Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In my electorate of Ballarat, we are home to some 17,670 residents on the age pension. That is not an unusually high or low number. With about 2½ million pensioners across Australia, it is around the average. It is also home to some 7,200 part pensioners. Again, this is not an unusually high number. Each week I undertake mobile offices or town visits across my electorate and I meet, as do many members of this House with pensioners at birthdays, at community events and as volunteers at community organisations across the region. Most days I will have one or two pensioners stop in my office to talk about their concerns. Quite often, we will also receive calls from pensioners who might find it a bit harder to stop in, whether it is because they are finding it a bit harder to get around than they used to or because they live just that little bit further away and they cannot travel into the town of Ballarat.

Many of these pensioners have been increasingly struggling to understand just what this government has done to their pensions. These are people who have worked incredibly hard all of their lives, have paid into the system and were promised for support for their retirement, particularly those who are on part pensions who might have put something aside and worked hard to make that they do not put any more burden on the system because there are those who might need it more.

So these 7,200 part pensioners are all starting to realise that they will increasingly be receiving less every fortnight to pay their bills. In the case of a single part pensioner, they could be losing as much as $8,000 every year. Some of these part pensioners are on incomes as low as $15,000 a year, and many of them are incredibly tightly geared, with every single dollar being accounted for. Understandably, these pensioners are asking why they have been targeted by the government and why a government which came to power on a very solemn promise of no cuts to pensions in fact has done exactly that.

As I said at the outset, my electorate has a similar number of pensioners and part pensioners to other electorates across the country, so I am therefore pretty sure that the questions that pensioners are coming into my office with are also being asked of those members opposite, with pensioners going into other electoral offices. This raises the question as to why not a single member of the Abbott government appears to have any problem with what has been done to thousands of pensioners whom they represent and who they promised would not be targeted by the Abbott government. I find it remarkable that those on the other side have not raised this issue and have not been honest with people about what it was that they intended to do and are now doing. Have there not been the same questions in those offices that I am getting in my electoral office about what has happened to those part pensioners? What is truly unusual is that the members of parliament opposite have stood side by side with their Prime Minister in sticking to a plan that has seen some 330,000 part pensioners worse off. Members opposite have argued that the pension should only be worth 16 per cent of the average weekly earnings—members who, it would seem, are simply not interested in how tough pensioners in their electorates are doing it and who have been complicit, frankly, in Tony Abbott's broken promise that there would be no cuts or changes to pensions. The shadow minister for families and payments has made absolutely sure that none of these moves by a tricky government have gone unnoticed, and she has been holding forums across the country. People, and pensioners in particular, are incredibly angry.

Yet these concerns and many more seem to fall on deaf ears when it comes to those opposite. The cuts to pensions, frankly, are just emblematic of the significant damage this government has done in its two years to date. It was elected on a solemn promise of no cuts to pensions, but all pensioners in Ballarat have seen a cut to their pensions. It promised no cuts to health, and yet in my own electorate Ballarat Health Services is losing some $348 million over the next decade. We are seeing increasing numbers of patients losing access to bulk-billing and paying increasingly high fees as a result of Tony Abbott's GP tax by stealth. We have seen the government promise no cuts to education, yet we have seen billions ripped out of funding for schools—funding that would have gone to, particularly, some of the most disadvantaged students in our communities—and also an attempt to impose $100,000 university degrees on our children. There have been cuts to local government and cuts to mental health. This is the true legacy of this government. If the plan is working, goodness help us if they are here for another three years.