Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's telling, isn't it? The government will not show up to defend their own legislation. And why would they want to speak on this bill? The first thing I say to the House is: don't be fooled by the Orwellian title. The Social Services Legislation Amendment (Payment Integrity) Bill 2019 is a bill to cut the age pension. This is a bill to cut Newstart. It's not about payment integrity. They may as well call it, as the member for Macquarie was saying, the 'Drive up poverty bill'. Only a government led by a cheap, failed marketing guy could come up with 'payment integrity' as a description for a bill that cuts the age pension and cuts Newstart.

What this bill does is cruel. It cuts the age pension supplement to pensioners who are overseas for six weeks or more. It takes $185 million from the pockets of pensioners. That equates to, I think, for someone on the single base rate of the pension supplement, a grand total of $11.88 per week for that single pensioner. Well done to the government; well done you. Even for this government that is a mean-spirited, nasty little cut. The main targets of these cuts, of course, are pensioners with families living overseas, many thousands of whom reside in my electorate—people who came to this country in the 1950s and 1960s from Greece, from Italy and then later from Serbia, from Vietnam and from all over the world, who've contributed to this country for the whole of their working lives. They've paid their taxes. They've put in, and now they might want to visit their families overseas in retirement. They want to spend quality time with their families even later in their lives, but this government's bill makes it harder to do so.

Many people might listen to this and think: 'How many pensioners can afford to go overseas for six weeks? If they can afford that, surely we can take $11 off them.' The truth is that, if you're a pensioner, you would have to save up for a very long time for the flights to get overseas, so it makes sense to go and stay with family for two, three or four months. Often people travel to care for the grandkids overseas, when a new baby is born, or for a sick relative. Indeed, in that regard—I talked about this at a recent seniors morning tea I had—people were horrified. The government hasn't told people about this bill; it's been buried in the background on the Notice Paper for some years now.

But it's not just migrants; it's people born in this country, because we're a globalised society now. Children of pensioners move overseas and get jobs, fall in love, get married, live in London or wherever they may be and have children. And, of course, the pensioners of Australia want to go and visit their children and connect with their grandkids. Pensioner are not rich. Staying for two, three or four months means saving for airfares. Often, of course, those airfares are paid for by their kids, but they still have the bills to pay at home when they're not here. They still have the council rates. They still have the electricity bills, most of which are the connection fees for many pensioners.

So why is the government doing this? They're cutting $11.88 a week from vulnerable people for a few weeks of the year to save $185 million by attacking pensioners. And yet this very year the government voted themselves a tax cut of $16,000 a year. That says everything you need to know about the government's priorities. Everyone on the government benches gets a tax cut of $16,000 a year, and now we're debating a bill to cut $11.88 from pensioners.

This is a government with the wrong priorities. Their budget surplus that we hear so much about is built entirely on these kinds of cuts and on attacking the most vulnerable people in Australia—the $1.6 billion cut to the NDIS, for example. Now, there are two possibilities: possibility 1, that the Liberals are just mean and don't care, and possibility 2, that they think now the election's out of the way they can get away with it. Well, the truth is, I think, probably both are true.

The fact that pensioners travel overseas for an extended period of time is the reality of life in modern Australia. This is the kind of society we are now. Pensioners don't just sit at home, government, waiting to die. They go overseas to see their grandkids, to be with family and to visit the place they have not been able to go to for 40 years. And, yes, they might want to stay for four months in the village where they were born and grew up. Cutting the pension in this way is an attack on the Australian way of life. You may not see it, but we will make sure that every pensioner, if this bill passes, knows.

The Liberals' efforts to cut the age pension are not new. This in fact is the third time they've tried to make this cut to the age pension supplement. In 2017—I'll give them this—at least they were a bit more honest. The bill that was buried in at that point was called the omnibus savings and child care reform bill—at least it had savings in the title. In 2017 they also introduced, astoundingly, another bill that sat on the Notice Paperthis time called payment integrity—but it was never debated. The Liberals have been too scared to debate this bill the whole of the last term, even though they had this cut to the age pension sitting on the Notice Paper for years. Of course it died on the Notice Paper in the last parliament but, like the political necrophiles they are, they just couldn't stop themselves and reintroduced it to the House—reanimated it.

