and the nurses; they did not talk about the people who worked in trades who were not millionaires—they had some superannuation savings because of collective agreements that they had negotiated, but not enough to provide them with what could be considered a decent retirement income. They are the people who lost when this government changed the pension assets test.

We do welcome the fact that at least this group of pensioners will get their concession card back. The cost of services in the regions is expensive. Pensioners in my part of the world do enjoy their discounts on public transport—every year the state of Victoria sends them a couple of free tickets for V/Line services to go to Melbourne. They can use them when they like—it could be for medical appointments or it could be to catch up with grandchildren; it is their chance to go to Melbourne. What is really frustrating about what the government did, without consultation with the states, is that when they stopped issuing the card there was a knock-on effect. People came to speak to us about the fact that they lost discounts on their rates notices, and then councils had to scramble to see what they could do. We had people come and say that they lost discounts on all forms of public transport, and concessions on their energy bills. The government just did not think through the consequences of scrapping this card for a group of people. The frustrating thing is that it has taken this long for the government to realise their error and reinstate the concession card. It is like the government do not trust people when organisations tell them what the impact of their decisions will be. They wait for the impact to happen—they do not trust the organisations, they do not trust their own department and, they do not trust people in the community when they come up and say, 'When this kicks in on 1 January, I will be affected.' That is what is disappointing: the government, knowing full well the impact of scrapping the concession card on this group of pensioners, did nothing, until now, to fix it. I mentioned that this government's once-off payment is not the same as $365 of assistance every year to help pensioners keep up with the increasing energy costs. It is not just pensioners that they choose to scrap this energy supplement for; it is people who are on Newstart and people who are on youth allowance. This government, again, is forcing the most vulnerable in our community, who need our support, further into poverty.

These are the people who are seeking support from our welfare and relief agencies. In my own area of Bendigo, our welfare agencies and emergency relief agencies report a 40 per cent increase in people seeking help over the last financial year. This year, so far, it is growing. They state that the reasons for this are the cost of energy bills, the costs of car registration and insurance, and, if those in need of help have children, the cost of children going to school. The agencies are saying that single pensioners, in particular, are doing it incredibly tough—people who are just trying to get by. Without food hampers—without emergency relief food—they literally would not survive. Max at the UnitingCare at Kangaroo Flat does an amazing job in reaching out to this group. He has people who rock up to say, 'I've just spent all of my pension on my rent and on my energy bills, can you help me out? Max is not alone. There is also UnitingCare in Forest Street, Bendigo and St Vincent de Paul in Bendigo. These organisations, every single day, are supporting people with food hampers and emergency relief, because people are being crippled by the cost of living.

This is so typical of this government—caring about the top end of town whilst putting pressure on people on the smallest of incomes. Coming up on 1 July, we have a government which will give millionaires a tax cut—$16,400 a year—while standing by and doing nothing to stop penalty rates being cut. Retail workers could lose up to $6,000 a year, or $77 a week. It may not sound like a lot to a millionaire or a government backbencher, with what they earn, but to someone on the smallest of incomes it is a lot. It is a government that continues to do nothing to support those on the lowest incomes. One pensioner said to me: '$75? Really, that's it? That will help pay a fraction of my bill. A once off—is it a bribe? Are they trying to get me to be quiet?' People will see this for what it is. Whilst we support it and welcome it, it is not enough. The government is really out of touch with those on the smallest of incomes. It is really out of touch with people who need ongoing and continuous help. It is a government that is caught up in its own rhetoric and thinks that people will be taken as fools.

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