Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Social Security and Veterans’ Entitlements Legislation Amendment (One-off Payments and Other Budget Measures) Bill 2008 provides for one-off bonus payments to carers and seniors as announced in the 2008 budget. The Australian Greens support any measure to provide more assistance to these essential and valuable groups in our community. However, we have deep reservations about the approach of the one-off bonus payments and are very disappointed to see that the new government is continuing this approach. Once again we have a government that has failed to adequately address the real needs of pensioners and carers in our community. Both age pensioners and carers deserve so much more. They deserve a government that is prepared to take seriously the difficulties faced by seniors and carers trying to make ends meet on inadequate support in a time of rising inflation. They deserve a government that is prepared to make the necessary structural readjustments to adequately support people who make such an important contribution to our society.

I note that the government’s second reading speech on this bill acknowledges that the bonus payments are a modest measure, and indeed they are. Australia’s two million pensioners have been left out in the cold by this budget. The prospects of more than one million Australian pensioners getting help to meet the soaring costs of food, housing, utilities and transport have been buried in this budget. Pensioners are left on what is now a meagre $273 per week. The Australian Greens have been calling for a lift in the age pension of at least $30 a week. At the very least, the budget should have lifted the rate for single pensioners from 59 per cent to three-quarters of the pension for a couple. This issue was raised during the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs inquiry into the cost of living for older Australians. One of the key issues that came out of the inquiry was how difficult it is for single pensioners to survive on the pension that they get. That issue should be immediately dealt with.

While we, of course, welcome the changes to indexation and the increased utilities allowance, we do not believe that they go anywhere near addressing the inadequacies of the weekly pension and the comparison between the weekly pension and the increases in the cost of living and being able to provide a decent standard of living.

There has not been a substantial increase in the age pension since 1993. At a time when the government can hand out billions and billions of tax cuts and have a surplus of $20 billion, we think it is about time that it acknowledges that it can afford to increase the pension rate. The issues around the cost of living were reported on extensively in the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs report that was tabled in the last sitting of the Senate. That report very clearly identified the gap between the pension rate and the cost of living and the inability to have a decent standard of living if you are trying to survive on a pension. It recommended that the government carry out a review of the suitability of the base pension levels to look at what these levels should be raised to in order to provide for a decent standard of living. People will recall that the Greens, at that time, said that the government should have increased the weekly rate for the pension while it carried out that analysis, because it was not fair to keep people who we know were not able to meet the costs of living struggling to survive on the pension. In a decent society, you do not keep people struggling while you carry out another review. We believe that that rate needs to be increased and then looked at to see what it should be raised to in the longer term.

Turning to the issue of carers, I suspect that anybody who reads the media will know that the carers community are very disappointed. While they are, of course, pleased that the bonus has been included in the budget now, they are very disappointed that the other issues, as they relate to carers, have not been dealt with. These issues have been known about for many years, and we are still treating carers as if they were second-class citizens. I remind the chamber that carers have the lowest social wellbeing index in our community, and that is because of the work that they do. Not only does it cause them great financial stress but it also has a very strong impact on their physical and mental wellbeing. Carers save the economy more than $30 billion each year. That figure, I think, was from a 2004 report by Access Economics. That was nearly four years ago, and that figure will be substantially higher now. That report also very strongly highlighted the need to start planning for the increase in the number of people that will be requiring care in our community as our community ages. I do not see that planning in this budget either.

Carers who rely on Centrelink payments are still living on about $200 a week less than the federal minimum wage; 39 per cent of carers—which is almost one million carers—have as their primary source of income a government pension or allowance. Carers who are reliant on receiving the carer payment plus the carer allowance saw their income rise by less than 3.5 per cent in the year to March 2008. Over that same period, essential cost of living items such as bread, milk, rent and electricity rose by more than double that percentage increase. So not only were carers living on a very low income but it is now getting even lower. A group that provides so much support and that is vital to the running of our community is becoming even worse off. You would not think that that was possible.

As Carers Australia stated, we are ‘frankly stunned’ that the government failed to provide any future security and certainty for carers and merely repeated the Howard government’s approach of the bonus payment. This is after the ALP were critical of the approach while they were in opposition. Carers Australia also stated that carers are not the cause of inflation; they are the victims of it. They are not buying plasma TVs or designer clothes; they are struggling just to buy the essentials that they need to live and to care.

For all of the rhetoric around working families, this government has left these hardest working families in this country abandoned and devastated. This government has not addressed the fundamental issues that need to be addressed in terms of supplying a decent standard of living that enables these people to carry on the work that they do 24/7. I acknowledge that there has been an increase. There was an announcement of an increase in respite care, and that is appreciated as well. But, as many carers have pointed out to me, if we actually had a systematic and a strategic approach with all the proper provisions in place, they would not need as much respite care. So, we are treating the symptoms as usual; not the causes.

Anybody who saw the Four Corners program on Monday night can be left in no doubt as to the struggles and difficulties facing our nation’s carers. These difficulties include—and I have been through some of them already—inadequate income support, lack of sufficient and appropriate respite services, lack of coordination between federal and state governments in the provision of necessary services. For all the rhetoric around working families, this government has left these hardworking families in the lurch. One-off payments do not provide for the systematic change and ongoing support needed to properly care for our carers. That is what this is about—caring for our carers. We needed to see a genuine commitment to a better planned system in order to improve the financial security and financial future for our carers, backed up by strategies to keep carers in the work force. With the number of older people requiring care expected to dramatically increase, this is becoming, more and more, a critical and crucial issue.

We note the government’s announcement of an inquiry into how the needs of carers can be better met. While this is a welcome move that is appreciated, again, the same issue applies to the carers as to the pensioners. We cannot keep carers living in these same conditions while we keep reviewing these issues. These matters continue to get worse while we continue to review them. The carers have provided a very well-researched and presented document about what strategies are needed to address their issues—for example, a significant increase, in fact a doubling, in the carers allowance; providing for their superannuation needs; and being able to ensure better coordination between state and federal governments. And that coordination is needed not only between state and federal governments but between government agencies.

There must be action now, not some time in the future. And the government must, when it carries out this inquiry, be committed to actually following its recommendations. It is no longer acceptable that the government just keeps acknowledging these difficulties and does nothing to address them. Carers are of course appreciative of the fact that there will be this ongoing one-off payment, but it does not address the systemic issues that we need to address. We were looking to this government, which says it is looking after the most disadvantaged in our community and looking after working families, for action. These people are hardworking families. They did not get what they needed from this budget.

We will be supporting this bill because it gives something, and something is better than nothing; but it does not achieve the long-term change that is absolutely necessary to support pensioners and carers, who, as I said earlier, are absolutely vital to the wellbeing of our community. They are vital to the wellbeing of the people they look after, but we do not look after their wellbeing. It is an absolute tragedy that carers and a lot of pensioners are in the lowest category of the social wellbeing index. What does that say about our community and our country and how we care for the least fortunate in our community? It does not say a lot and we need to do better.