Alan Tudge (Aston, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

the following March, the pension will go up.

Plus we have got rid of the carbon tax but we kept the carbon tax compensation for pensioners. What does this mean? This means there is an additional $21.20 for a married couple per fortnight. For a single it means they have an additional $14.10 per fortnight, which they would not have had had the Labor Party still been in government. Had the Labor Party still been in government, the carbon tax would still be in place. And it would not just be sitting at $23 per tonne, but, according to their own forecast, it was to go all the way up to $350 per tonne. That was their forecast, outlined in their economic documents.

But perhaps the worst thing that Bill Shorten was directly responsible for in relation to pensioners was the raiding of their inactive accounts. The member for Kooyong gave a very clear example today of a 92-year-old lady who had her funds raided. For those who are not aware, this is what Bill Shorten oversaw: he said that if there were ever inactive accounts—if an account was inactive for only three years—he would go and grab that money. And do you know what? Within a 12-month period, he took $550 million from pensioners and from other people who had inactive accounts. That is what they did. Bank robber Bill—bandit Bill—took $550 million from pensioners' accounts.

I have been asked where that $550 million sits in the scheme of things against the great bank robberies of the world. It is a great question. I did a bit of research and, believe it or not, the great train robbery of 1963 only rated $74 million. So it is well above that. That came in at No. 7. No. 5 was the Knightsbridge security deposit robbery of 1987. That was $200 million in Italy. The British Bank of the Middle East robbery of 1976 was $210 million—which of course was stolen in the middle of the Civil War in Beirut. That came in at No. 4. The Dar Es Salaam bank robbery in 2007 in Baghdad, just after the Iraq war had begun, was $282 million. Bill Shorten comes in at No. 2—only beaten by Saddam Hussein, who robbed $920 million the day before—

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