Patrick Gorman (Perth, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Western Australia) Share this | Hansard source

As long as the government say that they want to make the cashless debit card mainstream, with a cashless pension card, I will continue to bring the concerns of my community into this chamber. That's my job—to make sure that we raise these concerns and that the government doesn't continue down this path. My view is that pensioners have made sacrifices. We've all made sacrifices over the last year, but pensioners have done it tougher than most. Before the pandemic, pensioners were making sacrifices. Research that the government commissioned after they started cutting the pension showed this. The research showed that a third of Australian pensioners were experiencing energy poverty. Energy costs have been a major concern for older Australians. Many pensioners spend a substantial portion of their income on power bills.

When this pandemic hit, it showed just how vulnerable pensioners were. I congratulate the McGowan Labor government in Western Australia, who saw that vulnerability and sought to provide a $600 credit to pensioners in my electorate so that they could continue to pay their power bills. Where the income supports that were being provided to pensioners during the pandemic weren't sufficient, the state stepped in. That's a pattern of behaviour that we see time and time again.

The other thing that's important to note is that it's also pensioners and senior Australians who raise concerns about the lack of affordable renewable energy in our grid. Pensioners are people who do that long-term planning. They don't just think about how much money they're going to have this month or next month; they're thinking about the rest of their lives—20 years. Pensioners know that, over those 20 years, the only way they're going to have lower power bills and the energy they need to run their houses and keep them warm is to make sure that we start that important transition towards renewable energy. Otherwise, it's just going to be the same pattern that we've seen for the last eight years under this government—a 50 per cent increase in power bills, pensioners choosing to have cold showers and not put their heating on at night, and not being able to afford to run their air conditioners during heatwaves, as we experience in Perth on a regular basis.

I'll now come to the people who are stuck overseas that we are trying to help. As of 28 May, 35,000 Australians want to get home but can't. Many of them are older Australians; 4,260 of them are classified as vulnerable Australians. So, while we are passing this legislation to help them with financial support, I'd much rather we weren't having this debate. If the government and the Prime Minister had delivered on their promise to get everyone home by Christmas last year, this legislation wouldn't be necessary. It's as simple as that. We wouldn't need it. We need this legislation. It's been six months. It's another broken promise from this Prime Minister.

In India alone, there are more than 11,000 Australians who are trying to get home. Some of them are grandparents who haven't seen their grandkids for more than a year and families who have been separated by the incompetence and laziness of this government. The Prime Minister promised the Australian people in the middle of a pandemic that he would get these pensioners home. The Prime Minister having broken that promise, we finally have some legislation to at least provide them with their pension payments. This is the same Prime Minister who assures us that he is on a war footing in terms of how we're helping people.

Mr Tudge interjecting —

I wonder. We get questions from time to time from people who say, 'How do different people get to the frontbench?' I ask the government opposite: how do you leave the Prime Minister in his job when he has continued to lie and fail the Australian people?

See this speech in context