Carol Brown (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Families and Payments) Share this | Hansard source

We all know in this chamber, and indeed around the country, that at the last election the Prime Minister promised there would be no changes to pensions. We have known since then that that commitment by the then opposition and now government was a lie.

Unfortunately, here in question time today, we had Senator Fifield, playing with words and using weasel words to say that the pension changes are not 'cuts'. We all know they are indeed cuts. Senator Seselja has also used those words. It is playing with words, playing with people's lives, with pensioners' lives. You do not make savings in your budget if there are no cuts. The savings are there and there is a cut to the pension.

As Senator Moore said in her contribution, changing the indexation to only a CPI indexation does indeed erode the value of the pension. Analysis after analysis, review after review—and the community sector—has estimated that the change to just CPI indexation will result in an $80 a week cut to the pension over the next decade. That is indeed a massive cut to the pension and one that pensioners cannot afford. Quite frankly, they were tricked by the Abbott opposition when they were told there would be no changes.

I have had many constituent inquiries—many people ringing up concerned, many pensioners ringing up concerned—begging for the Labor Party to do everything they can to ensure that these changes do not get through the parliament.

We know that in 2009 the Labor government introduced an increase to the pension. We also know that Dr Harmer reviewed the adequacy of the indexation. Following the recommendations of the Harmer review, the Labor government introduced a fairer system of pension indexation by adding a new indicator, which was the pensioner and beneficiary living cost index, and increasing the male total average weekly earnings benchmark to 27.5 per cent. So this government are asking the pensioners—we have 3½ million Australians in receipt of a pension and approximately 2.4 million of those are age pensioners—asking those people who can least afford to take this massive hit on their incomes and who are already doing it hard, to take this massive hit of $80 a week on their pay. They are asking them to take this hit because this government do not care about pensioners.

We have had Mr Morrison trying again to trick the Australian people—and it does not work; they have been caught out—by saying that the latest pension increase was in line with CPI. That is complete and utter rubbish. It was not CPI. If it had been, the pension increase would have been less. That is not hard to understand even for coalition senators. If you only use CPI and you take away the other indexation measures, and those are the measures that would have kicked in, then the increase is less. That is a cut. Unfortunately, those people who can least afford those cuts are being hit by this government, and they deserve better. They deserve to have this Prime Minister, a Prime Minister who said that he would keep his promises, honour the commitment not to change the pension and not to cut the pension. Unfortunately, this government has turned very, very quickly into a very mean and tricky government. (Time expired)