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

I want to respond to the remarks of particularly Senators Bob Brown and Lundy in this debate. Both of those individuals and their parties to some extent have paid lip service to the principles behind this bill. Both of those individuals have gone to very large public meetings and told those public meetings, with their hand on their heart, how sincerely they believe that justice needs to be done for people in defence retirement, with respect to their pensions. Both of those individuals today betray those constituencies and those people by their actions. I will turn first to Senator Lundy. Senator Lundy has shared the platform many times with me in the ACT over several elections where members of the retirement community—self-funded retirees and government superannuants—have come in large numbers to hear what we have to say about this issue. As Senator Lundy herself said in today's remarks, she acknowledges that the CPI is no longer an appropriate measure of indexing pensions. She acknowledges that there have been flaws in previous government inquiries into this matter. I think she was strongly implying, without saying as much, that the Matthews report, the most recent of those reports, had serious flaws in it. She acknowledges that something needs to be done but she found reason today not to do what had to be done and that is to take the first step towards addressing this issue with a vote in favour of this piece of legislation.

Why did she not support it? It was on two grounds. One is that she said that the coalition had not justified its savings to offset the cost of this measure. She misrepresented those savings by saying that we were proposing to raid the Future Fund in order to achieve this. That was either deliberately or accidentally a serious mis­representation of what the coalition has proposed. We did propose, it is true, to put money into the Future Fund which would then be drawn out in the future to pay for the additional superannuation costs which this measure would incur. But to say that we were going to raid the Future Fund without making clear that we were also putting money into the Future Fund to meet those obligations is frankly false. We have made very clear that we propose to achieve those funds being put aside for that purpose by reducing the growth in the APS full-time equivalents in the Department of Defence by one-third. This is a decision that would still see projected staff numbers in the Department of Defence grow by something like 8.3 per cent by financial year 2013-14 compared with a larger projected growth in the previous budget, not in this year's budget.

We are not proposing to cut Com­monwealth employees in the Department of Defence in real terms; we are talking about reducing projected government growth. Even a justification based on wanting to protect Public Service numbers can hardly point to a decision made by the opposition that we would not be allowing growth to occur at such a large scale in the future as somehow justification for not supporting this bill. Public servants that are not yet there are being cut, not ones that are actually there at the moment. It is an extraordinarily stupid—with respect—argument. There is no basis for it whatsoever.

Then there is the argument that we are dividing the community by this—we are picking off some Commonwealth super­annuants and not others. On what basis does the government think that we cannot deal with this issue on a progressive basis? That has not been explained. Senator Lundy fled the chamber as soon as she had made those remarks and will have to come back to the people of this community—