Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Siewert has, on behalf of the Greens, important amendments to extend the reach of this bill to include both disability pensioners and carers. We will speak to those as they come along.

I want to remark again on the commitment of the opposition to this process today, with one speaker out of the 37 being committed to a speech in the second reading debate. Reflect upon that as against the situation last Thursday where there were 37 senators listed to speak in opposition to the luxury car tax legislation. So on the one hand when the luxury car tax is being debated all 37 members of the opposition are up to fight against this tax being raised on people who can afford the most expensive cars, which are largely imported into the country, but when it comes to single pensioners getting a $30-a-week increase, they can provide only one speaker.

I note that Senator Xenophon said, ‘Well, they have tied their support to the mast for this legislation,’ and indeed it is their legislation now. But it is hollow legislation from hollow people when you see only one speaker—not even another minister and not even those new shadow ministers who are responsible for portfolios like disabilities and carers has been in the chamber for the duration of this debate today. It is not just careless; one has to be concerned that this opposition, which did nothing to improve the lot of pensioners over 12 budgets, is now taking pensioners for granted. That is a greater insult still.

The legislation that we have here will hopefully pass this place and will, as we know, be stalled in the House of Representatives. It is unlikely, I think, looking at the numbers, to get up for debate in the other place. But we do want to put legitimate pressure onto the government. When the government sees an opposition that does not back up legislation but is simply moving it so that it can say in the public arena, ‘We have moved it for pensioners,’ the government gets the wrong signal—that is, that this does not count because it will blow over.

Let me state that the Greens are extremely serious about the need to get pensioners out of the pitiful situation monetarily that serial governments have left them in. And we will continue to put pressure on this government. But it is an enormous pity that the opposition did not come in here fighting today. It did not come in here with serried ranks in argument for this legislation. Instead of that it left it to a couple of minutes for an introductory assessment of the legislation by the minister and then a sum-up at the end. Therein is the strategy failing to put the pressure on government that is required if we are going to see pensioners get the minimum $30 increase in a lead-up to bigger increases in the next budget, which they will require if they are going to be helped just a wee bit.

In today’s Advocate newspaper, which is a newspaper from Burnie in Tasmania, I read about a pensioner at Zeehan, on the west coast, where they have done away with the local service station—it is a mining boom town—and you have to use a card to get petrol because there is no person there. The service has gone but the station remains. To get a card you have to have $300 for the month to get petrol. This pensioner is saying, ‘I do not have $300, therefore I cannot get a card, therefore I cannot get petrol and therefore I cannot move.’ Her only option, after 25 years in the town, is to leave the town.

That is a failure of private enterprise, if you ask me, on the one hand to simply remove service from the town and say, ‘We’ll provide service to the mining industry,’ which has been doing extraordinarily well, in the main, but, on the other hand, to forget the long-term citizens of the place. It is totally unfair and it is unjust that that pensioner should have to move from her home town to find some place somewhere else simply because she cannot afford a petrol card. But that is the lack of choice that is left to our elderly citizens, who, as Senator Milne was just outlining, have put so much of their lives into making sure that we are all doing very well, thank you very much.

That said, it is important to deal sensibly with these amendments and to expect that the government will take them seriously. Having seen the failure of the opposition’s strategy here today, I do ask the government to take this seriously. Let’s see the government have this debate in the House of Representatives—a debate that has been failed by the opposition here in the Senate today. Let’s make it a serious debate, let’s give it the gravitas that it genuinely deserves and let’s take it to the next stage and ensure that we get a commitment from government to give this rise of $30 to single pensioners that we set out at the beginning to achieve.

Senator Fielding has moved amendments to expand that increase across the board. That has been the position of the Greens all the way down the line. However, let me state very clearly here: we homed in on the $30 increase for single pensioners as an achievable goal on the road to getting not just a $30 increase but closer to a $100 increase for pensioners across the board by next year’s budget. It is easy to come in here, once that strategy has been put forward in this legislation, and continue to extend it. It is simply extending this measure to where the Greens began in the first place. We will support those amendments, but I put the challenge to Senator Fielding as I put it very clearly to the opposition—and except for talking about the surplus we got no response—how are you going to fund these pension increases? To fund this pension increase, the Greens took a courageous stand in the Senate to vote against the tax cuts for people on more than $75,000 a year. Not one other senator supported that move earlier in the year—not one other senator.

If there is going to be a serious call for the government to find and spend this money that question to Senator Fielding—who is planning to extend these measures, thereby catching up with Greens policy from the outset—has to be answered by Senator Fielding. That question to the opposition has to be answered by the opposition. Saying that the surplus is there is one thing; it is incumbent upon the opposition to indicate what should be taken from the surplus and from where it should be taken.