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

Amidst the disaster that's facing the nation now, with most of the country locked down or suffering other restrictions due to the Prime Minister's failure on vaccines and quarantine, we've heard a day of demented and often deluded government speakers telling us that somehow the government's failure is Labor's fault. It really is astounding. But, amidst the despair and the despondency that is palpable in my community and much of the nation, I want to talk about something else and call out the government's escalating attacks on older Australians. We've had eight years of attacks, budget after budget, on pensioners from this government. We've had an aged-care crisis, which remains unaddressed and unresponded to. We've had Medicare rebates cut for critical hip, hand and shoulder surgeries, snuck in under the cover of COVID for 1 July, and they now want to force aged pensioners onto the cashless pension card. We shouldn't be surprised. The royal commission into aged care revealed a national disgrace. At some level, every Australian should be ashamed of what was in that report—how we've treated our vulnerable Australians and older citizens. 'Neglect' it was called. It revealed shocking mistreatment: maggots crawling out of wounds, nearly 50 per cent of older Australians in care not receiving enough nourishment and food, drugs given to sedate people because there are not enough staff, staff not being paid a living wage, and 28,000 senior Australians died waiting for a home-care package at the right level, too scared to go into care.

The government's response was an insult to older Australians. They didn't even touch the recommendation that said you need a nurse on duty for 24 hours a day. Let's not worry about that! There's nothing for staff wages, but $3.2 billion is given to the nursing home providers, with no strings attached. It's the kind of response you give when you actually don't care about it and don't want to make a response. We shouldn't be surprised, because this bloke, the Prime Minister when he was the Treasurer, cut nearly $2 billion from aged-care funding and is now running around pretending he didn't do it. The latest plan is a new low: the cashless pension card. Eighty per cent of a person's pension would be put on this privatised card. The government and a private company would control when, where and how pensioners can spend their own money, what kinds of shops they can shop in and what they can buy in those shops. They've even got a secret technology working group committee with the big banks, Australia Post and all the big retailers, trying to work out how they can do product-level blocking to control exactly which products people could buy. It's disgraceful. Pensioners would only be able to shop at shops approved by the government. There wouldn't be enough cash to go to the Dandenong Market in my electorate and buy cheap food—which is how people survive—buy second-hand goods off the internet and give a bit of money to the grandkids. There would be no meals at the local RSL. A private company would see how much people spend, how much they have in their account and what they buy.

This is privatisation by the Liberals of the social security system. They've already wasted $70 million of taxpayer money on this. That's $5,200 for every card that's been issued so far, with a lot more to come. This is going to be a cash bonanza for the private company, and the government wants to put it out wider. At one point I heard the minister yell out, 'It's a scare campaign.' Government members try and scurry away from this and deny it. Well, the Prime Minister said himself that the pension is a welfare payment. A headline on Sky News said the Prime Minister was 'eyeing a national rollout of the cashless debit card'. The minister said:

We are seeking to put all income management onto the universal platform ... the cashless debit card.

The government introduced legislation into this House last year that would force aged pensioners onto the card and they want to pretend that they didn't do it. The consequences are horrendous. There are shocking reports of people whose rent hasn't been paid and their utilities haven't been paid. There is the shocking tale from the member for Gilmore of a woman who literally had to ring the private company to beg for permission to be able to shop at a shop that sold a bra the right size for her, and then she had to send photos of it in for the audit. Disgraceful!

There is a Liberal agenda to expand this scheme. Labor will fight the government's plan. A Labor government will scrap this scheme. We'll cancel the contract with the private company and we will repeal the legislation so this cannot happen again. We will fight privatisation. As I said, it comes after eight years of attacks at every budget. Budget after budget, the Liberals attack aged pensioners. Last year, they froze the pension—not even a 5c increase. They refused to index the deeming rates, they tried to cut the energy supplement, and they did a dodgy deal with the Greens political party to kick 370,000 part-pensioners off the pension, which was a $12,000 loss for many part-pensioners. We will fight them every step of the way. (Time expired)