Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

The opposition is supporting the Veterans’ Entitlements Legislation Amendment (2007 Election Commitments) Bill 2008. It does so because it believes that additional benefits to veterans are always an important thing to be looking at, that veterans are people with whom this country has made a contract and that, because of their service and the sacrifice that they make for this nation, they should always be considered a special case, in the sense that they are not welfare recipients but people who receive compensation and other payments because of that contract between a grateful nation and veterans who serve the nation.

The bill, very simply, does three things. Firstly, it extends the automatic grant of certain pensions. In other words, it amends the Veterans’ Entitlements Act to extend the automatic grant of a pension payable under part II or part IV to the eligible dependant of a veteran or member, where the veteran or member immediately before his or her death was in receipt of an intermediate rate disability pension or temporary special rate disability pension. Secondly it extends the income support supplement to all war widows or war widowers and amends, again, the Veterans’ Entitlements Act to extend eligibility for the income support supplement to a person who is a war widow or war widower who is under qualifying age and has no dependent children, is not permanently incapacitated for work and is not the partner of a person receiving an income support pension, which were previously requirements to receive that supplement. Thirdly, there is the extension of disability pension bereavement payments. Schedule 3 makes amendments again to the Veterans’ Entitlements Act to extend the 12-week bereavement payment to the estate of a single veteran or members in receipt of a special rate or extreme disability adjustment disability pension who die in indigent circumstances.

You can say that the extension of the automatic qualification for the war widows pension for surviving partners of intermediate rate and T&PI rate disability pensioners is a logical step. Currently, the automatic qualification for the surviving partner only applies to some intermediate rate disability pensions, where the disability involves the loss of one or more limbs. This is probably an old-fashioned way to be looking at things, and this is a good thing to be doing.

However, despite those good things which the government has decided to do and which the opposition is very pleased to support, I think in the light of the budget you can look at the government as perhaps giving with one hand and taking away with another for different sections of the veterans community. Indeed, the word ‘veteran’ did not appear in any of the budget statements. Presumably veterans, who are very largely retired and do not fit the category of ‘working family’, are left out in the cold. In fact, we are seeing much more that, if you are an aspirational family or if you are a retired person, you do not fit the mould of a working family and therefore you are going to be left out in the cold.

If we look at what the budget does for veterans—what it takes away from them—we see that, while there was an entitlement for partners of eligible service pensioners to take a pension at the age of 50 if they were women, that is now going to be pushed up to 58.5 years of age. Think about it. This is not the gradual increment that we saw when we increased eligibility for the age pension for women from 60 to 65, being the same age as for men; this is a sudden, one-off hit. If you are part of a veteran family which has been planning on that entitlement to come into place, you are suddenly going to be penalised—no warning, just sudden implementation. There has been no consideration of and no concern about how these families may have been planning—just simply a savings measure of $35 million.

We have heard a lot in the rhetoric about how this government is focusing on inflation, that this budget is all about delivering on promises, that it is a fiscally responsible budget and that they are really fiscally conservative people. The three core promises made by the current government before the election were that it would come in and it would reduce interest rates, reduce the cost of food and reduce petrol prices. There is nothing in this budget that will do anything to reduce any of those things and therefore it does not deliver at all on core promises.

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