Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

You can understand if people in the gallery today think, with a contribution like that from the Labor Party and the Speaker wearing a red jacket, that there is virtually nothing to talk about among pensioners and aged Australians of significant financial import, because we can talk about mindfulness in the contributions of volunteers. It is always a very safe topic when you can point over in that direction and hope they do not notice the obvious.

What is the obvious that brings us here today, when talking about financial pressures on senior Australians? Let us go through the devastating chronology of the last six years. No. 1 is inventing a carbon tax and insisting that pensioners pay it. That is the history. No. 2 is bringing in an unclaimed money bill so that pensioners who had their money in a bank account could be swept by the Labor Party and kept by the government, without the seniors knowing. I bet that is not raised when you have your cups of tea and coffee with pensioners in your electorate. Absolutely not.

The most grievous sin of all, perpetrated on seniors, was six years—as the member for Hughes pointed out in such voluminous tones that even his own electorate in Hughes could hear it, without the benefit of broadcasting—of uncontrolled spending, leading to what? It led to no interest bill each month, to us paying $1 billion every week in interest that should be paid to pensioners. The money that should be helping the most needy is paid mostly to foreign entities, two-thirds of whom have the privilege of going into debt. We could not run the books. 'We never saw a good idea we could not fund in government,' said the Labor Party, leaving us with a billion-dollar-a-week debt. Where do we find the billion dollars if we do not take it from the aged pension? It is a Labor government that ran out of ideas. They simply refused to fund anything long-term and left it to the coalition to sort out the mess, as the member for Hughes pointed out.

Let us rewrite a little bit of history here, for a minute, before I talk about pensions. Back in 2009 we were all concerned about a GFC. What we did know at the time was there was plenty of money in the bank—thank you to John Howard. We had the four major banks all triple-A rated and strong enough to resist the threats of a GFC. Lastly, we had strong exports, in the form of mining. That is the triple inoculation that would get us through a GFC.

I do not blame people, at the end of 2008, in the panic of Lehman saying that maybe we need to tighten our belts and stimulate the economy. The payments to pensioners that occurred late that year were supported by both sides. But as early as 2009, the TRIM modelling from Treasury showed something very embarrassing for the Labor Party: there would be no fall in GDP, we would not go behind and we would not fall into deficit.

In early 2009, given the option—now realising there was going to be no GFC recession in Australia—what did they do? They kept spending. It was not just for another quarter or another year, it was for four years of continuous spending. They wonder in the end when, after the US, Australia was the largest spender, why it is that we are in debt now. The simple answer to seniors in this country is: six years of uncontrolled spending puts us in this invidious situation, where we have to look at ways of addressing social spending.

The age pension moving to $50 billion a year is an important issue, and this is a government that has watched on as two pension indexations are all based on CPI. The third one this week will also be based on CPI. But I would be lying if I did not say there is concern amongst pensioners about whether we are simply switching from one indexation formula to another. That is why, intrinsically, all Australians out there would support the possibility that we have an adequacy review of the age pension every three years. We would take it out of the hands of the mob that cannot run the economy and the mob that are trying to repair the economy and we would say, independently: 'Can we look at the level of indexation? It is appropriate to make sure that the age pension keeps up with what we think is a basic expectation.'

Let us be honest. Why do we discuss the age pension? Like almost every other form of welfare, age pensioners have almost no alternative to earn an income. They are at the age when they are living on their savings and are utterly reliant on them. That is why—and I can see the member of the Labor Party on the other side who spent us into oblivion in the first place—we must find a way to examine the adequacy of these pension increases and make sure that they meet community expectation. That is where our minister is. That is why many social groups support where we are going.

We can find a way that will raise pensions every year, twice a year. We do it not because we want to, we do it because Labor's spending has given us no option but to take these tough choices.

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