Let's just record for the House the Liberals' age pension cuts—the history thereof. In 2014 they tried to cut pension indexation, a cut that would have meant that pensioners would be forced to live on $80 a week less within 10 years. In 2014 they cut $1 billion from pensioner concessions—support designed to help pensioners with the cost of living. In 2014 they also axed the $900 seniors supplement to self-funded retirees for receiving the Commonwealth Seniors Health Card. In 2014—that was a good year for them, wasn't it?—they tried to reset deeming rates thresholds, a cut that would have seen half a million part-pensioners made worse off. In 2015 they did that famous deal with the Greens political party to cut the pension for around 370 pensioners by as much as $12,000 a year by fiddling the pension assets test. Not stopping there, in 2016 they tried to cut the pension to around 190,000 pensioners—again, this was the early version of the plan to limit overseas travel for pensioners to six weeks. In 2016 they tried to cut the pension for over 1.5 million Australians by scrapping the energy supplement for new pensioners. The government's own figures—this is their own admission—showed that this would have left over 563,000 Australians who are currently receiving a pension or allowance worse off. Over 10 years in excess of 1.5 million pensioners would have been worse off.

They then spent five long years trying to increase the pension age to 70. I think when the current Prime Minister did in Malcolm Turnbull he freaked out because he realised that wasn't exactly popular in real Australia and they dropped that one—it may well return. And then they took five consecutive RBA rate cuts before they even adjusted the deeming rates, and that was only after a concerted campaign from seniors groups and Labor.

This bill, though, doesn't stop there. It is not just a bill to cut the age pension; this bill attempts to cut Newstart, astoundingly. It's hard to actually understand where they think up this nonsense. At a time when almost everyone in Australia except those opposite understand that the rate of Newstart is too low, at just $40 a day, and even the Business Council of Australia, those well-known socialist lefties, say Newstart has to be raised, what do the Liberals do? They cut Newstart in this bill.

To be clear, there is no public policy rationale for increasing the liquid assets waiting period for people who lose their job or are made redundant. This a cash grab from vulnerable Australians, pure and simple. Again, in a year when the government voted themselves a tax cut—everyone opposite got a tax cut of $16,000 a year from the government—their answer now is to try and cut Newstart to prop up the budget surplus.

The Liberals are proposing to take money from workers experiencing unemployment, who are Australia's most vulnerable people, because currently there is a maximum waiting period of 13 weeks for people with very modest savings, if they're made redundant or lose their job, to access Newstart, sickness allowance, youth allowance and Austudy. This bill would double the waiting period from 13 weeks to 26 weeks; that's six months. The government wants vulnerable people to wait six months to access basic support through Centrelink. Applicants therefore would be forced to spend down what meagre savings they might have before being eligible to receive a payment.

Now, a savings buffer is incredibly important for the financial resilience of everyday Australians. This bill would force people to eat into their emergency savings. What happens, then, when the car breaks down? What happens when you need to pay a rental bond because you lost your last house and have to move? What happens when the fridge stops working? What happens when your suit pants rip before a job interview? The government might as well call this, if they were being honest, the 'Drive up payday lending bill' or the 'Drive up poverty bill', because that's what it will do.

As the Senate inquiry made clear, these changes will particularly impact unemployed older Australians—men between 50 and 65, and people who have received redundancy payments. We know what the government's doing. They've always loved demonising people on welfare, people on Newstart, summoning up that old stereotype of the dole bludger and making people think that just about everyone claiming unemployment benefits is somehow a dole bludger. They know that's not true. It is not true. The integrity mechanisms within Centrelink stop just about all of that happening. Of course there are a few people who rort the system, and they should be caught and they should be dealt with. But the vast majority of people on Newstart are on Newstart because they cannot get a job and they need the support to survive. These cuts don't help people to get back on their feet. They just push vulnerable people into desperate situations and further isolate them from support.

The Department of Human Services—just to put some numbers around this—expect that these cuts would impact 13,800 Australians annually, and that 11,000 Australians would be forced to wait an entire six months, if they got made redundant, before they could access Newstart. It's a continuation of six years of cuts based on the Liberals' obsession with attacking ordinary working Australians doing it tough and their ideological obsession with punishing people because they are poor. This is a bill to cut the age pension and to cut Newstart, and they should be honest, at least, and call it that.

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