Chris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Government in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Bernardi for the question. I am at a bit of a disadvantage because he did not refer to what claims I had made, so I am not quite sure of his reference. He refers to Treasury modelling which I have not seen, so I am not able to help him with the detail of that. What I can say is that I saw some modelling the other day by NATSEM which indicated that pensioners had gone backwards significantly between 2001 and 2005. I actually thought there were some flaws in that modelling; I did not think they had made a proper assessment in that they had excluded a number of factors which I thought would be relevant. But one can have duelling modelling on these things, I suppose.

I think the real point of all this is that the government have made an assessment that, in the current economic circumstances, pensioners are doing it tough and that the current rate of pension and support for pensioners is not allowing them to live in a manner which we think is acceptable—that they are under too much financial pressure. That is driven by a range of factors: a higher rate of inflation, increased costs of petrol and a range of other factors. It is also true that it is not a ‘one size fits all’ analysis. I think there are questions that impact on how people are going. One of the questions is whether or not people receive rental assistance. I know that in my own state there has been a real problem for people trying to rent private accommodation given the huge increase in costs. That affects people on fixed incomes, as it does others. I think some of the research I have seen indicates that different groups of people within the broad category of pension recipients are having slightly different experiences and slightly different impacts, but fundamentally the answer to Senator Bernardi’s question is that the government accept that pensioners are doing it tough. That is why we made an immediate down payment in our first budget by paying the $500 bonus and by increasing the utilities allowance from $100 to $500, and also by paying bonuses of $1,000 and $600 to carers and extending the eligibility for the utilities allowance.

We made in excess of $5 billion worth of investment in assisting those people with immediate relief. And in doing that we said, ‘That’s not enough; we need to do much more fundamental reform to income support for pensioners.’ We have set about doing that serious public policy work, and no doubt the Treasury modelling will assist us in that endeavour but that is a piece of work that is in progress. It will be brought to a conclusion in February and we will have the benefit, then, of all the various sets of modelling, various views and expert opinion to bring all that together in a government response. But, as I said, we moved quickly to provide extra income support for pensioners through the budget and we are tackling the much larger public policy question of how we fundamentally deal with the structural issues that underpin pension and other income support measures.