Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Labor have run through the entire gamut of excuses as to why they should not support immediate relief for Australian pensioners. We have heard just about everything. Earlier this week we were told that it was constitutionally impossible to pass a bill to provide pensioners with $30 a week. Today we have heard that the system of paying pensions is very confusing and that you cannot just give people money because it is a bandaid solution, so you cannot adopt this idea of giving people $30 a week to solve an immediate, real problem. We have heard that nothing is required at this point in time because the Liberals did not do anything about this problem. The unstated part of the argument is, ‘Therefore, we are entitled to do nothing about it as well for quite some time.’

Now we have had the extraordinary contribution from Senator Pratt to this debate that, if you give pensioners $30 a week, they might go backwards. I am confident that if I rolled into a senior citizens club in this town or went to an aged-care facility and said to people, ‘Would you like to give go backwards to the tune of $30 extra a week?’ they would say, ‘Yes, we will take our chances, thank you.’ Hands would go up for going backwards. I do not know where those arguments were cooked up, but they do not hold a lot of water.

Let me put this simple proposition to those opposite: if you think that there is more work to be done on this question, some sort of review of the kind that you have specialised in since coming to office nine months ago, by all means go ahead and do that review and work out what you think is the right solution for a long-term problem. But, at the same time, honour what you said in this place and elsewhere this time last year when you initiated the inquiry of the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs into the living standards of older Australians and do something immediately to address the real problems that older Australians are facing now. The two courses of action are not inconsistent. There is no way that adding $30 into the pockets of aged pensioners in Australia is going to detract from a longer term review of how you structure pensions in this country. The two are perfectly capable of sitting together. I would suggest that that would keep faith with the urgency with which you people approached this issue only this time last year. A lot changes when you cross the floor, go onto the other side and take the Treasury benches, but the urgency and immediacy of that issue seemed to magically disappear in the course of that transition.