Anne Stanley (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to make my contribution to the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Payment Integrity) Bill 2019, and I oppose this bill with a sense of deja vu. The coalition government first tried to introduce this bill in 2017. It was a bad bill then, and now, two years later, nothing's changed; it's still a bad bill. Dig a little deeper and the details of this bill are so cruel and miserly that they would actually make Scrooge blush and are a shame at this time of the year. This bill seeks to increase the residential requirements for age and disability pensioners by five years. It stops the payment of the age pension supplement should they want to go overseas for more than six weeks. Allowances such as Newstart and youth allowance will now have to have the liquid asset test raised from 13 weeks to an impossible six months.

People who, through no fault of their own, are made redundant are now going to be cruelly punished. There is no rationale for increasing the liquid assets waiting period for people who lose their jobs or are made redundant. Let's face it: how many times do we see workers lose their jobs, be made redundant, and then find out that superannuation has not been set aside and all their other entitlements aren't paid? The government, on top of that, is now going to make them wait even longer to get something back. For people who lose their job and are made redundant, having a financial buffer is incredibly important. It allows them to make changes to their lifestyle if they need to, and it allows them the space to keep their mental health in check. Yet this government says, 'If you want a go, you get a go.' Again, this government says one thing but seemingly is doing quite another.

Being made redundant and being unemployed is not some form of punishment for moral failure. Social security is a safety net. It is what this country should be most proud of—supporting people when they need it most. This government is alienating these people, who have no other option but to turn to the safety net.

In every budget since 2014, this government has tried to increase the pension age to 70. Let's not forget about the axing of the $900 seniors supplement for self-funded retirees receiving the Commonwealth seniors health card, nor forget the deal that was done with the help of the Greens last year to cut $12,000 from the pension to over a quarter of a million pensioners by changing the assets test. I have seen many pensioners who could not be counted as well off for whom this change has meant significant issues for them and their partners.

In 2016, right as energy prices were causing families and pensioners to go into debt and skip much-needed heating, what did the government do? It scrapped the energy supplement for new pensioners. Our pensioners, who've worked hard to build this country into what it is today, who contributed so much, are being financially choked by this government and the Treasurer. In fact, it took the government until the cash rate was at one per cent to change the deeming rate—a deeming rate that was set for a cash rate of 2.25 per cent, a rate we hadn't seen since April 2015, and that is just appalling. How you could not have done something about that earlier is really beyond belief, given that the only people that were winning out of that were the big banks, and look at what we've seen in the last week about what they do.

This government does not want those pensioners, of which a high number are migrants who helped build this country, to be able to visit their families overseas. We all know that it's a long way to go to places like Italy and Greece, where a majority of my constituents originally hail from, so you want to be there for some time. Many of the constituents that I see in my electorate office think this will be the last time they will be well enough to go. They want to say goodbye to family and friends, and they want to reacquaint themselves with the places of their childhood, which ultimately many of them left in really awful circumstances, just after the war or in the early fifties. They were coming to this country because they wanted a better life for their families. It's hard to speak to those people, in my electorate, at least, who have spent the best part of 30 or 40 years growing the food that we put on our tables—the tomatoes, the eggs, the chooks—and see in their eyes that they can't afford to go back and see brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews they left behind. Some of them have been saving up for this for the last 15 or 20 years. I really don't know what to say to those people, because this is not the Australia that I grew up in and it's not the Australia that we want for our future either. The government just doesn't seem to have an appreciation for the long years of hard work these pensioners have put into the country.

We've got a disgraceful list of age-care abuses, banks ripping off our elderly, and robodebt that isn't actually true also ripping off our elderly. Now the government is dipping into its pile of failed legislation to have another go at our aged Australians. All this is at a time when we have a stalling economy and a government and a Treasurer asleep at the controls of a fly-by-night operation. They have no ideas of their own, so they're looking to the failed ideas of their conservative colleagues abroad: austerity. The Treasurer seems to be grasping desperately at cuts, cuts, cuts but has no plans to save the stalling economy. At the risk of being heckled by those opposite, the last time we had an economy that looked like it was going to have problems, we as a government made a decision to create jobs for people. That kept us much better off over the global financial crisis. It's something that this government needs to think about again.

For hardworking Australians who find themselves redundant and out of a job, their savings can make the difference, enabling them to retrain and get back on their feet quickly. We all know that Newstart does not provide enough money for people to pay the rent, feed and clothe themselves and get to job interviews. The little money you have means you aren't able to do your best at these job interviews if you're thinking about other things.

The government seems to have no plan for the economy. It has been two years since this bill was sent away from this place, and it really should be sent away again. We find ourselves firmly in a rotating door of failed coalition policy. This bill is nothing but a nostalgic look back at the coalition's worst hits. Since being elected in 2013 the government has been determined to destroy everything that is good and decent. We need to stop this bill now; we need to think about our vulnerable Australians and we need to make sure that this bill is stopped.

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