Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Seniors) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. I remind the Prime Minister that some of our nation's most vulnerable older citizens are now being told that they face increased residential care fees which are almost twice as much as the increase forecast by Treasury under the carbon tax. Can the Prime Minister explain to these pensioners why the government is inflicting this additional financial pain on them when our domestic emissions will actually increase under the world's biggest carbon tax by eight per cent?

Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Once again the opposition misleads about the nature of carbon pricing, and once again the opposition is there trying to scare and confuse people. We are very focused on making sure that we assist pensioners. That is why as a government we have been proud to deliver an historic increase in pensions. We understood how difficult pensioners find it to make ends meet—we well and truly understood that. An historic increase in pensions has been delivered under this government.

When it came to putting a price on carbon, having delivered that historic increase to pensioners, we of course wanted to make appropriate arrangements to ensure that we were helping pensioners. So we have provided and will continue to provide additional money to pensioners, which means that pensioners will see more assistance than they require for the average impact of carbon pricing upon them. We have deliberately designed the scheme to provide an extra 20 per cent because we wanted those Australians who are of limited means to have the additional assistance.

Pensioners are seeing an increase, for example, of $338 in the single pension. We have prepaid that increase. Pensioners around the country in their millions have received money already, and they will keep receiving money from March next year. Three million pensioners have already received assistance, and in March next year they will keep receiving assistance because we want to make sure that we are always looking after our pensioners.

So, in terms of the prices in aged care, of course any adjustments there have been factored into the very modest cost-of-living increase from carbon pricing—less than a cent in a dollar—and assistance has been provided to pensioners so that they are receiving more assistance than they need for the average impact of carbon pricing.

The real risks for Australian pensioners are from the opposition's plan to claw these benefits away and then the opposition's plan to slash the kinds of services older Australians rely on, such as health services, by $70 billion.

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Seniors) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I seek leave to table the summary indicators from Strong growth, low pollution:modelling a carbon price, proving the—

Leave not granted.