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

I said yesterday in the course of another debate that I sometimes wish there could be tears in the space-time continuum and people could hear from the future the words that they would be saying in the context of the present debate. I would love to have had the comments of Senator Feeney and others in this debate sent back to the debates that happened before the 2007 and 2010 elections because the tone and the comments were very different between then and now. Before the 2007 election in particular the Labor Party was sending very strong signals to the veteran community that it was going to fix this problem not only, incidentally, for the veteran community but also for all Commonwealth superannuants. There would be a process to deal with the inequitable arrangement with indexation for all Commonwealth superannuants. 'We will do a review,' they said, 'which will get to the bottom of this issue.' In commissioning that review, producing that review and, immediately the day that the review was tabled, backing the review, in its rejection of any adjustment to superannuation arrangements the government spectacularly dishonoured those promises.

I am not asking the Senate to take my word for that phrase 'spectacularly dishonoured its promises'. I am asking the Senate to accept the words of those members of the Labor Party who have already been quoted by Senator Johnston. A letter by the present member for Eden-Monaro and the Labor Senator for the ACT, Senator Lundy, belled the cat very nicely when it said to the then finance minister:

… there is huge disappointment in both the findings and the Government response announced on the same day—

that is, to the Matthews review. It went on to say:

Significantly, many people genuinely believed that prior to the 2007 election, the ALP had committed to determining a "fairer" method of indexation, and 'a review' would provide the direction, so the immediate acceptance of the recommendations of no change in the Government response is being seen as a reversal of the pre-election position espoused by the ALP in campaign material.

And indeed it was. It was seen as a broken promise, because the Labor Party wanted to play to that gallery before the election and now it wants to be fiscally responsible: 'We cannot possibly put that money forward because it would not be responsible.'

The problem is that the Labor Party is still playing to that gallery. Mr Neumann, the member for Blair, said to the Queensland Times a few weeks ago that he was sympathetic to the DFRDB lobby. He had written to the finance minister about the 'pitiful' increase in their pension:

It is ridiculous to expect people to accept a 0.1 per cent increase …That is unviable, given the cost of living. It is too meagre and it needs to change.

He asked the minister to consider a 'fairer' form of indexation for DFRDB benefits. The Labor Party has not given it up. It is still in the business of misrepresenting what it intends to do.

I want to correct the impressions created by both Senator Feeney and Senator Wright in this debate. Senator Feeney implied that we had broken some promise by never indexing these pensions during the time we were in government. We never promised to make any change to those pensions. We did not have that as a commitment of the government. We were tackling a huge amount of inherited debt, and I admit that there were philosophical views among many in the government that we should not make that change.

But after the 2007 election we reassessed all the policies of the coalition and came to the view that it would be fair to address this question with respect to the superannuation arrangements of veterans. We went to the 2010 election with a clear commitment to change that policy and to index those pensions on a fairer basis. We kept our promise when Senator Ronaldson introduced into this place the legislation to make that happen—we were not introducing the legislation just to facilitate it but putting before the members of the Senate the means by which we would fund those arrangements. We put savings proposals to the government which were obviously well-based savings proposals because, subsequently, in its following budget, the government accepted and reaped those savings in adjustments it made to spending within the Defence budget.

I also have to make some comments about Senator Wright's contribution. She talked about fiscal responsibility but seemed to ignore the fact that at the 2010 election—as at the 2007 election and, indeed, the 2004 election—the Greens promised to use their votes in the parliament to index not just veterans' pensions, military pensions, but all Commonwealth superannuation arrangements by the higher of CPI or MTAWE. They promised to do all of those things, and so for the Greens now tell us that fiscal responsibility demands that they cannot even partially index those pensions is very, very mysterious. If it was possible to promise everybody a higher pension, why could they not have supported even partially addressing that problem through the bill that Senator Ronaldson put forward?

A veteran has written to me, and I can only finish by citing what he had to say about the unfairness of the government's position. He said that the government had broken its commitment to the people of the Defence Force by refusing to support this important measure of reform:

A breach of many implicit and explicit promises (before the election!) to fix the problem.

He said:

… veterans are condemned to continued erosion of the purchasing power of their pensions, …

And he is right. He also said that the refusal of the government to follow through with its promises from before the 2007 election represents:

A betrayal of Labor's own core values of fairness and its principal of a fair go for all Australians.

There is unfinished business here. The coalition has made clear with its actions that it is going to follow this through, and it is time that the other parties who made similar promises to veterans in this country did likewise.