Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to make a few remarks about the Social Security and Veterans’ Entitlements Amendment (Commonwealth Seniors Health Card) Bill 2009. Quite frankly, removing the Commonwealth seniors health card from around 22,000 senior Australians is simply wrong. This is absolutely appalling, and I think the Labor government should be holding its head in shame at even putting this forward. We have a situation now in this country which, by all accounts, is going to be one of the most difficult we have seen for decades. Yet what is the Labor government doing? It is trying to put a measure in place that will hurt those people who quite simply are least in a position to afford it.

During the 2007 election campaign, the now Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, said he was going to ease the cost-of-living pressures for senior Australians. This bill is exactly in opposition to what he said at that time. This is going to do completely the reverse. This measure is going to make it more difficult for senior Australians. It is not going to ease those cost-of-living pressures, as the now Prime Minister said at the time. Instead of the strengthened support that the government said that it was going to give to seniors, this is going to roll back the support that the coalition, in government, had in place. To me, it is just the ultimate in hypocrisy from the Prime Minister to have said through the election campaign, ‘We’re going to do everything we can to ease the cost-of-living pressures for senior Australians,’ and yet here we are standing in the chamber today debating a bill that is going to do precisely the opposite.

We have seen debated in this chamber and also in the other place the recent $42 billion stimulus package. I think people will find it quite incongruous when they look at that $42 billion package that the Rudd government has put in place and compare it to the fact that the Prime Minister is going to strip away money and assistance from senior Australians. He can find $42 billion to put in a whole range of measures that the government says are going to assist the economy in Australia to get through these difficult times and yet, at the same time, this relatively tiny amount of funding is going to be stripped away from seniors. Seniors are the last people, the very last sector in this society, who should be having assistance taken away from them at this time—absolutely the last. We can find billions of dollars for pink batts and for boom gates, and yet senior Australians are expected to take a hit by having their seniors health card taken away. That is just wrong. It is not right.