Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Defence Materiel) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in support of the Defence Force Retirement and Death Benefits Amendment (Fair Indexation) Bill 2010 and to welcome very warmly the fact that this bill has come before the parliament. An opportunity is created by it being before the parliament to remedy an omission in the support that we as Australians give to those people who have served us, in war and in peace, in uniform. The question of fairness for those who have served Australia in a variety of ways has been an issue before this parliament for a number of years. As a member of this place, I have been disturbed by the fact that we use different tests and different criteria for deciding what level of financial support people deserve, having spent a number of years in service to this community.

I note that we generally honour Australians who are in need of financial support in their retirement with an age pension and that this pension is indexed according to a number of tests. The intention is that the pension improves each year, or each time it is indexed, according to a measure which increases the pension by at least the amount by which the consumer price index has increased. I note that will use a different test with respect to those people who have served the Australian community in a more direct way, in a sense, through service to the Australian government, either as public servants or as people who serve in uniform. It is difficult to discern a logical basis for that distinction. It is difficult to explain to people who have taken particular steps to serve the Australian community in certain ways, often for long periods of time, why the effective rate at which their financial support increases is lower than it is for people who have not served the community in that same way.

This bill before the Senate today takes an important step towards addressing that general level of inequity. It addresses those people who belong to the DFRDB Scheme and provides for an improved level of indexation, reflecting not only increases in the consumer price index but also increases in the pensioner and beneficiary living cost index and the male total average weekly earnings. It increases their pensions by whichever is the highest of those three on a biannual basis. It is an extremely important development, one that honours properly those people who have served Australia in that particular way of donning a uniform, but it also acknowledges that there is a task ahead of us as a nation to redress a number of problems with respect to the justice we provide to those people, to whom we owe a special obligation.

There are many signposts which have pointed us in this direction, many things which have suggested very strongly that action of this kind needs to be taken. I do not wish to exclude anything of significance in this debate but to mention particularly the work of several Senate select committees on superannuation, chaired by our now retired friend from Tasmania Senator John Watson, who worked on this for a very long period of time as a senator in this place, and at least partially with this bill the work that he was doing has been addressed.

I do not propose to speak much longer except to make the point that it is extremely important that this parliament understand how dependent Australians are in retirement when they are recipients of government benefits and that constitutes the entirety or a very substantial part of their income in retirement. It is extremely important for us to make sure that we do not let them down and see a decline in their standard of living when they are entitled to expect much more. This bill goes an important way towards dealing with that. I commend it to the Senate.